By JULIA LOVELL It’s hard to find a precise Western analogue for Lu Xun (1881-1936). He is China’s Dickens, for his mercilessly sharp portrayals of the era he lived through; he is Joyce, a re-maker of language and form. He has a good deal of Orwell, too, for his political commentary and the plain vernacular style that he championed. And, as a writer who in his final years became a figurehead of the literary left and was sanctified by his the Chinese communist leadership after his death, he has a touch of Gorky. Lu Xun owes his immense literary reputation in mainland China primarily to his satirical fiction but also to the prose poems and polemical essays that he wrote in the last two decades…