century Life of Writer Yi Kwang-su: From Nationalist to Collaborator

By Andrei Lankov

Korea Times Columnist

Most people want to see history in black and white, as an epic struggle between perfect heroes and treacherous villains. But real history ― like real life ― seldom has clear-cut ``goodies'' and ``baddies.''

One figure who encompassed all of this confusion of Korean history in five decades between 1900 and 1950 was Yi Kwang-su, arguably the first modern Korean writer.

Perhaps, his strange, successful and paradoxical life is best expressed by such a fact: Yi was imprisoned by all of the regimes that ruled Korea in his lifetime ― by the Japanese, by the North Koreans and by the South Koreans!

Yi was born in 1892, in what is now North Korea. He was 10 years old when his parents died, but the village community took care of him as he had already become

viewed by his fellow villagers as a local prodigy.

In an earlier era, his life path would have been easy to predict: sponsored by the villagers, he would receive education in the Confucian classics, which would enable him, with some luck, to become a junior official in the Joseon bureaucracy.

But the Joseon era was coming to an end, and the young prodigy became involved with the then powerful Cheondogyo sect. The sect's theology can be described as a Korean attempt to answer the challenge of Christianity.

It was sect leaders who provided Yi with a scholarship to study in Japan where he went in 1905. In Tokyo, he acquired a native fluency in Japanese. Indeed, Japanese, not Korean, was the language he used in his first fiction writings (in later stages of his life he also switched to Japanese sometimes). After graduating from the equivalent of a high school, Yi majored in philosophy at Waseda University.

In the early 1910s, many Korean students were attending Japanese schools, learning the ``new science'' and discussing the future of Korea. Most of them were nationalists, and they were full of ambition. Yi wrote in his diary: ``Am I a genius? I do not know, I am only trying.'' Well, Yi was not an example of modesty.

While in Japan, he was exposed to modern literature. The works of Western writers, so different in style from what Korean (and Japanese) intellectuals used to read before, enjoyed tremendous popularity.