Positive Hero Research Articles

Visualizing History: Truthfulness in North Korean Art

Abstract In North Korean paintings, history is mobilized to legitimate the North Korean system and its leaders. Utilizing the mode of socialist realism, North Korean paintings give visual form to a socialist world, a utopian vision full of unremitting heroism, harvest, and happiness centered on the ruling Kim family. In these paintings, positive heroes such as laborers, workers, farmers, and children are depicted in historically correct scenes that always propel the North Korean revolution forward. After adopting socialist realism from the Soviet Union, North Korea localized this creative method to meet its specific political needs through medium and content. Through this process, socialist realism came to reflect the ideals of juche, the state ideology of North Korea. Informed by North Korean theoretical writings on art and art reviews, this article examines how history is visually mobilized in three paintings created in 1985 and 2000 through the language of juche realism.

Повесть о настоящем человеке: «Судьба барабанщика» Аркадия Гайдара

Gaidar’s military career was considered as incredibly successful in Soviet times. However, it is obvious that Gaidar did not stand the test of war. That is why, on the eve of the coming big war, the writer Gaidar set himself the task of becoming the tutor of future soldiers. It was a challenging task to accomplish. Gaidar could not be unaware that the fathers of many children, whom he was going to train the “Strong Red Guard,” were unjustly condemned during the years of the Stalinist repressions. The tragedy of the situation was aggravated by the splitting consciousness of the Soviet man, condemned to be both the executioner and the victim at the same time. It is impossible to cope with an external enemy unless one first defeats the internal enemy. Of course, enemies carefully disguise themselves, but this is not the main difficulty in fighting them. Gaidar’s artistic world is based on the bizarre dialectic of good and evil. There are often strange similarities between his positive heroes and antiheroes. To a certain extent, the old gangster Yakov is a double of the main character of the story Sergei Shcherbachev. Moreover, Sergey suffers from a clear personality splitting. By the end of the story, his dissociative identity disorder develops essentially pathological forms. Only in the final of the story does the hero overcome his duality. He is undoubtedly ready for the big war. Sergei Shcherbachev is sure not to have a traumatic neurosis, like Arkady Gaidar.

THE PROBLEM OF A POSITIVE HERO IN H. BÖLL’S NOVEL “BILLIARDS AT HALF PAST NINE” IN THE CONTEXT OF THE LITERARY INFLUENCE OF F.M. DOSTOEVSKY

The paper examines the peculiarities of the reception of the artistic experience of F.M. Dostoevsky by the German writer H. Böll at the level of the figurative system of the novel “Billiards at half-past nine”. A comprehensive comparative analysis of the images of Makar Dolgoruky and Shrella allows us to reveal a number of artistic similarities between these characters, manifested both in terms of character disclosure (the presence in both characters such qualities as humility, insight, moral hardness, religiosity) as well as in the aspect of artistic functions (the role they play as a moral guide for central characters). This confirms the fact that in this work there are signs of the literary influence of F.M. Dostoevsky on the creative style of H. Böll. At the same time, the problem of a positive hero in the novel “Billiards at half-past nine” is developed on the material of the German post-war reality in close connection with the historical and political context. The German writer creates an original image of a distinctive character, imbued with special symbolism.

‘Not a good time for positive heroes’

E. Konstantinova interviews R. Senchin, a writer, journalist, shortlisted entry and winner of numerous literary prizes: Russian Booker (2009), National Bestseller (2010), The Culture Prize of the Russian Government (2012), Yasnaya Polyana (2014), The Big Book [Bolshaya Kniga] (2015), and others. They discuss Senchin’s personal creative experiments and discoveries as well as contemporary Russian prose in general. Senchin opines that modern literature, having digested the experiences of the ‘new realism’ of the 1990s–2000s, has moved on to discover writers’ individual characteristics and harness new subjects, including documentary ones. Given the limitations of the forms and methods of artistic literature, Senchin argues, an unexpected choice of topic, language, intonation or plot comes to the forefront. However, he prefers to stick to recognizable, traditional subjects and recurrent characters. The exploration of the motivations and personality of those characters (the writer Savateev and the office clerk Chashchin) takes up most of the interview.

