The North Korean Positive Hero in The People of the Fighting Village

Abstract

IntroductionThe People of the Fighting Village by Chon Se Bong (1915-1986) is a socialist realist heroic epic dressed up as a novelette that has apparently withstood the test of time in North Korea. It is a sentimental, stereotyped, and disturbing story set around October to December 1950 during the Korean War. The plot centers on two North Korean villages, Kaean and Kaebak, where peasant dwellers, in coordination with guerrilla partisans, struggle to oust an American occupation force. Notably, the original Korean edition, Ssaunun Maul ui Saramdul, was awarded third prize for the best prose work in 1953 at the Festival of the Fifth Anniversary of the Founding of the Korean People's Army (Chun, 1955). Yet, despite the availability of two Englishlanguage editions published in 1955 and 1986, Chon's narrative has been neglected for half a century in the United States. This, however, does not represent a unique case-it is the fate of all North Korean literature accessible in North America. Having undergone arguably minor alterations and omissions, the translations of The People of the Fighting Village are important political-cultural documents. As both editions suggest, the work has evidently endured several decades of bureaucratic expediencies that condition the Stalinist arts doctrine of socialist realism, which North Korean sources describe as the only valid creative method and style in the country (Korean, 1959, p. 160; Chai and Hyon, 1980, p. 23). That doctrine is now termed Juche or Juche-oriented realism. The apparent longevity and success of Chon's The People of the Fighting Village may be due in part to the characterization of the protagonist Kwon Yong Pil. Central to the tale, he is an ascetic partisan youth and archetypal positive hero molded as an exemplary representative of North Korean nationalist Stalinist ideals, and one who is to be emulated for his uncompromising perseverance, fortitude, and devotion to the North Korean fatherland/motherland.Socialist RealismBefore exploring those qualities that define Kwon Yong Pil as a positive hero, it is necessary to address the question of socialist realism, which underlies his development. In brief, the Bonapartist aesthetic doctrine emerged in Soviet-Stalinist cultural discussion when Ivan Gronsky, chairman of the Organization Committee of the Soviet Writers' Union, introduced the term in 1932. The concept subsequently found its way into colonial-era Korea in 1933. Soon thereafter, it was promulgated and defined by Stalin's cultural lieutenant Andrei Zhdanov at the First Soviet Writers' Congress in 1934. And following the U.S.-Soviet agreements at Yalta and Potsdam, culminating in the occupation and division of the Korean peninsula with the defeat of fascist Japan in i945, socialist realism became the veritable cultural law of the Sovietsponsored northern regime in 1946. (That is also when the North Korean Federation of Literature and Art was established.) To be sure, North Korean literary control policy was thoroughly pervaded by Soviet-Stalinist influence from 1946 to 1950 and formed within the cultural-political structures of Zhadnovism and socialist realism (Lim, 1989). Other scholars such as Gabroussenko (2004), Howard (1996), Kwon (1991; 2003), Pihl (1977), and Pucek (1996) have confirmed the tradition of socialist realism in North Korea. Founded as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in 1948, North Korea was formed during the height of Zhdanovism (Stalinist cul- tural nationalism) in the Soviet Union, that is, during the blackout of Soviet art and letters that lasted from 1946 to 1953. This was a period that ushered in the notorious anticosmopolitan campaign (a euphemism for anti-Westernism and, to some extent, anti-Semitism) as well as the theory of conflictlessness. Both policies proved especially detrimental in cultural production, cutting off Soviet literature from international influences and rejecting conflict as an integral component of drama and character (Vickery, 1963, pp. …