Проблемы литератур Дальнего Востока. Часть 1

Новые вопросы изучения классической китайской литературы... Issues of Far Eastern Literatures. Vol. 1. 2018 361 stubbornly stuck in the sideways and refusing to submit to social norms surrender, regardless of the circumstances. She was born on May 30, 1953 in Changsha, the Capitol city of Hunan province. Due to the cultural revolution she did not even get a secondary education, as a teenager she worked in a factory, and, when in 1980’s the state allowed founding private companies, together with her husband she set up a tailor shop. She started to write in the beginnings of 1980’s and at the end of the decade she was considered the representative of then emerging avant-garde trend, to which the present aces of Chinese literature, e. g. Mo Yan, Yu Hua, Ge Fei, were included. Xue is the author of four novels, more than 50 short stories, ca. 120 tales and seven volumes of literary critique. The small part of her writings was translated to English (seven volumes, including the collection of stories) and French (two volumes). In 2015 she was awarded the American Best Translated Book Award for the novel The Last Lover . Can Xue’s work is filled with a combination of grotesque and absurd, the author sometimes is called as the daughter of Kafka and Borges, and she herself admits that the reading of their texts influenced her writing. Her characteristic features — the way of narrating, surprisingly used language, unparalleled character types — dis- tinguish her texts from any other Chinese and foreign author and cause that after reading merely few lines one can recognise her style. Chinese critiques describe her works with barely hidden reluctance as crazy, hysterical, not suitable for reading and understanding, filled with nightmares, while the author herself as a “paranoid woman, afraid of being hurt by other people”  1 . The complaints concentrate mainly on two aspects— the surrealistic presenting of non-logical world and unconventional narrative technique deprived of chronological or spatial order, as well as the lack of clearly outlined plot that would lead the action to whatever ending  2 . Can Xue’s main characters are “closed” in family or social relations. Astounding is the frequent combination of protagonist (usually a girl or a woman) in opposition to the rest of people — the Others. Both sides are suspicious and do not have positive feelings to each other, but simultaneously they are connected by the inseparable, symbiotic bond. Can Xue denudes the dark side of human psyche and existence remaining under the influence of coercion and enslavement. Her works are dominated by crippled and degenerated human relations which reflect the non-human realities of communist China. In the majority of Can Xue’s works there is a first-person categorical narra- tor — a reader is not confronted with any other voice, observes the world filtered by 1 The collection of Chinese critiques’ opinions in: Lu Tonglin, Can Xue: What Is So Paranoid in Her Writings? , in: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature and Society, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993, p. 175–179. 2 Rong C. The Subject in Crisis in Contemporary Chinese Literature , Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2004, p. 96.