Structural-Semantic and Functional-Stylistic Characteristics of Vasily Aksenov’s New Coined Words in the 90’s (On the Material of the Collection of Stories «Negative of Positive Hero»)

In this scientific article, we study the individual author’s neoplasms, extracted from the texts of the collection of short stories “The Positive Hero Negative”, written by V. Aksenov in the 90s. of the 20th century. The methods that the author uses to create these neoplasms are established, a semantic characteristic of the named units is given, the functions that they perform are analyzed. In the course of the analysis, it is concluded that the writer constantly uses systemic and non-systemic methods of creating occasionalisms. The former includes prefixation, suffixation, fixation, and addition, while the latter include substitutional derivation and creation. Systemic methods are characterized by the presence of word-formation chains of occasionalisms, as well as a deviation from the language standard. Non-systemic methods are characterized by irregularity and singularity. The functional and stylistic characteristic testifies to the fulfillment of occasionalisms of nominative, interlinguistic, ideological, playful and emotionally expressive functions. The author emphasizes the constitutive nature of the last two for the creativity of V. Aksenov. In general, the study claims that the predominantly casual nature of the derivative structure of neoplasms, as well as the playful, emotionally expressive, and ideological connotation of these units are explained by the view of V. Aksenov, an adult of the sixties in the 90s. in Russia, the fundamental changes in which he, after many years of emigration, can observe with his own eyes.

Екзистенційні мотиви збірки поезії Сергія Жадана «Життя Марії».

The article deals with some poetry from the collection of Sergiy Zhadan's Life of Maria through the lens of the philosophy of existentialism. It is traced how they realize the motives of the tragedy of being, the absurdity of the world, rebellion, freedom of choice. The poet's nationalexistential model of the world and the meaning of human life is substantiated. It is proved that the collection is a kind of attempt at the empirical confession of the author, his diary, which continued during the first year of the war in the Donbass. In the collection Life of Mary Sergey Zhadan reveals a complex of problems related to life and death - specific constituents, antipodes of society in times of war. It is justified that the heroes of the poet have no illusions about the prospects of their existence, but resort to the knowledge of eternal values. The object of the image of Zhadan is not only the peculiarities of the life of those who left the occupation. No less, but where much more attention is paid to those who, like a stalker, go out into the streets of the occupied cities every day. The purpose of these people is different, as is their meaning in life. Many of them cannot be called even positive heroes if they go back to the stated system of distribution of characters into carriers of universal good and universal evil. For Zhadan one of the leading was and remains the motive of the road, the way, so the images of immigrants are best suited to this artistic matrix. After prolonged wanderings, migrants attach themselves to new places of residence, receive a temporary address - an agreement to reside in rented living space, one can also say about the infamous migrant certificate, which marks and stigmatizes people who have lost their homes, leaving them immediately isolated residents.

"We pay no heed to the ideal… We pay heed to trifle and trifle…" The issue of moral and ethical evaluation of Alexander Ostrovsky's works in literary criticism of the second half of the 19th century

In terms of newspaper-magazine reviews of Alexander Ostrovsky's works, published in the 1850s-70s, the problem of artistic text literary-critical evaluation is examined in the article. The author of the article assumes that artistic text evaluation is directly related to ideology and to the main request of time in terms of which, the text receives this assessment. According to Georgiy Fridlender, one of the most important tasks that Russian public life of the second half of the 19th century set for literature was to create an image of a viable and still positive hero. Alexander Ostrovsky in his work was oriented to answers to the most pressing social requests. Nevertheless, his works often did not satisfy his contemporaries, and sometimes insulted their moral feelings. An attempt to trace how the negative moral and ethical assessment of the playwright's creative work was conditioned and the role that newspaper and magazine criticism played in shaping the literary process is undertaken in the article.

