Writer's suicide is a cultural phenomenon, which is closely related to the cultural psychology, social conditions and political and economic factors of the country to which the writer belongs.
Take the suicides of ancient and modern writers in China as an example. According to the available data, the number of suicides by writers in China is very small. From Qu Yuan, the first writer who committed suicide in China, to the founding of New China, there were no more than 30 writers who committed suicide in China. On average, only one writer committed suicide every 100 years. This is related to the cultural psychology of Confucianism. Confucianism believes that the skin of the body and parents cannot be destroyed. But in the face of right and wrong, China writers are willing to fight to the death. Seeing that Chu was ruled by a treacherous court official who was a bad king, Qu Yuan had no hope of saving the country. He did not want to go along with these people and drowned himself in Miluo. Liu An was dissatisfied with Emperor Wudi's arbitrariness, but unwilling to be humiliated, he committed suicide in a fit of pique. During the Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties, a group of writers committed suicide out of national justice. They either starved to death (Xie Fangde), drowned in the water (Chen Zilong) or hanged themselves (Niluyuan), thus safeguarding their personal dignity and national integrity.
After the Republic of China, especially after the May 4th Movement, western philosophy and literary thoughts entered China. China's cultural psychology began to change. Therefore, the writers who committed suicide in China after the May 4th Movement are also very different. Wang Yiren committed suicide because of lovelorn love; Zhu Xiang committed suicide because of economic distress and unable to find a life orientation; Among other reasons, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer's philosophy, the thought of safeguarding human dignity and the western "magnificent" aesthetic view are some important reasons that prompted Wang Guowei to commit suicide.
During the Cultural Revolution, a group of writers such as Lao She and Wen Jie committed suicide. On the one hand, they expressed the strongest protest against the ultra-left line. On the other hand, the Confucian cultural psychology of "a scholar can be killed but not humiliated" also played a role.
Most western writers committed suicide after the eighteenth century. At that time, capitalism had established its rule in the west, and liberal bourgeois values also dominated the writers. On the one hand, the writer regards the pursuit of personal freedom and dignity as the purpose of life; On the other hand, the capitalist mode of production and lifestyle tightly fetters individuals in society like shackles. The writer's creation is not free in essence, and so is his life. Plath, an American poetess, had a dark cloud of suicide floating in her inner world when she was young. The idea of suicide also troubled Hemingway. Jack London, Huck Klein ... Many writers commit suicide in America.
The contradiction between nouveau riche America and serious writers cannot be solved. But the fate of writers in old capitalist countries is no better. Virginia Woolf, a British woman writer, had a nervous breakdown before committing suicide. The famous French writer Mo Bosang cut his throat with a paper knife; The Spanish writer maliano Lala's house rang with dull gunshots; German playwright Kleist and his companion Henriette Fogg mutually assured destruction; The famous Austrian writer Stefan Zweig committed suicide with his wife. ...
Japan is both a developed capitalist country and a tradition of oriental civilization, but the number of Japanese suicide writers is amazing. Nobel Prize in Literature winner Yasunari Kawabata committed suicide in the third year after winning the prize, which shocked the world literary world. In the history of modern Japanese literature, there are many writers who committed suicide in the past century: Tomokoya Kitamura, Tadao Tadao, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Shinichi Muye, Osamu Dazai, Hiroshi Tanaka and Yukio Mishima. On the one hand, this is rooted in the opposition between capitalism and creative writers, on the other hand, it is also related to Japan's unique cultural psychology on the issue of life and death. Japanese believe that death is a continuation of life, a moral self-improvement, and an act of self-cultivation.