Reading Junkan Literature Series
After his death, his fame became widespread, his works were widely circulated, and his novels were translated again and again, spreading to home and abroad. However, in his lifetime, he lived a miserable life, and his wife suffered and suffered.
He took the civil service exam all his life, but he repeatedly failed to fail until he was 60 years old, and finally chose to give up the scientific examination, which made him suffer for a lifetime.
It is also the unsatisfactory nature of life that makes him put a lot of his thoughts into the creation of strange novels of demons and ghosts. In the end, with these strange novels, he also became an influential fiction writer in China and even in the world.
Speaking of this outstanding ghost writer, you must have thought of this person in your heart: Pu Songling!
Portrait of Pu Songling
Yes, he is known as a writer who "writes ghosts and writes demons", and his "Chatting with Zai Zhiyi" has been read by many people.
The novel, even translated into more than two dozen languages at one point, spread to many countries. Many chapters of the novel have also been adapted into operas, movies, and TV series.
Many of the creations of modern Japanese novelists, poets and others are based on the inspiration of "Liaozhai Zhiyi".
For example, the novel "Ba Bo Chuan" created by Japanese novelist Ozaki Momiba is based on the "Flower Girl" in Pu Songling's "Liaozhai".
In today's eyes, Pu Songling is a talent, and his novels are highly sought after by many people. However, in his time, these ghost novels he wrote were regarded as crooked and unpopular things.
For Pu Songling at that time, how much inner suffering he had to endure was beyond the comprehension of ordinary people.
Today, when we look at these works of his, we see a big world, a thing that is common to all people. Undoubtedly, he created a wealth of spiritual wealth for mankind.
Classic Chinese Literature on Stamps - "Liaozhai Zhiyi"
Pu Songling, born in 1640, a Qing Dynasty native, was born in Pujiazhuang, Zichuan, Shandong.
In this place, it is said that it is hundreds of miles away from Mo Yan's hometown, it can be said that Pu Songling and Mo Yan are fellow countrymen, and the various absurd fantasy story descriptions in Mo Yan's novels have been greatly influenced by Pu Songling's strange novels.
Of course, the place where the two of them are located is itself a place where the demon story industry is very developed. Deeply investigating, it can also be said that the culture of that place has influenced the creation of the two.
Previously, we mentioned Mo Yan's new book "Late Maturing Man" in the novel. There are many such descriptions, such as the novel that reads:
When a man sees a snake ("the brother-in-law of the long worm"), "he must keep fiddling his hair and smashing it with stones, otherwise he will count his hair and die himself." ”
Such a strange story is based on local folk tales.
Why? It is said that because the snake will count the hair of the child as soon as it sees it, if it is allowed to count the hair, the human soul will be hooked by it, so when it encounters the snake, the hair must be quickly messed up.
It can be said that the place where Pu Songling was born also affected his later ghost novel creation to a certain extent.
Speaking of Pu Songling's ancestors, in fact, it can be regarded as a figure with a head and a face. His distant ancestor, who had been an official in the Yuan Dynasty, only later suffered the disaster of the Yi clan because he offended the emperor.
Here to explain, what is the "Yi tribe"?
Yi refers to an ancient penal system, also known as clan curse. Simply put, it's a full door cut.
Perhaps, after not letting the Pu family die in the dark, when the official government liquidated and the Pu family was full of doors, it was precisely when the Pu family had a child living in the grandfather's house and escaped a disaster. And this little child is his tenth ancestor Pu Zhang.
Since the Ming Dynasty, the Pu family has been considered a famous and prestigious family, but after his father's generation, it began to gradually decline.
Due to the large number of brothers in the family, trivial disputes often occur, Pu Songling's father had to divide the family with several sons, each of whom was only given twenty acres of land, and Pu Songling and his wife were given three dilapidated houses.
In the original words, it is called "three old houses in the only farm, with no four walls, small bushes, and full of basil."
That is, there are three old and dilapidated houses on the farm, the family has four walls, the wind is ventilated on all sides, and the weeds are growing everywhere, and the desolation is incomparable.
However, although life is very depressed, Pu Songling is ambitious.
He studied hard from an early age, and at the age of nineteen, he won three consecutive firsts in the examination of the county, the government, and the province, and obtained the qualification of Xiucai, and his name shocked most of Shandong. In this regard, the chief examiner at the time, Shi Runzhang, was very optimistic about him, and once praised his article: "Smell strange fragrance in the air, and there is a god in a hundred years."
However, unfortunately, Pu Songling did not achieve any more amazing results after that. This state of high and low walking continued until his old age, and "poverty and poverty" became the "synonym" of his life.
I have been tested all my life, I have been poor all my life, but I have to live every day.
In order to make a living, Pu Songling, 31 years old, had been a guest of honor to Sun Hui of Baoying County, Zhixian County, but he dealt with social texts every day, and he felt that it was really boring and boring, and he resigned and ran home after not long.
After returning to his hometown, he continued to take the township examination, and the results were still very tragic, and he could only sigh again and again.
On the road of scientific expedition, Pu Songling is undoubtedly an "unlucky egg". From the youth to the old man, he took the test for more than forty years and failed repeatedly. Decades of arduous scientific expeditions have made him suffer from all kinds of human cold eyes.
The scientific expedition was hopeless, and he hit a wall everywhere, and Pu Songling began a long career in the museum, that is, to become a tutor.
From the twelfth to fourteenth years of the Kangxi Dynasty, Pu Songling worked as a tutor in the family of the Wang brothers in Zichuan. In the eighteenth year of Kangxi, he transferred to Xipu Biji and had a family, and this sitting was a long 32 years, which occupied almost half of Pu Songling's life.
It is also here that he, a down-and-out literati, has a relatively stable environment, and can make a living while teaching and creating literature.
Since he was deeply influenced by rural culture since childhood, he is keen to record strange things, so his writing is mainly based on fox ghost stories.
Pu Songling's Bi family, where Pu Songling is located, has a wealthy family, a large collection of books, and a pleasant home environment, full of flowers and trees, strange flowers and stones, and flourishing gardens, which provides very good convenience for his literary creation.
His "Liaozhai Zhiyi" was basically completed in the Shi Yin Garden, and the place where various poor scholars and fox ghosts written in "Liaozhai Zhiyi" actually carried the shadow of the Shi Yin Garden.
However, for a book reader who aspires to make a career, writing these demon novels is undoubtedly "not doing the right thing". For this reason, his friends had dissuaded him many times, and others had sneered at him.
However, Pu Songling did not take these words seriously, and still insisted on writing, "Go your own way and let others say it." ”
In the end, we had the "Liaozhai Zhiyi" that our descendants saw, which was a masterpiece he wrote all his life.
Pu Songling left a huge spiritual wealth to future generations.
Unfortunately, only half of his invaluable manuscript of Liaozhai Zhiyi is extant, the only surviving manuscript of a writer in classical Chinese literature, and is now in the Liaoning Provincial Library.
Only one portrait of him remains, with his autograph inscription.
Resources:
Biographies of Famous Chinese Writers of Past Dynasties
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