РЕЗОНАНС ІЗ КУЛЬТУРОЮ ПРОСВІТНИЦТВА В НАУКОВІЙ ФАНТАСТИЦІ ТА ФЕНТЕЗІ УРСУЛИ ЛЕ ГУЇН

Стаття має на меті розглянути вплив культури Просвітництва на творчість майстра американської наукової фантастики й фентезі Урсули Ле Гуїн (1929–2018). Зазначено, що наукову фантастику поєднують з філософію більшості просвітників матеріалістичне сприйняття світу як збагненного об’єкта дослідження та експлуатації, домінування ідей над образністю, яскраво виражена пропагандистська основа, пафос ствердження позитивного героя, критична спрямованість. Паралелі літератури фентезі, яка ґрунтується передусім на сюжетному припущенні ірраціонального характеру, та раціонально орієнтованого художнього досвіду Просвітництва менш очевидні, але й між ними існують спільні риси, а саме виховна спрямованість і культ природної людини. Наголошується, що творчому доробку Урсули Ле Гуїн притаманні такі базові постулати епохи Просвітництва, як виховна спрямованість, пропаганда культури та знань, боротьба з догматизмом, віра в прогрес як шлях до гуманізації, захист свободи в усіх її проявах, антирелігійний пафос, культ природної людини тощо. Великі прозові твори письменниці часто сягають корінням до роману-подорожі або роману виховання, які були провідними жанрами Просвітництва. (The author seeks to consider the impact of the culture of the Enlightenment on the works of the master of American science fiction and fantasy Ursula Le Guin (1929–2018). It is noted that science fiction has much in common with the philosophy of most representatives of the Enlightenment: the materialistic perception of the world as an object of comprehension, study and exploitation; domination of ideas over imagery; vivid propagandistic basis; pathetic assertion of a positive hero and critical orientation. The parallels between the genre of fantasy, which is based primarily on the irrational plot assumption, and the rationally oriented cultural experience of the Enlightenment are less obvious, but there are also common features among them, namely the educational focus and the cult of Natural Man. It is emphasized that Ursula Le Guin’s works have such basic postulates of the Enlightenment as educational focus, promotion of culture and knowledge, the struggle against dogmatism, faith in progress as a way to humanization, the protection of freedom in all its manifestations, anti-religious pathos, the cult of Natural Man, etc. Her long prose narratives are often rooted in a travel novel or a coming-of-age novel (Bildungsroman) that were leading genres of the Enlightenment.)

Wyman, Alina The Gift of Active Empathy: Scheler, Bakhtin, and Dostoevsky (review)

