See also: Culture of North Korea.
Reading is a popular pastime in North Korea, where literacy and books enjoy a high cultural standing, elevated by the regime's efforts to disseminate propaganda as texts. Because of this, writers are held in high prestige.[1]
The division of Korea following the Second World War led to a considerable cross-border movement, which included writers moving from North to South or from South to North.
North Korea's subsequent literary tradition was shaped and controlled by the State. The "Guidelines for Juche Literature", published by the official, emphasised that literature must extoll the country's leader, Kim Il Sung, and, later, Kim Jong Il.[2] Only members of the Writers' Alliance are authorised to have their works published.[2] [3]
Russian, and later Soviet, literature were popular in pre-liberation North Korea. Koreans viewed Russian literature very differently from Western audiences, searching for Confucian undertones of social engineering. While Westerners appreciated works like Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and War and Peace, Koreans mostly ignored these works but enjoyed his works on religion and moral treatises. Of Soviet writers, Maxim Gorky in particular was popular.
The foundations of socialist North Korean literature were laid in the period between 1945 and 1960s, when North Korea adopted many Soviet-style forms of organization. Along with them, restrictions and political imperatives found their way to literature. Immediately after the liberation, North Korea followed in the footsteps of Soviet literature. But by the de-Stalinization of the mid-1950s in the Soviet Union, the relationship changed. Kim Il Sung saw the moment as an opportunity to lessen the control of the Soviets and increase his own. He accomplished this by denouncing all things "foreign" in literature in a speech entitled "On Eliminating Dogmatism and Formalism and Establishing Juche in Ideological Work". From there on, North Korean literature would have a nationalistic outlook, but Soviet elements introduced during the 1940s would remain steadfast.
According to B. R. Myers, the work of Cho Ki-chon in the late 1940s exemplifies particular traits of the early cult of personality of Kim Il-sung built upon Soviet Marxism–Leninism and bloc conformity. They were soon replaced by the Korean ethnic nationalism of writers like Han Sorya.[4] While Cho's Kim Il Sung is a brilliant strategist who has masculine qualities like strength and intellect, in Han's works he embodies traditional Korean virtues of innocence and naivety having "mastered Marxism–Leninism with his heart, not his brain". The ethnically inspired style of Han would establish itself as the standard of propaganda over Cho's.[5]
Attitude toward foreign literature changed after the 1967 Kapsan Faction Incident. People were forced to burn many of their books or donate them to library collections. Among authors whose books were destroyed were Tolstoy, Gorky, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Books on Chinese, Greek, and German philosophy were eradicated as well. Researchers could access the works of Karl Marx only at designated libraries and by supplying a reason for studying his work.[6]
According to "court poet" and now defector Jang Jin-sung, prior to 1994, when Supreme Leader Kim Il Sung was alive, the art of the novel was preeminent.[7] Nearly all the top state honors such as the Kim Il Sung Medal, the Order of Heroic Effort, and the title of Kim Il Sung Associate were awarded to the state's novelists.[7] The novel's length was a perfect medium to expound on the great deeds of Kim Il Sung, who was himself both an avid reader and writer of novels.[7] After his death in 1994, the novel was replaced by poetry, which was largely due to the country's economic problems which made paper very expensive and poetry about the deeds of Dear Leader could be reproduced easily in a single newspaper page.[7] Shorter poetry was most common, while the longer epic genre was restricted to just six poets, who were also the poets laureate of North Korea.[7] Epic poetry (and film) became the chief vehicle of political propaganda under Kim Jong Il.[7]
The DPRK promoted North Korean literature in Russia and China during the Cold War era. Several Soviet Koreanists published studies on DPRK literature and translations in Russian. Among the novelists translated into Russian and Chinese were:
Works published in , the Korean Writers' Alliance's monthly literary journal, are accessible by subscription abroad.
Many authors of highly significant political texts fell out of favor with the populace. As a result, North Korean publishing authorities would employ a policy of favoring collective creations of creative teams and withholding the names of individual contributors. This practice was observed most closely in the 1970s and started to wane in the 1980s. Regardless, its legacy is that even today North Koreans are very ignorant about the biographical details of their most read authors.[1]
As Ha-yun Jung puts it, "[i]f there is an underground network of dissident writers secretly circulating their writings under the watchful eyes of the Workers' Party, the world has not heard from them yet". In 2006, Words Without Borders included the works of four North Korean writers, translated into English, in its anthology Literature from the "Axis of Evil". Kang Kwi-mi's short story "A Tale of Music", published in Choson Munhak in February 2003, tells the tale of a young Zainichi Korean who discovers he is skilled at playing the trumpet, moves to North Korea, and relinquishes music in favour of stonemasonry. His passion for the "music" of stones is caused by the greatness of Kim Jong Il as expressed through stone monuments. Lim Hwa-won's short story "The Fifth Photograph" is told from the perspective of a North Korean woman who visits post-Soviet Russia in the early 1990s, and finds a country in a state of moral turmoil for having turned its back on socialism. The narrator blames insidious American influence for Russia's woes, and emphasises the need for strong ideological commitment in North Korea. Byungu Chon's poem "Falling Persimmons" evokes the emotional suffering caused by the partition of Korea, and hopes for reunification.
The anthology also contains an excerpt from Hong Seok-jung's 2002 novel Hwangjini, which received the 2004 Manhae Literary Prize – the first time the South Korean literary award had been conferred upon a North Korean writer. Hwangjini is a historical novel set in the sixteenth century.
Contemporary North Korean writers come in different ranks, some earning more than the others. Regardless, most writers remain relatively obscure: their pictures or biographical details are not made known to the reading public and mentions in anthologies and interviews are rare. Literary awards do exist, but results are not widely published. Consequentially, even literary professionals in North Korea are relatively oblivious about North Korean literature. Tatiana Gabroussenko describes how, when she interviewed such defectors, she:[1]