Feng Zhi (1905-1993), formerly known as Feng Chengzhi, was a native of Zhuo (zhuō) Prefecture, Hebei. The Feng family was originally a famous salt merchant family in Tianjin, but because the Eight-Nation Alliance invaded China and took refuge in Zhuozhou, Feng Zhi was born there. When Feng zhi was young, he studied at Beijing No. 4 Middle School and began to write poetry under the influence of the May Fourth New Culture Movement. After his excellent academic performance, he was admitted to Peking University, where he met Ye Jiaying's teacher Gu Sui and was taught by Mr. Lu Xun.
In 1923, Feng Zhi joined Lin Ruji's literary group Asakusa Society. In 1925, Feng Zhi, Yang Han, Chen Xianghe, Chen Weimo and others established the Shen Zhong Society, publishing the "Shen Zhong" weekly, semi-monthly and "Shen Zhong Series".
In April 1927, Feng Zhi published his first collection of poems, "Yesterday's Song", and in August 1929, he published the second collection of poems, "Journey to the North and Others", which recorded his teaching life in Harbin after graduating from university.
In 1930 he studied in Germany, attending the University of Berlin, heidelberg, and in 1935 he received a doctorate in philosophy from heidelberg university. From 1936 to 1939, he taught at Tongji University. He was the director of the Institute of Foreign Literature of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Mr. Lu Xun called Feng Zhi "China's most outstanding lyric poet" in the "Introduction to the Poetry Collection of the New Chinese Literature Department".
However, what the public does not know is that Feng Zhi's narrative poems are also well written. To know why Feng Zhi's narrative poetry is good, we must first know what "narrative poetry" is. The so-called "narrative poems" are poems that tell stories, with characters and plots. In this kind of poetry, although it is inevitable to reveal the author's thoughts and feelings to a greater or lesser extent, its main purpose is to make one thing clear.
The more famous narrative poems in ancient China include "Mulan Poems" about Mulan serving in the army for her father, as well as the love tragedy "Peacock Flying Southeast" about Jiao Zhongqing and Liu Lanzhi who were forced to commit suicide, and the lingering love story of Tang Xuanzong and Yang Yuhuan, "Long Hate Song". Of course, we must not forget the "Pipa Line" that tells the story of the pipa girl that makes "Jiangzhou Sima Qingyi wet".
The May Fourth era was the era of the establishment and rise of new Chinese poetry. Since Hu Shi published eight new poems in the vernacular in New Youth, new poets who write in the vernacular language, the rules of the vernacular, and the free format have increasingly appeared in the literary world, and they have consciously or unconsciously formed many genres according to their own writing style and creation theory.
For example, the Crescent School represented by Xu Zhimo, the Lakeside School represented by Wang Jingzhi, the Symbolist School represented by Li Jinfa, and the Modern School represented by Bian Zhilin... These genres, drawing on the essence of Western poetry, inherit the tradition of Chinese poetry, and create new poetry works with their own characteristics. In these works, on expressing the reflection on the essence of life and the investigation of the appearance of human existence, we have to mention Feng Zhi's narrative poems.
In His early years, Feng Zhi composed four narrative poems, namely "Blowing Pipe Man" (May 1923), "The Curtain" (autumn 1924), "Silkworm Horse" (summer 1925), and "Before the Temple Gate" (summer 1926). Let's combine these four works to talk about them in detail.
"The Whistleblower" is such a story: the poor boy meets the rich girl and is attracted by the rich woman's whistle. He spared no effort, crossed the mountains and the sea, and finally found his sweetheart. But the woman's family did not agree with their love, because the door was not right. In order to dispel the pain of lovesickness, they relied on the sound of the flute to convey their admiration night and night.
The woman was unfortunately infected and bedridden, and the man cut off his own hole, boiled it into a soup medicine, and cured the woman. The woman's parents, grateful for the man's kindness, allowed them to be together. But the man who lost the hole, even if the beautiful person was by the side, but he did not keep his soul, missed his hole, and finally fell in love. When the woman saw this, she also destroyed her own hoop and made it into a soup medicine to cure the man's illness. The two men who lost the cave and fled into the mountains without a trace.