SEER, 96, 2, APRIL 2018 340 Academy, Dmitry Grigorovich. If Dostoevskii does not emerge as a likeable character (this much we already knew; his elder brother Mikhail by contrast comes across as a saint), then the rounded and fair-minded picture we are given at least makes him more understandable. There is no attempt to hide Dostoevskii’s frankly unpleasant traits or behaviour, but we also see the pressures he was under, the understanding of his own talent and struggles to realize it, and the tensions between uncontrollable vanity and self-doubt that are more than a little reminiscent of Mr Goliadkin and his double, on whose story Dostoevskii was also working in this period. Marullo’s selection is very revealing of Dostoevskii’s creative process and his personality. Subsequent volumes covering the rest of the author’s life will make excellent companion pieces to existing, more traditional, biographies, and are to be eagerly anticipated. UCL SSEES Sarah J. Young Wyman, Alina. The Gift of Active Empathy: Scheler, Bakhtin, and Dostoevsky. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 2016. xiv + 323 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $39.95 (paperback). Bakhtin’s book on Dostoevskii was attacked as ‘idealist’ by its first Marxist reviewers in 1929. Ever since, its dazzling but not watertight case for polyphony and the dialogic word has prompted philosophically equipped critics to offer correctives. Alina Wyman is among the best. Her method is to use the younger Bakhtin to improve upon the older, with the help of the German phenomenologist Max Scheler, whose work on sympathy Bakhtin admired. Add a Schelerian supplement, Wyman suggests, and Bakhtin’s early Kantian ruminations on self-other relations — where my ‘I’ is dutybound to consummate yours — can be made compatible with his Dostoevskii study, which promotes radical incompleteness and shared being. Bakhtin on Dostoevskii is problematic. On the level of character, a constant privileging of the other in dialogue and the ‘coexistence-and-interaction’ mandate in polyphony ignore a hero’s growth over time and discourage cultivation of a private zone. On the level of novelistic construction, the leveling effects of dialogue and polyphony obscure Dostoevskii’s hierarchy of values. But balance can be restored if we revive Bakhtin’s early concept of vzhivanie or ‘live entering’: the ‘active empathy’ of the title. This is not Nietzsche’s despised pity, reactive and duplicative. ‘Active’ here means morally potent. The empathizer does not collapse into the other’s pain. Rather, my ‘I’ briefly steps in to your space (the mechanism here is unclear), our horizons momentarily coincide REVIEWS 341 and are mutually enriched, after which we return to our separate selves. Such compassionate, temporary consummation of ‘I’ and ‘other’ is never a finalization, never a fusion, always a possible way out. To be properly understood, Wyman contends, Dostoevskii’s positive heroes need both Bakhtin and Scheler. Scheler’s model permits a self to retain a private ‘surplus’, its own ‘individual ineffable’, which gives it the dignity, traction for change, and trust in the wholeness of its own embodied image that Bakhtin withholds. To presume unfinalizability or full open access in human encounters is not an unalloyed good. In pursuit of optimal mutual incarnation in Dostoevskii, Wyman organizes her study in three sections. The introduction and first two chapters lay out the fragile, fraught task of empathy, the intuiting of another’s consciousness. Chapters four to six are microreadings of actively empathetic moments in three masterworks: House of the Dead, The Idiot and Brothers Karamazov. The prison quasi-memoir is partially successful (but mostly in retrospect). The Idiot is largely a failure (Myshkin’s fusing with the sufferer makes matters worse). Alesha Karamazov is a victory. Alesha knows his own mind, acts on it, can be sorrowful when humiliated but is not insulted, and thus manages to consummate others but not finalize them, making him everyone’s favoured ‘uniquely competent friend’ (p. 215). Bridging these two sections is chapter three, a dark digression on anti-empathy in the Underground through Scheler’s concept of resentment. When, out of a misguided quest for freedom, the Underground Man refuses to incarnate himself, an impotent unfinalizable fury sets in, and forever. Sixty pages...

The ‘cinematic poetry’ of the Thaw

As represented in Soviet cinema from Stalinism to the Thaw, the ability to appreciate and recite poetry was a meaningful characteristic of a positive hero. However, the way this positive characteristic was reflected on the screen shifted drastically. In part, this shift reflected familiar Thaw priorities of emphasizing sincerity and the individual experience in re-presenting the tropes of Stalinism. However, shifts in performance also responded to the long-standing tension in Russian culture between the value and the potential banality of kul'turnost', a tension that had been less prominent in Stalinist culture, even as the Stalinist valorisation of education resulted in its emerging more strongly than ever in post-Stalinist cinema. This article examines three sites of post-Stalinist cinema that illustrate how this tension was negotiated: playful and ironic performance; unpolished but highly expressive poetry; and disjunctures in cinematic space around performed poetry.

Heroes and Social Criticism in the Works of Valeria Anderson

Abstract This article investigates how director Valeria Anderson constructed heroes in the documentaries she directed between 1960 and 1985. It also asks how far one could go with social criticism in the post-Stalinist/pre-Perestroika era, how pointed the revelations of economic disorder could be, and what rank of leadership could be blamed for the occurrences of these problems. The article concentrates on the documentaries made by Valeria Anderson that depict positive heroes sacrificing their personal interests for the good of the homeland. The narratives are examined by using discourse analysis.

