1. Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), a Russian critical realist writer, thinker, and philosopher of the mid-19th century, whose representative works include War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and Resurrection.
Tolstoy's work reflects the history of Russia between the reform of serfdom in 1861 and the Revolution of 1905, and many important social phenomena and major historical issues are discussed in his work.
Because Tolstoy came from the upper echelons of Russia, his works mainly depicted the spiritual world of the Russian nobility. The despair of The Duke of André, the wandering of Pierre, the boredom of Nekhlyudov; The spiritual decay of the Russian aristocracy, the spiritual decline of the aristocratic community, the collective emptiness, and even despair are vividly displayed.
Tolstoy's artistic charm lies not only in reproducing the macroscopic world, but also in depicting the microscopic world. In world literature, the dialectical development of the mind is grasped as never before, and the process of psychological transmutation under external influence is described in detail; and it penetrates deep into the subconscious of man and expresses it in the harmonious connection with the consciousness.
Tolstoy is the "mirror of the Russian Revolution", and those who do not know Tolstoy cannot know Russia.
2. Chekhov
Chekhov (1860-1904), Russia's world-class short story master, outstanding playwright, was the last master of critical realist art in Russia at the end of the 19th century, together with the French writer Maupassant and the American writer O. Henry, known as the "world's three major short story writers".
Chekhov's novels are compact and concise, giving readers room for independent thinking. His plays had a great influence on 19th-century theatre. The two main features of his work are ridicule of ugliness and deep sympathy for the poor people, and his works ruthlessly expose the irrational social system and social ugliness under Tsarist rule.
If Tolstoy set his sights on the upper echelons of the Russian Empire, then Chekhov presented the reader with the living conditions and spiritual worlds of the middle class of the Russian Empire at that time, and those seemingly ordinary and trivial stories, as well as the ridicule of those poor people and poor lives, precisely reflected the spiritual world and living conditions of all sentient beings distorted by the old system.
3. Pull left
Emile Zola (1840–1902) was a French naturalist novelist and theorist, founder and leader of the naturalist literary genre.
Born in 1840 in Paris, France, Zola's main works are "The Natural and Social History of the Lugong-Maca Family", which includes 20 novels with more than 1,000 characters, including "The Little Hotel", "Sprout", "Nana", "Money" and so on.
Zola's naturalistic literature focuses on the sensibility, symbolization, and imagery of narrative, and also directly contains the literary factors of symbolism and imagism. Naturalism is the intermediary between realist literature and modernist literature, he inherits the literary view of reality and imitates reality, and opens modernist literature with many modernist literary factors.
4. Ibsen
Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) was a Norwegian dramatist and the founder of modern European theatre. His work emphasizes the happiness of the individual in life, ignoring the trites of traditional society. The most famous are the poetic drama "Pierre Gunter" (1867), the social tragedy "Doll's House" (1879), "The Ghost" (1881), "Enemy of the People" (1882), "Haida Gaboul" (1890); his symbolic plays "Wild Duck" (1884), "When We Die and Wake Up" (1899) reflect his ideas of "spiritual death".
Ibsen is revered as the "father of modern drama", but he consciously becomes an enemy of his native Norway, his people and his culture. From 1864 onwards, the thirty-six-year-old Ibsen self-exiled to the European continent, writing new plays every year or two, sending them back to his homeland in a steady stream of harsh criticism and attack on the narrowness, conservatism and ignorance of civil life in Norwegian society. Most of the scripts were staged in a social uproar, but he enjoyed it and was proud of it. In "Enemy of the People", the protagonist Dr. Stomonk once said a famous saying: The most powerful person in the world is the loneliest person! This is also Ibsen's self-portrait.
5. Kafka
Lands Kafka (1883-1924), major works include the novels "The Trial", "The Castle", "Metamorphosis" and so on.
Living in an era when the Austro-Hungarian Empire was about to collapse, and deeply influenced by the philosophies of Nietzsche and Bergson, and always had a bystanding attitude toward political events, most of his works used deformed and absurd images and symbolic intuition to show isolated and desperate individuals surrounded by a hostile social environment.
Kafka, along with the French writer Marcel Proust and the Irish writer James Joyce, is known as a pioneer and master of Western modernist literature.