It is said in the Drapery that there was a girl, who was seventeen years old, who entered the monastery and became a nun. The reason was simply that she had heard that she was going to marry someone very ugly. She couldn't accept fate's arrangement, so she preferred to flee. But then she met her fiancé at the monastery and found that the man was handsome and not ugly at all. The nun discovered this and regretted it, but knew that everything was irretrievable, and she could only lose weight in sorrow and gradually die.
The story of "Silkworm Horse" is a man-beast love. There was a woman who missed her father and hoped that someone would bring her father back. The horse admired the woman and knew her thoughts, so he brought back his father from afar. But he was killed by his father and the skin on his body was peeled off. The father left again, the woman was lonely and lonely, and the horse skin had a spirit, and rolled up the woman and turned into a cocoon on the tree.
There is an old monk in "Before the Temple Gate", and one night, the old monk told a story with the crowd, he said that he had encountered a naked female corpse many years ago, and he excitedly rubbed the female corpse with his hand and slept with the female corpse.
The reason why the artistic value of these narrative poems is unique is that there are two reasons.
First of all, these works have exhausted the absurdity of life.
In the story of "Blowing Pipe Man", men and women know each other because of the art object of "Hole Pipe", and the biggest motivation for them to be together is the mutual fit of souls. However, in order to save each other's lives, the two of them must give up their spiritual sustenance: Dong Zhen. In this way, they who have lost their spiritual sustenance inevitably fall into the emptiness of their souls, and even if they flee to the mountains with each other, they face a life without fun. This kind of ending seems to be a kind of torture of fate, but also an absurdity of life, we can't help but ask deeply, why is reality so cruel, can a full life be obtained?
Also a work of love, the story of "Silkworm Horse" is even more absurd. "Blowpipe Man" is the love of human beings, and in the story of "Silkworm Horse", the horse seems to have become a spirit, has its own thoughts and feelings, and even has a love for its own woman. Moreover, the depth of this love has reached the point where the horse has paid for it. Moreover, when the horse's life was lost because of love, it killed its lover and wrapped her up in a cocoon in order to be with its beloved woman. Now we see that some lovelorn men and women also use hurting their lovers as a means of revenge or expression of love, and these things are absurd. If the love of the world has been cruel to this extent, then they cannot be called love, but only personal selfishness and greed.
Secondly, these works write about the struggle of human nature.
The ordained nun in "The Drapery", who has the courage to break her parents' arranged marriage, runs away from her family and comes to this worldly place alone. She had thought that her life would end up before the Qinglan Ancient Buddha, but she did not expect that when she met her fiancé and found that he was so handsome, her long-extinguished heart, like a spring flower, bloomed again. But at this time, one person swore that he would never marry again, and one person put on the clothes of the Buddha. No matter how courageous the nun was, she did not dare to flee from the Buddha. But she was unwilling," she sat alone in front of the door, the sunset was also heavy, the north wind was cold, "but she was powerless to return to heaven, and finally died in pain."
"Before the Temple Gate" writes that an old monk left the beauty of his hometown when he was young, left the beautiful girls around him, endured insomnia all night, and embarked on a desolate spiritual journey. He has a lot of desires, he can't get rid of it, he has a lot of pain, he can't be soothed. Like ordinary people, he has all kinds of emotions, good and bad. But because he was a practitioner, he had to cover up all these desires. Until one day he came across a half-naked female corpse, so that he could no longer hold back the desire in his heart, he committed all kinds of perverted behaviors, and fell into deep self-blame afterwards.
Knowing these four works of Feng Zhi, it is not difficult for us to know that in his narrative works, the absurd depiction of life and the complex portrayal of human nature have deeply tortured the souls of Chinese since May Fourth. Each of us seems to be able to read our own shadow in these four works of his.