Dawid jako organizator kultu w Pochwale Ojców (Syr 47,8–10)

The Praise of the Ancestors (Sir 44–49) includes the presentation of the history of biblical Israel as an exemplification of God’s working in history. The sage presents the most important and positive heroes of this history according to his own criteria. David, described in Sir 47:1–11, is one of the most important Old Testament heroes. His activity as a king is presented by Sirach first of all as that of an initiator of Jerusalem cult (Sir 47:8–10). The sage employed the “cultic” image of David, present in Chronicles 1. The image of David is also integrated with the idea of history and covenant characteristic of the Praise of the Ancestors . David becomes a forerunner of the high priest Simon, who was, in the times of Sirach, a sole sign of the covenant as well as the mediator between God and his people.

Развитие соцреалистических «тропов» в кинодраматургии начала 1960-х: на материале киносценария Геннадия Шпаликова «Причал»

the paper focuses on the development of the social-realistic tradition in the culture of the early 1960s. Special attention is paid to the first full-length feature Gennady Shpalikov’s screenplay «Berth», which is an example of the development and the change of social-realistic «tropes» in the screenwriting of «Ottepel / the Thaw»: «a positive hero», «big family» and «war». The author concludes that these fundamental «tropes» define all Shpalikov’s work, the screenwriting and the poetry.

Spreading the Wings and the Words: Hybridization & Dissemination of Palestinian Literature

The paper presents Palestinian literature as a unique example of nationalistic literature inspired by the political milieu and historical context, aimed at reviving and regaining the lost essence of the Palestinian identity. It argues that there are supra-literary factors involved in writing about Palestine adhered to, more or less, by most writers. It explains that writers who write about Palestine, as well as readers, do not start with a blank page; writers have a set of themes to choose from, readers, moreover, expect to read a story along the lines of an optimistic and futuristic framework: A positive hero(ine) with a positive conclusion beyond all odds. The paper also discusses the general characteristics of Palestinian literature and its various subgenres, titles and their thematic implications on writers, stories and readers. The paper provides a brief critical overview on how writing about Palestine is viewed as part of the resistance and a contribution to the national cause. The paper presents a real life example in the biography of Ghada al-Karmi, the typical hybrid Palestinian refugee stressing that it is not the “whereabouts” of the Palestinian authors which shape their literary vision, it is legacy of their Palestinian origin and identity that is nurtured in their being but ceased to exist in real life. It concludes with stressing that the particular and unique nature of Palestinian literature should not hinder the audience from appreciating its value. National and ideological literature, unlike the stereotypical belief, can still walk hand in hand with creativity, both sharing in the presentation of a memorable human suffering.

"Russian Americans" in Soviet film: cinematic dialogues between the US and the USSR

Certain aspects of American popular culture had a formative influence on early Soviet identity and aspirations. Traditionally, Soviet Russia and the United States between the 1920s and the 1940s are regarded as polar opposites on nearly every front. Yet American films and translated adventure fiction were warmly received in 1920s Russia and partly shaped ideals of the New Soviet Person into the 1940s. Cinema was crucial in propagating this new social hero. While open admiration of American film stars and heroes of literary fiction in the Soviet press was restricted from the late 1920s onwards, many positive heroes of Soviet Socialist Realist films in the 1930s and 1940s were partially a product of Soviet Americanism of the previous decade. Some of the new Soviet heroes in films of the 1930s and 1940s possessed traits noticeably evocative of the previously popular American film stars such as Douglas Fairbanks, Pearl White and Mary Pickford. Others cinematically represented the contemporary trope of the 'Russian American,' an ideal worker exemplifying the Stalinist marriage of 'Russian revolutionary sweep' with 'American efficiency. Russian Americans' in Soviet Film analyses the content, reception and underlying influences of over 60 Soviet and American films, exploring new territory in Soviet cinema studies and American-Russian cultural relations. It presents groundbreaking archival research encompassing Soviet audience surveys, Soviet film journals and reviews, memoirs and articles by Soviet filmmakers, and scripts, among other sources. The book reveals that values of optimism, technological skill, efficiency and self-reliance - perceived as quintessentially American - were incorporated into new Soviet ideals through channels of cross-cultural dissemination, resulting in cultural synthesis.

