The Scarecrow is the first collection of fairy tales created by Ye Shengtao in the history of modern Chinese literature.
Ye Shengtao's Masterpiece: The Scarecrow is the first collection of fairy tales written for children in New China, and the author Ye Shengtao is also a pioneer in the creation of modern fairy tales in China. Mao Dun commented on Ye Shengtao in this way: If you want to find amazing things from his works, you may not have them; However, even at the beginning, there is his power to purify and sublimate human character.
Ye Shengtao (1894-1988), formerly known as Ye Shaojun, was born in Jiangsu, a famous writer, educator and publisher in modern China. After graduating from middle school, he began to be a primary school teacher and engaged in literary creation. In 1921, he and Shen Yanbing, Zheng Zhenduo and others initiated the organization "Literature Research Association" and published many papers, novels, essays, new poems and fairy tales reflecting the people's suffering and tragic fate. He has created and published the Scarecrow, the first collection of fairy tales in China, and Ni Huanzhi, the first novel in the history of modern Chinese literature.
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Introduction to Scarecrow
There was an old woman who had a scarecrow in her field, and the scarecrow kept the rice fields for her. However, the moth laid a seed on the leaf. The old woman didn't see the leaves rolled up. The worm ate all the rice, and the scarecrow warned the old lady, but the old lady didn't know. Scarecrow saw that the fisherman and crucian carp were pitiful and could not help them themselves, so he fell down sadly.
The Scarecrow, a fairy tale, truly describes the stormy world in rural China in the 192s through what a compassionate but helpless Scarecrow saw and thought.
Ye Shengtao devoted his whole life to the education in our country. He has been engaged in education and teaching for more than 7 years, accumulated rich experience and wrote a large number of monographs, monographs and books on education and teaching. After the founding of New China, he successively served as deputy director of the General Administration of Publishing of the Central People's Government and director of the Editorial Bureau, vice minister of education and president and editor-in-chief of People's Education Publishing House, and curator of central research institute of culture and history, with works such as Ye Shengtao's Collection and Ye Shengtao's Essays on Chinese Education.
The outstanding artistic achievement of Ye Shengtao's novels lies in his calm observation and objective description of "gray life", which shows distinct realistic characteristics. The writer's cool and objective style does not exclude the expression of his inner enthusiasm and subjective opinions. Calm observation and objective description are the most prominent factors in Ye Shengtao's novel style.
With a pair of penetrating eyes, he calmly examines the humiliated and damaged people crouching in a corner of old China. His heart is full of compassion, but when he put pen to paper, he hid it but didn't show it, and it was cold and implicit. His meaning was often hidden outside the words, but his feelings were not exposed in the text.
Compassion and satire are the basic characteristics of Ye Shengtao's pen for ordinary intellectuals. Under the pressure of life, intellectuals don't like their cowardice, emptiness, dereliction of duty and selfishness, so he should stab it and expect them to change. But he also knows their hardships, and the reasons for their poor performance are complicated, and sometimes they can't control their own destiny.
Therefore, while mocking, he unambiguously pointed his pen at the dark reality system behind it, which made his critical realism reach a certain depth.
Baidu Encyclopedia-Scarecrow (Fairy Tales by Ye Shengtao)
Baidu Encyclopedia-Ye Shengtao