Chapter 141 Preface to "Selected Novels of Lu Yao"

Thanks to the relationship of Qinghai People's Publishing House, I selected some of my novels so far and compiled this anthology.Through this book, readers can roughly see the tortuous traces of my ten years of learning to write.These works have not changed much, maintaining the appearance when they were first published.The reason for this is not that these works have no room for revision, but that I am often incapable of doing so.I feel that if the mental state of the original creation cannot be restored on the whole, even if I want to make up for some shortcomings of the work later, it will be tantamount to repairing the scars, so I gave up this should and necessary effort.

I was born on December 2, 1949 in a poor peasant family in the mountainous area of ​​northern Shaanxi.I grew up in the countryside and finished elementary school, and later went to the county to finish high school and junior high school.Most of the time during adolescence was spent in rural areas and county towns.He had never been out of the county before the age of seventeen.After graduating from middle school, he returned to his hometown to work, and taught rural primary schools, and did various temporary jobs in the county.In 1973, he entered the Chinese Department of Yan'an University to study.After graduating from university in 1976, he worked in a literary group in the provincial capital.Became a professional writer in 1982.The most important part of my life experience is such a long and complicated process from the countryside to the city.

The various moods and feelings in this process have left deep imprints on my body and mind, and thus have obviously affected my creative activities. The subject matter of my works is mostly life in what I call the "intersection of urban and rural areas".This is a colorful world full of contradictions.Undoubtedly, when I expressed life in this field at first, I did not fully and rationally realize its profound and great significance in our entire social life. Instead, I just wrote about the life I was most familiar with, as it is often said.This undoubtedly affects the depth of some works of the Central Committee.Later, it was only because of repeatedly cultivating the same land that I gradually gained a deeper understanding of the soil of this life.

I said in an article a few years ago: "Due to the development of modern productive forces and the long-lasting and extensive social upheavals, cities and cities, villages and villages, regions and regions, industries and industries, especially cities Interactions with rural areas are becoming more and more extensive, coupled with the improvement of the cultural level of the whole society, especially the popularization of primary education in rural areas, and because a large number of junior and senior high school graduates jump in the queue or return to their hometowns to join the ranks of farmers, the urban and rural areas are interconnected in all aspects. The phenomenon of infiltration is very common. In this way, with the changes and development of the city and the countryside itself, the impact of urban life on rural life, the impact of rural life on urban life, the pursuit of urbanization in rural life, the modern way of life and the ancient way of life The conflict between civilization and backwardness, the conflict between new ideology and traditional concept, etc. constitute some of the important contents of contemporary life. All these contradictions are reflected in our society's politics, economy, culture, ideology, moral concepts, etc. It is so prominent and complex that it can be said to be a three-dimensional intersection bridge on the three-dimensional intersection bridge."

Undoubtedly, the rapid and tremendous development of contemporary real life in our country has made all the above-mentioned things more and more prominent and complicated.The drastic social reforms have made China's rural areas and cities no longer their own closed worlds.They will also intersect to a greater extent.And at some point in the future, their lines may even become blurred.Just imagine, if the Yellow River and the Yangtze River meet and run together, what kind of scene will it be?This will be a new river.At this time, there is both the Yellow River and the Yangtze River, but this will undoubtedly be a new, wider and more turbulent river that is neither the Yellow River nor the Yangtze River.Perhaps this is the general picture of the life we ​​face or will face.

Facing the surging torrent of life, I often act like an ignorant and curious child.With a timid mood, our country has splashed a few splashes in its whirling shallow water bay, but has not yet dared to set foot in its rushing waves and valleys... When can I really go to the middle water line to fight a battle? Where?Willow's Legacy Compared with some writers with voluminous works, Liu Qing's works may not be enough for us.However, if one tael of gold and silver is compared with a catty of copper and iron, what is its value? Yes, this serious realist writer, in his literary activities throughout his life, even if he created something as big as a palm, he tried his best to carve it carefully with his unique artistic carving knife, avoiding a kind of craftsman-like manufacturing as much as possible.As for his unfinished epic "The History of Entrepreneurship", it consumed almost a third of his entire life.