Like the good or bad guy—Empathy in antisocial and prosocial games.

Evidence suggests that violent media influence users’ cognitions, affect, and behavior in a negative way, whereas prosocial media have been shown to increase the probability of prosocial behavior. In the present study, it was tested whether empathy moderates these media effects. In two experiments (N 80 each), inducing empathy by means of a text (Study 1) or a video clip (Study 2) before playing a video game caused differential effects on cognitions and behavior depending on the nature of the subsequent video game: The induction had positive effects on participants’ behavior (i.e., decreasing antisocial and increasing prosocial behavior) after a prosocial game (Study 1), or when participants played a positive hero character in an antisocial game (Study 2). In contrast, empathy increased antisocial behavior and reduced prosocial behavior after playing a mean character in an antisocial game (Study 1 and 2). These findings call attention to the differential effects of empathy depending on game type and game character, thereby questioning the unconditional positive reputation of empathy in the context of video game research.

The Myth of Enver Hoxha in the Albanian Cinema of Socialist Realism: An Inquiry into the Psychoanalitical Features of the Myth

Although the mythological status of Enver Hoxha became fundamental in the political identity of communist Albania from 1944 to 1990, the absence of the Hoxha character in the Albanian feature films produced during communism begs the question: why did Enver Hoxha exclude his character from feature films? Both his role model, Stalin, and his nemesis, Tito, were incarnated in feature films produced in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, respectively.1 However, though Hoxha appeared in many documentaries, several requests by filmmakers to impersonate his character received negative responses. To answer this question requires understanding the myth of Hoxha. Hoxha built his own myth by combining elements from the myths of the Stalin and Tito with idiosyncratic features suggested by the Albanian historical context as well as his own psychopathology. Whereas Stalin appropriated the archetype of the caring father and Tito appropriated the archetype of the die-hard military commander, Hoxha decided to personify the divine heroic son. Th e Albanian cinema helped generate a stereotype of the positive hero who still looked submissive to the ever-elusive divine image of the great leader. Although some elements of this myth might resemble the Stalin myth, it diff ers in that Hoxha did not appropriate a paternal role to his nation. By the same token, while his panegyrists oft en referred to Hoxha as “the legendary commander,” an idea appropriated from Tito, Hoxha himself looked uncomfortable in such a position. Th erefore, the Albanian political cinema of communism can be better understood as the reflection and constructor of a social reality dominated by Hoxha’s presence as a ubiquitous mystic divinity that supervised society. Th at divinity was

“Doing the duck”: negotiating the resistant‐consumer identity

PurposeThis paper aims to examine how dumpster divers' practices and tension‐resolution strategies facilitate their construction of resistant‐consumer identities outside the dominant paradigm of consumer choice.Design/methodology/approachInterview data were interpreted with the assistance of relevant literature, netnography and observation.FindingsBy viewing ideological motivations as paramount, even divers initially having economic or psychological motivations are able to negotiate a positive hero identity. Sharing forms community and constructs a “self‐for‐others” narrative that accommodates the paradoxical need to consume while resisting.Research limitations/implicationsThe illegality of the practice prevented researcher participation. Examining the reacquisition of waste informs identity construction and consumer resistance, and suggests that corporate and public policies should facilitate waste reclamation.Originality/valueThis investigation, unlike prior research, does not examine only one set of motives nor only those who dive for food. Thus, this paper uncovers the complex inter‐relationships between ideological, economic and psychological motivations, permitting a more complete understanding of how divers' practices shape their identities.