Kafka was the enlightenment teacher of many novelists we know, Márquez, Faulkner, and so on. The most amazing thing about Kafka is not his skill or imagination, but his precise view of the codes that make up the real world, and yet he scrambles, reorganizes, and pieces together an incomparably magical surreal world, a world where only he has the key.
6. Gorky
Maxim Gorky (1868–1936) was a Soviet writer, poet, critic, political commentator, and scholar.
Gorky was a contradictory and complex writer. In the Tsarist era, unlike Tolstoy and Chekhov, Gorky paid attention to the reality of the lives of the people at the bottom and presented the "silent majority" to the reader, so that Tolstoy, Chekhov and Gorky comprehensively showed the living conditions and spiritual worlds of the upper and lower levels of the Russian Empire from different perspectives. It was because of Gorky's concern for the people at the bottom that he was hailed by the Soviet Union as the "father of proletarian literature".
In 1934, he was elected chairman of the Writers' Association. After returning to China, Gorky, as a banner of soviet culture, did a lot of work for the cultural construction of the Soviet Union.
7. Joyce
James Joyce (1882–1941), Irish writer and poet, one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, one of the founders of postmodern literature, whose works and "stream of consciousness" ideas have had a great influence on the world literary scene.
He settled in Paris in 1920. Throughout his life, he traveled all over Europe, teaching English and writing to make a living, and in his later years he suffered from eye diseases and nearly blindness. His works are complex in structure, strange in language and extremely original.
His main work is the short story collection Dubliners (1914), which depicts the daily life of the lower classes of citizens and shows the destruction of human ideals and hopes by the social environment. The autobiographical novel Self-Portrait of a Young Artist (1916) depicts the psychology of the characters and the world around them with a large number of inner monologues. The masterpiece "Ulysses" (1922) shows the loneliness and pessimism of people in modern society. The later novel Finnegan's Vigil (1939) borrows dreams to express the ultimate reflection on the existence and destiny of human beings, and the language is extremely obscure.
8. Kundera
Milan Kundera (born 1929) is a novelist born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, where he has lived in France since 1975. The novels Joke, Living Elsewhere, Farewell To the Round Dance, Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Life and Immortality, and the short story collection Funny Love are written in the author's native Czech language. His novels Slow, Identity, and Ignorance, the essay collections The Art of the Novel, The Betrayed Testament, The Curtain, and his new work Encounter, are written in French. Jacques and His Master is the author's theatrical masterpiece.
Love, death, joy, sorrow, these are common themes that can be found in all kinds of situations in our daily lives and in all kinds of media. Milan Kundera explores each of these themes in a profound way by constructing a deep spiritual connection between his characters and the reader.
Kundera was one of the great novelists of the 20th century. In the 1980s, "living elsewhere", "unbearable lightness in life", and "kitsch" once became popular phrases, and Chinese literary and ideological circles must be called Milan Kundera. Milan Kundera's influence on China is more important in thought, and he has allowed Chinese writers to go from focusing on the group to focusing on the individual himself, and less empty grand narratives. The philosophies of Kundera's work made him a world-class writer. His work is full of many issues of great discussion value and touches on them deeply. He enlightened the Chinese literary world: a truly first-rate writer should first and foremost be a thinker.
9. Nabokov
Nabokov (1899 – 1977), a Russian-American writer, created his literary work Lolita in the United States, but what really made him a famous essayist was his work written in English. He also contributed to entomology, chess and other fields.
Nabokov's Lolita, written in 1955, is a novel that received great attention and great acclaim in the twentieth century. In 1962, the author published the English novel "The Faint Fire". These works show Nabokov's love of chewing words and detailed descriptions. In the 1970s, his popularity reached its peak and he was hailed as the "King of contemporary fiction".
10. Lao She
Lao She (1899-1966) was a modern Chinese novelist, writer, language master, and people's artist, and the first writer in New China to win the title of "People's Artist". Representative works include "Camel Shoko", "Four Generations Together", and the script "Tea House".
It can be said that most of Lao She's works are classics: they have an indisputable weight of a hundred and a thousand; their indispensable position in history, insurmountable exemplary and representative; they are important when they are produced, and then they have lasting influence, and they have their readers and even infatuations from generation to generation; they are worthy of repeated recollection, can be constantly felt, constantly verified, constantly have new discoveries, and have eternal charm.
If he had not died early, perhaps Mr. Lao She would have won the Nobel Prize in Literature.