There has been a saying that "the world's top ten literary heroes" have been rumored, and the lucky ones on this list are Homer of ancient Greece, Dante of Italy, Shakespeare of Britain, Goethe of Germany, Hugo of France, Byron of Britain, Leo Tolstoy of Russia, Tagore of India, Gorky of the Soviet Union and Lu Xun of China.
If we draw up a list of the top ten literary heroes of ancient China, who should be among them?
First and foremost was the great patriotic poet Qu Yuan.
Chinese literature has two major sources, the Book of Poetry is the beginning of realist literature, and the Chu Ci is the indiscriminate pursuit of romantic literature, the former is the collective creation of northern literati during the Spring and Autumn Period of the Western Zhou Dynasty, and the latter is indeed the crystallization of qu Yuan's wisdom. Qu Yuan single-handedly made southern literature and northern literature a draw, and it is worthy of being among the top ten literary heroes in ancient times, and it can be reflected and complemented by his status as one of the four major cultural celebrities in the world.
Qu Yuan was followed by Sima Qian. If the Han writers represented by Sima Xiangru and Mei Cheng developed the romantic literature pioneered by Qu Yuan, then the historians Sima Qian and Ban Gu are the inheritors of realist literature. Sima Qian's "Shi Ji" text is smooth and natural, the story is magnificent, the characters are vivid, the emotions are gushing out, the reason is profound, and it has a profound and extensive impact on the prose and novel creation of later generations.
In third place is Tao Yuanming, a great poet of the Eastern Jin Dynasty and the founder of pastoral landscape poetry. Although Xie Lingyun, an outstanding landscape poet of the Southern Dynasty, once said, "There is only one stone in the world, Cao Zijian has eight buckets, I have to fight, and the world is divided into one bucket." Compared with Tao Yuanming's literary achievements, he and Cao Zhi are slightly inferior. Tao Yuanming not only writes poetry well, but also has great prose attainments! "Peach Blossom Origin", "Return to Xi Ci", and "The Biography of Mr. Wuliu" are all rare prose masterpieces.
The poet Xian Li Bai can be called a master of romantic literature, reading his poems, just as he listened to the Shu monk Jun playing the piano, "for me to wave a hand, such as listening to the Ten Thousand Pines", if you do not believe, please see "Jun does not see the water of the Yellow River rising from the sky, flowing east to the sea and never returning", "Oh woo, Shu Dao is difficult, it is difficult to go to the blue sky"; please see "Flying down three thousand feet, suspected that the Milky Way fell for nine days", "I pounded the Yellow Crane Tower for the Jun, and the Jun also fell for me but parrot Island"; please see "Idle fishing on the Bixi, suddenly taking a boat to dream of the sun", "The green mountains on both sides of the river are opposite, Lone sails come from the side of the sun"...
Since Li Bai has been ranked among the top ten literary heroes in ancient China, Du Fu certainly cannot be absent, because Du Fu said that he and Li Bai "slept in the night and were together in autumn and walked hand in hand", which is of course a joke, and the real reason is that they held up the two banners of Tang poetry romanticism and realism respectively.
Du Fu personally experienced the whole process of the Anshi Rebellion, and through his works comprehensively and profoundly reflected the many hardships brought by the war to the people, "Three Officials", "Three Farewells", "Soldier Carriage Line", "Mourning River Head", "Three Hundred Words from Beijing to Fengxian County" are soaked with the blood and tears of the people. By the way, Du Fu and Du Mu and Du Xunhe should be called "Three Dus" together, and they can be comparable to "Three Li".
Special Writer of "Night Wolf Literature and History Studio": Yi Jiangnan