Labor like an ox

Literary and artistic creation is arduous creative labor, and there must be no falsehood. Those literary and artistic masterpieces that can be shouted, spread, and retained are all obtained by staying away from impetuousness and not seeking utilitarian gains, and they are all painstakingly forged. The ancients of our country said: "Yin'an one word, twist a few stems and whiskers." "Two sentences and three years, a groan and two tears." Lu Yao's tombstone is inscribed: "Labor like an ox, give like land." Tolstoy also said: "If I were told that I could write a long novel, with which I could assert without any problem a view of all social problems that I thought was correct, I would not have to work for two hours in such a novel." But if I were to be told that today's children were going to read what I had written twenty years from now, and that they would still cry for it, laugh for it, and love life, then I would dedicate my whole life and all my strength to a novel like this. ”

——Speech at the Opening Ceremony of the Tenth National Congress of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles and the Ninth National Congress of the China Writers Association (November 30, 2016)

Further reading:

Throughout the ages, literary and artistic masterpieces are all the crystallization of accumulation, and the charm of literature and art is the manifestation of inner enrichment. All works that have been handed down from generation to generation and famous through the ages must be works of perseverance and painstaking efforts. Those literary and artistic masters who have created popular works also have the quality of being distracted, submerged and steady.

Jia Dao in the Tang Dynasty was a famous poet of the "Ku Yin School". In the Middle and Tang dynasties, represented by Mengjiao and Jiadao, they had a very rigorous and serious attitude in poetry creation, focusing on the tempering and scrutiny of words. "The bird stays in the tree by the pool, and the monk knocks on the door under the moon", using the word "push" or "knocking", Jia Island has been thinking about this for a long time, and because of it, Han Yu has been acquainted with it, leaving a good story of "Jia Island Deliberation". After Jia Dao wrote the poem "Sending the Superior to the Best", he added a small poem under the sentence "Walking alone in the bottom of the pool, counting the side of the tree": "Two sentences and three years, one chant and two tears." If the bosom friend is not rewarded, he will return to his hometown. He used poems to annotate and refine sentences for a long time, and the excitement after chanting, the spirit of bitter chanting can be seen. For the creative attitude of bitter chanting, not only Lu Yanrang pinned his chest with "Yin'an is a word, twist a few stems and whiskers", Li Bai also has a sigh of "borrowing don't come too thin by asking, always bitter for the past poems", Du Fu's famous sentence "is a good sentence for human nature, and the words are not shocking and endless", which is even more well-known.

"Work like an ox, dedicate like the land", this sentence is Lu Yao's motto, and it is also a portrayal of his personality and spirit. Lu Yao lived in a time when literary concepts such as modernism and stream of consciousness were all the rage, and the pursuit of new literary forms and techniques was dizzying, but he adhered to traditional realist creative techniques. "Ordinary World" was written from 1975 to May 1988, which was completed after arduous work, and presented a panoramic view of the great changes in social life and people's thoughts and emotions in urban and rural areas in China during the reform era, and won the third Mao Dun Literature Award. Leo Tolstoy was a 19th-century Russian critical realist writer and thinker. the novel "Anna Karenina", in which he has undergone 12 major revisions; At the beginning of the novel "Resurrection", there are 20 manuscripts.

The cultural movement is linked to the national movement, and the cultural context is connected to the national context. In Xi Jinping's view, realizing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation is a great cause that shakes the past and the present, which requires a great spirit of perseverance and inspiring works. He placed ardent expectations on literary and artistic work, and also pointed out on many occasions that there are problems in the field of literature and art, such as the lack of "plateaus" and "peaks", the separation from the people and life, and the vain value of joking about history. Xi Jinping's list of quotes and stories from ancient, contemporary and foreign writers who are focused, down-to-earth, and hard-working is precisely to encourage literary and artistic workers to take it as their responsibility to create literary and artistic masterpieces that can be called, spread, and retained, and to avoid rushing for quick success and quick profit, and shoddy production. At the 2014 Symposium on Literary and Artistic Work, he also told the story of Flaubert writing "Madame Bovary" "in five days with one page", and Cao Xueqin writing "Dream of Red Mansions" "Ten years of reading, adding and deleting five times", in order to express his gratitude to literary and artistic workers, only by showing the spirit of diligent pursuit and excellence, can they create good literary and artistic works.