Performing Justice: Agitation Trials in Early Soviet Russia by Elizabeth Wood (review)

REVIEWS 789 Wood, Elizabeth. Performing Justice:AgitationTrials inEarly Soviet Russia. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY and London, 2005. viii + 301 pp. Illustra tions.Appendices. Notes. Index. $49.95: ?27.50. Bolshevik posters have long been a subject of interest for historians of Russian propaganda, but other forms of political agitprop have been leftunder studied. In this fascinating and detailed study Elizabeth Wood makes an important contribution to putting that situation right. Wood tells the storyof the agitation trials of the 1920s, tracing this genre from its origins in the Russian Civil War to itsdemise with the very real purge trials of the 1930s. Wood informsus that the very firsttrial took place in a Red Army unit based in Kharkov on 7 December 1919. Thereafter they became commonplace, particularly in theRed Army, with trialsbeing staged of deserters, the 'White Green' movement of the Caucasus, Wrangel, and the Kronstadt rebels. In these early days, the accused were as likely to be positive heroes as political enemies: Lenin was acquitted when his trialwas staged byMoscow railway workers inApril 1920, as was the Communist Party itself ? but only after ithad been accused of seizing power illegally, ruining industry and closing down the free press. Such heroic 'reverse' trials took place alongside more predictable ones, like that in 1922 of theOrthodox Church. As the 1920s developed, so the focus of the trials shifted tomore social and cultural issues.They remained an important feature of life in theRed Army, with such titlesas The Trial of thePeasant who Avoided Conscription and the Trial of the Soldier Who did not Want to Learn Military Arts; but their appeal was equally also to society beyond the barracks, something testifiedby such titlesas The Trial of the Woman who Refused toAid Starving Peasants of theVolga Region and The Trial of the Illiterate. Indeed, therewas scarcely a Bolshevik campaign where the trial formatwas not used. In The Trial of a New Woman a woman delegate involved in the work of the Bolshevik Women's Department was tried and acquitted of neglecting her family,while the subject matter of theTrial of the Pioneer Who Smoked speaks for itself. Trials were also used to raise difficult issues of sexual health: The Trial of the Prostitute enabled doctors to explain what venereal diseases were, how they could be both cured and prevented, and how the social stigmas associated with them in the capitalist past no longer applied in socialist Russia. One of the great strengthsofWood's book is theway she links the genre of the agitation trial to the work carried out in workers' clubs in the pre revolutionary period. Noting such events as The Trial of Vodka staged in 1904 by theAleksandr Nevskii Society for Sobriety in St Petersburg, she sug gests that by 1919 itwas 'as ifeveryone already knew what theywere' (p. 17) and the trialformat grew likemushrooms after the rain. Indeed, Wood briefly traces the career of Boris Borovich who was actively engaged in worker edu cation before 1917 and became one of the key figures in staging the early Kharkov trials. Wood's explanation for thedisappearance of the agitation trial genre ismore problematic. In her introduction she suggests that 'ultimately the trials attracted and encouraged thousands of "little Stalins'" (p. 10) and links the agitation trials to the rituals of the 1930s purge trials. Such a clear continuity does not really come across from her closing chapters. It is of 79? SEER, 85, 4, OCTOBER 2007 course true that the 1928 Shakhty Trial contained elements of drama compa rable with the agitation trials, but did 'fiction and reality become indistin guishable' as the tide of chapter ten suggests? Itwould be foolish to deny that, by the end of the decade, the agitation trials featured little of the 'critical thinking' encouraged by the 1920 Trial of Lenin; the trials were indeed increasingly concerned with condemning enemies. However, Wood's own evidence suggests that the genre was already dying out by the early 1930s, partly because the 'trialsworked best on audiences that had not seen them before' (p. 206). The Shakhty Trial and all the subsequent show trialswere not primarily to educate and agitate, but to punish. Their targets were not selected by...

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

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. …