The intellectuals' writings returned home, and the scholar Wang Yao's new masterpiece "Times and Portraits" was published

Wang Yao, a Yangtze River scholar and winner of the Lu Xun Literature Prize, wrote his new work "Times and Portraits" by Jiangsu Phoenix Literature and Art Publishing House.

"Times and Portraits" is a series of reminiscence essays about childhood and youth, including "Painful Memories", "Mr. Li's Literary Texts", "Grandma and Her Town", "Is That First Love", "The Year I Had a Cousin" and twenty-one articles. With affectionate and condensed brushstrokes, the author's growth process encountered teachers, classmates, elders, neighbors, distant idols, the township of the able and other more than twenty people, while affectionately recalling the warmth and touch of that year, pay special attention to the relationship between those people and that era to expound and lyricism, intended to point out that some people are suitable for some times, while others always have a kind of effort and ambition beyond their own era.

This book combines the nostalgia of individuals to middle age with the writing of the historical sense of the past era, taking the characters as the unit, focusing on the story, taking their own growth as the core, through the restoration of each character of the year, reproducing the author's own growth process, and restoring the self-improvement spirit and eagerness of the Chinese nation for a long time, and giving all the times and time a rich texture, expounding the continuation and expansion of the national spirit in each person.

More than a decade after the publication of the essay collection "One Man's Eighties", Wang Yao launched the work "Times and Portraits", which is another return of intellectuals. This memory puzzle allows the author to chew on those people and things after leaving his hometown, to glimpse parts of history from the cracks, and to tell us where to start.

"We grew up in the turbulent eighties, the age of thought, the age of enlightenment, the age of literature. This experience makes me feel that to a large extent literary studies are also the spiritual autobiography of researchers. "While portraying and recording the past, the work fully presents the resilience of a generation of people and the importance and support of the state and the nation for intellectuals, so it has a strong personal biographical color and is full of Wang Yao's memories of a generation of people about history, life, emotions and rural life." The stories in the book are a chronicle of the author's life, a microcosm of a Belle Époque, with unpredictable powers. The author shows his personal hardships in a special historical period, and "Times and Portraits" is about the era experienced by the author, who is a classmate, friend, student or junior of those portrait archetypes, and the reader sees the light and shadow of the times in their portraits.

The author wrote in the afterword: "In fact, not only my generation, but also the earlier intellectuals have experienced a harsh test than we have, and at any time, intellectuals are faced with the problem of how to live in the times." These feelings reinforced an idea I had put forward earlier: prose is the way intellectuals exist in spirit and emotion. ”

The characters depicted in "Times and Portraits" surround the author, and as the town changes, they are deeply imprinted in the memory of the author's hometown, allowing him to constantly reflect on and understand a new self. The "grandmother" who resolutely refuses to return to the village to greet the end of his life, the "Grandpa Tian" who writes well and is full of money, the "cousin" who loves to read but is defined by the villagers as lazy, the teacher Zuo who can play the accordion but loses contact... In his essay "Return and Escape", he wrote: "I just want to liquidate myself in the way of writing now, because over the years, we have always been accustomed to liquidating others. In the process of "liquidation", the author restores the history of the countryside and small towns, so that he has a strong ability to empathize.

Over the years, the author has always adhered to the writing of prose essays outside of academic research. We can think of "Times and Portraits" as a "continuation" of the book "One Man's Eighties", a re-examination of one's own destiny by an intellectual. In the concluding part of "History of Contemporary Chinese Prose", he described the prose realm as follows: "The relaxed cultural atmosphere, diverse artistic choices and free subject spirit are the realms that Contemporary Chinese prose has long awaited. The spiritual history of Chinese intellectuals in the twentieth century will be rewritten here, and the aesthetic creativity of a nation will be revived here. ”