In 1899, Lu Xun became one of many young, ambitious Chinese men who turned their backs on traditions that seemed to have led China into political disaster. He won a scholarship to study medicine in Japan岸a country that Chinese radicals reluctantly admired for transforming itself into a modern, imperialist power. 'A glorious future unfurled in my mind,' he remembered, 'in which I would return to my homeland after graduation and set about medicating its suffering sick . . . all the while converting my fellow countrymen to the religion of political reform.' Then, in 1906, at the end of a lecture, one of his Japanese teachers showed the class a slide depicting a scene from the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, partly fought on Chinese territory. It revealed a mob of Chinese watching dully, while one of their compatriots was beheaded by the Japanese as a Russian spy. Lu Xun later wrote:

Though they were all of them perfectly sturdy physical specimens, every face was utterly, stupidly blank. . . . I no longer believed in the overwhelming importance of medical science. However rude a nation was in physical health, if its people were intellectually feeble, they would never become anything other than cannon fodder or gawping spectators. . . . The first task was to change their spirit; and I decided that literature and the arts were the best means to this end.

Shortly after this Damascene conversion, Lu Xun abandoned his medical degree and began a career as China's self-appointed literary and spiritual physician岸although he did not find his voice and audience until he became one of the luminaries of the New Culture Movement more than a decade later.

At its first publication, Lu Xun's fiction was rebellious in both language and message. Until the 1910s, aspiring literati typically devoted themselves to poetry, in an opaque classical Chinese steeped in allusions, while vernacular fiction was held in disdain. Lu Xun took a different view. To him, imperial China's antiquarianism was a means of silencing the uneducated majority. Composed in a Westernized idiom, his short stories demonstrated that fiction could serve sophisticated, serious purposes.

Ms. Davies picks up Lu Xun's story in detail in the second half of the 1920s, when the right-wing Nationalist Party began a purge against actual and suspected communists. Many of China's radical intellectuals turned leftward in response, simplistically acclaiming literature to be 'a tool of revolutionary violence.' Lu Xun was less certain. He scorned the egotism of born-again literary Marxists, whom he accused of posturing in revolutionary cafes: 'In front of each is a cup of steaming hot proletarian coffee while in the remote distance there's 'the great unwashed岸the peasants and workers.' ' Yet Lu Xun was also tough on writers who protested that literature should be apolitical, denouncing them for espousing a vapid humanism.

Eventually, in 1930, Lu Xun sided with the communist cultural establishment by becoming titular head of the newly formed League of Left-wing Writers. But we can detect his doubts about a socialist aesthetic in his vituperative, elitist essays, which fueled sectarian feuds among leftist literati during the early 1930s. Shanghai's revolutionary writers, he concluded, were 'a thoroughly useless lot.' (He was even-handedly nasty about literati across the political spectrum: Those with right-wing connections were 'pampered pugs'; feral leftists were 'mangy dogs.')

Through his last years, Lu Xun continued to shelter in Shanghai's urbane, privileged foreign enclaves: enjoying family life, browsing favorite bookshops, hosting dinners, going to Tarzan movies. In 1927, he admitted that he would rather sit down with 'a glass of reconstituted evaporated milk' than join a revolution. When Lu Xun died of tuberculosis in Shanghai in 1936, he was mired in quarrels with left-wing functionaries and especially with Zhou Yang, the literary politico who would become Mao's cultural czar after 1949.

But as soon as Lu Xun was safely dead of tuberculosis, he was adopted by Mao Zedong as an exemplary Servant of the Proletariat. Lu Xun was a fine trophy: the lampooner-in-chief of early 20th-century China who failed to live long enough to say anything nasty about Mao's brave new world. Because Mao claimed him for communism, a Lu Xun industry has developed on the mainland岸museums, plaster busts, spinoff books, journals, television adaptations, even a musical岸lionizing the writer as a great proletarian revolutionary. Ms. Davies does an admirable job of reclaiming the literary, psychological and political complexities that Mao did his best to erase. Far from just an angry polemicist, Ms. Davies's Lu Xun is also an exceptional prose poet, 'creating a turbulent aesthetics' out of vernacular Chinese.

In later decades, Mao quoted from Lu Xun's vendettas to validate his own intellectual purges. It would be unfair to blame Lu Xun for the posthumous distortion of his words. Yet there is an uncomfortable link of some sort between the writer's literary pugilism and Mao's later justification of violence, a connection perhaps underplayed by Ms. Davies. But it is a testament to Lu Xun's importance as a writer and thinker that there are multiple ways of reading his legacy to Chinese letters. In 'Lu Xun's Revolution,' Ms. Davies has created a fascinating account of the final years of the writer's life and the beginning of his literary afterlife.