Although this monumental structure will never be complete again, nor is it perfect in its ready-made parts, it will still be cherished by present and future generations.Just as we stand in front of the temple in Athens now, although we can no longer see a complete miracle, the broken corridors and columns alone are enough to amaze people. Liu Qing is such a kind of person: he always dissolves the citizenship and the artist's great poetic feeling together.As an artist, he is always like a burning flame and a turbulent water.He tried his best to let people hear his own voice clearly in the chorus; he deliberately tried to make himself stand out from the average person.But in daily life, he strictly regards himself as an ordinary citizen, and tries his best not to lose the feeling of an ordinary person.He has lived in the countryside like a farmer for many years and has done a lot of specific work like an ordinary grassroots cadre.It is precisely because of this that he can reproduce such a complex life so realistically in "The History of Entrepreneurship"-in this work, every tiny ripple we see seems to be a wrinkle in life itself.

After all, real life and deliberately staged life will be distinguished by people.If an artist is detached from the vast and deep life, even if he is talented, he can only produce some exquisitely dressed handicrafts; and the artistic flowers with fragrance and dew can only be cultivated on the land of life.This is the lifelong belief of the artist Liu Qing.For today's writers, we may not all be able to adopt the exact same method as Liu Qing did back then, but the tenacious and extraordinary pursuit of the late writer should be respected and learned by each of us. The writer resolutely left the bustling big city back then, and lived in a courtyard house rebuilt from a ruined temple in Huangfu Village. His eyes scanned everyone and everything around him trivially, and on the other hand, he projected his eyes to the wider world. world.With a microscope in one hand, he was observing life in Huangfu Village and its surroundings, and with a telescope in the other hand, he was looking beyond Zhongnan Mountain.Therefore, his works not only show the lifelike details of life, but also reflect the epic grandeur in general.Only a few geniuses can unite these two aspects.When we read "The History of Entrepreneurship", we often feel that the whole period of life shown in the work is like a long and wide river flowing in front of us; and in this long and turbulent river, if we stop in any bay, we will feel that You will find that there is also a world - and each place has a unique scenery.The scene like the conversation between Liang Da and his son Shenglu in the house in the twenty-fifth chapter of the second part of "The History of Entrepreneurship" makes people feel like following the old man suffering from asthma and secretly using the family's window paper Tongue licked, what he saw while standing outside their house holding his breath.

As a profound thinker and an extraordinary novel artist, Liu Qing's main talent is to divert and gather these small streams of life into the broad riverbed of the overall structure of his works; to make these seemingly ordinary Life is suddenly filled with a huge and surging capacity of thought and history.Undoubtedly, this writer shows with all his creative activities that he is not only satisfied with a familiar and thorough understanding of the life around him; he also casts his eyes on the wider world and the entire history of human development In order to put the fine slices of life that you have obtained on the curtain of a vast society and far-reaching history to check its true value and significance.

He was by no means a man who was only obsessed with the little stories of life.If this is the case, he may only leave us some excellent sketches, instead of hanging a huge oil painting like "The History of Entrepreneurship" in the gallery of our country's contemporary literature. Those who have never met Liu Qing have heard rumors that the writer is dressed in double-breasted clothes and a melon cap. He is simply a real farmer, or a clock repairer in a small town.Yes, that's what he looks like.However, such a Liu Qing will soon become another Liu Qing: wearing a suit, a pair of pedantic gold-rimmed glasses, and talking with foreigners in fluent English.About domestic and foreign politics, economy, nationality, history, culture, geography, almost all aspects of the world are within the field of vision of this seemingly peasant writer; An insight that makes you feel new and unique.On the walls of the apartments he changed several places in his later years, there were no other decorations, only a map of China and a map of the world were often hung.

From time to time he would walk up to the map and snap his bony fingers to a place in China or a foreign country he was talking about.Sometimes he will point to the map and tell you half a day about the history and current situation of British or French agriculture, the situation of wheat planting in Canada and so on.At this time, you will feel that he is not a writer, but an expert of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.When he was writing "The History of Entrepreneurship", he also wrote a paper on changing the agricultural management methods in the mountainous areas of northern Shaanxi.In his thesis, he quoted a large number of foreign agricultural materials, which surprised some famous agricultural experts.It is this vastness of vision and breadth of learning that a writer has, coupled with his penetrating knowledge of life, that give his work an epic quality.His works can never be simply described as "yam eggs". Liu Qing's creative activities tell us that if we are only satisfied with the small circle of life we ​​know, or simply hide in our inner world to create, we will not have much success.We can't compare with him, but we should learn from him, and try to keep our eyes not only in the small world of life and acquaintance. The outstanding realist writer Liu Qing left us five years ago.But the writer has undoubtedly left us a legacy.He lived passionately in our turbulent times, he busily created, and, like any human being, he had his faults and mistakes.But the wealth created by his life's hard work is extremely precious to people today and to people in the future.As juniors, we accept his gift with gratitude.