On February 18, 2012, the Ho Chi Minh Prize and State Prize 2010 Award Ceremony will take place. On this occasion, USSH republishes an article by Associate Professor, Dr. Nguyen Thi Minh Thai about Professor, People's Teacher Ha Minh Duc - one of 12 scientists receiving the Ho Chi Minh Prize in this period.
Throughout his life, he understood very clearly that to teach Vietnamese literature well, one must thoroughly research the issues raised from the practical development process of Vietnamese literature itself - that is, the modernization process that has taken place in Vietnamese literature for hundreds of years. The researcher's research must be deeply explained in writing - also very deeply, in order to hope that the teaching on the university podium is truly attractive, and has intellectual depth, especially for university students of the Faculty of Philology, which belonged to the largest and only university in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam at that time: Hanoi University of Science. It was also at the time when he graduated with honors from this school, was retained as a teacher, right when he was still young. That was indeed the most accurate way of thinking and concept in that case of his personal opinion. And it is impossible not to see, within that, the presence of great influences from the masters he studied with, and whom he always respected throughout his life: Hoai Thanh, Dang Thai Mai, Nguyen Khanh Toan... In a story about his work of researching modern Vietnamese literature, which required a lot of his dedication, he said that he always wanted to find and research the true problems of Vietnamese literature, which were both of current significance and had to ensure long-term scientific depth.
Professor Ha Minh Duc was born in 1935 in Thanh Hoa. He was formerly the Head of the Faculty of Journalism and Communication - University of Social Sciences and Humanities. He was considered for the Ho Chi Minh Prize in Science and Technology in 2010 for the group of works: Ho Chi Minh's literary and journalistic career and some theoretical and practical issues of Vietnamese culture and arts, including the group of works Ho Chi Minh's literary and poetic career, Ho Chi Minh's journalism (monographs and selections) and the group of works Tu Luc Van Doan: movements and authors (monographs); A cultural and artistic foundation with a strong national identity and many rich art forms.
When researching the literary career of President Ho Chi Minh, Professor Ha Minh Duc had his own perspective, both scientific and current. Therefore, although he researched after scholars: Dang Thai Mai, Hoai Thanh, poets Xuan Dieu, Che Lan Vien... on Ho Chi Minh's poetry and prose, Professor Ha Minh Duc still found his own way to exploit and process the materials, and with the sincere help of poet Hoang Trung Thong, in 1979, his research work "President Ho Chi Minh is a great poet of the nation" was published at the Social Sciences Publishing House, personally ordered by the Publishing House director Pham Huu, after being persuaded by Professor Duc with the research idea. According to his own assessment, it was a work that may not be really good, but it researched the problem thoroughly, raised relatively basic issues and was accepted by public opinion. In 1985, taking advantage of his research, he continued to write the book "Ho Chi Minh's Literary Works" and was encouraged by Professor Nguyen Khanh Toan, who wrote the preface for the book, affirming that it was a seriously written book, although he saw that there were still some issues that needed to be discussed more about Ho Chi Minh's literature. Professor Ha Minh Duc recalled that time, both grateful to his teacher and understanding that "getting the words of "Mr." Nguyen Khanh Toan was not an easy task at all." However, Professor Ha Minh Duc did not stop his research on President Ho Chi Minh's literary career there. When he returned to the Faculty of Journalism at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Hanoi, as Head of the Faculty of Journalism, he felt he had to continue researching Uncle Ho's journalism career. He overcame difficulties and continued to write the third work: “Ho Chi Minh Journalism” and tried his best to avoid duplication. He researched Uncle Ho’s unique journalistic style on the harmonious combination of two axes: the axis of time and the axis of journalistic issues that Uncle Ho was very sharp in discovering. Just those three specialized research works on Uncle Ho’s writing and journalism career have made Professor Ha Minh Duc a significant success in his research and teaching career. However, he has shown his diligence in researching much more than that. According to his own research method and his own concept, Professor Ha Minh Duc has deeply researched New Poetry, although before him and at the same time with him, many researchers have been and are plowing this issue. Not discouraged, he knows that he can still continue to research and have his own opinion on New Poetry. He confided: “I really feel that this is a research problem that one person cannot complete, or even complete in one period, but must be done in many periods. And at each period, I can develop my viewpoint in a way that is increasingly broader, deeper, and more straightforward than in the past, when objective social conditions were not suitable for such a way of doing things.” Writing about the issue of Tu Luc Van Doan in the literary period of 1932 - 1945, he also had a tendency and research method consistent with himself. Regarding attitude, Professor Ha Minh Duc said that at each literary period, he perceived it as he wrote exactly as he perceived it. But he also had to admit that “our literary public opinion in the past few decades has often been swept away by the hot demands of society, so it is inevitable that it is impulsive and lacks objectivity. Sometimes I am more or less influenced, but only to a certain extent.” And he advocated writing from his heart, not writing differently from what he thought, and also avoiding excess, when wanting to praise praiseworthy things and criticize blameworthy things. Basically, he also did not accept saying the opposite of himself, always being extremely careful when writing about the issues that he had pursued research for his whole life.
He also said that the two research works on New Poetry and Self-Reliant Literary Group were invested in by him with great effort and were written with great interest in research. And he also knew clearly that those books were useful reference materials for his students and spread to them a significant interest in research while they were studying in the lecture hall and not only in the university lecture hall. He admitted and mixed a bit of humor, saying that he was like a hard-working farmer in the field of literary research, although he had many harvests, he still knew that he did not like many of the works he wrote himself and knew that they also had some meaning for the studies of university students of literature. He liked his own book “Poetry and some issues in modern poetry”, with the reason “this is a book that I wrote carefully, a separate book, (not together like the book “The development of poetry - form and genre” with Professor Bui Van Nguyen”, although he also liked this book) and is a purely theoretical book, reprinted several times! He happily confessed: “Nam Cao and his works” is also a book I like. I am one of the first people to write a research book about Nam Cao. Or the book "To Hoai - Life and Works" is both a literary study and a memory of the writer To Hoai who was close to me and helped me a lot... Then the books "President Ho Chi Minh - the great poet of the nation" and "Literary works of President Ho Chi Minh" have both been reprinted 8 times... There is a special thing in Professor Ha Minh Duc's research that he "changed direction" quite dramatically to the field of writing: he suddenly wrote poetry, memoirs, essays... in the years entering middle age, when he had gone through the autumn of his life and then found himself in the middle of winter: "Now there is only winter left/And I am alone in the middle/The years pass, the winter days become colder/The sad winter is a friend of loneliness...". Besides his research, lectures, guiding students to write theses, students to write theses, graduate students to write theses... he found poetry as a consolation and he himself believed that it was also a way out of the mainstream to return to himself in a peaceful and harmonious way. It was not by chance that he published several collections of poems and received a lot of affection from the audience. Poet Huy Can once praised Ha Minh Duc's poetry for its pent-up sincerity. Poet Anh Tho read his poems many times and praised his poetry for being modern, written in a free form. Poets Vu Dinh Minh, Ma Giang Lan, Huu Thinh all gave his poems the love of soulmates. And thus, he was able to release energies that he himself did not know were hidden in his heart, in addition to the qualities of a person who devoted his whole life to researching and teaching Vietnamese literature as fate had ordained. And he, Professor Ha Minh Duc, is very worthy of the noble titles, positions, and awards that the State has given him: Professor, People's Teacher, State Award, and Ho Chi Minh Award for his achievements in research and teaching over half a century...
