Dual Homeland: Cho Myŏng-hŭi and the Origins of Koryŏ Saram Literature

Abstract

This article constitutes a first step toward filling a crucial gap in English-language studies of Koryŏ Saram literature. I focus on the early formative period, which began in the 1920s in tandem with the establishment of Soviet power in the Russian Far East. Its protagonists are Cho Myŏng-hŭi, the proletarian writer from colonial Korea who crossed the border to the Soviet Union in 1928, in addition to the first generation of Soviet-Korean writers centered on the Korean-language newspaper Sŏnbong. This first, Far East, phase of Koryŏ Saram literature was violently terminated during the Stalinist purges with the deportation of the population to Central Asia in 1937, which was in turn preceded by the execution of thousands of Koryŏ Saram intellectuals and writers, including Cho. The rise of proletarian literature was one of the major developments of Korean literature of the early twentieth century. Among proletarian KAPF (Korean Proletarian Artists’ Federation) writers, Cho stands out from this group as the only writer who migrated—and so soon after writing “Naktong River”(1927), a landmark work of Korean proletarian literature—to the Soviet Union, the source and center of world socialism. Aside from his ideological commitment, what little has been known of Cho’s migration and Soviet period (1928–1938) has been understood within the dominant image of Cho as a fierce anti-colonial nationalist writer. But Cho’s efforts to lay the foundations of a Soviet Korean literature during his decade in the Russian Far East complicate the traditional notion of the exiled or diasporan writer longing for the homeland.