(252) Literary Scene in N. Korea

By Andrei Lankov

The last decade or so have been a most difficult time for the average North Korean. However, these same years have witnessed undreamed of freedoms for North Korean writers and readers.

Indeed, until the mid-1980s the literary scene in North Korea presented the most disconcerting picture: a vast intellectual desert. By comparison, even places as notorious as Mao's China or Stalin]s Russia would seem to have a lively literary life when compared with the DPRK during the heyday of Kim Il-sung's rule.

The individual works of North Korean writers were seldom published, being largely replaced by the faceless production of the anonymous 'creative groups? The most prominent of them was the '15 April creative group,' which worked on a particular lofty topic ― a multi-volume epic depicting the heroic deeds of Kim Il-sung himself. From the early 1960s, foreign works of fiction were virtually banned. Only in 1984 was this ban lifted (as rumors hold, it was done under pressure from Kim Jong-il himself).

From the late 1980s, the system which had been so carefully created by Kim the Senior, began to crumble. Economically, it spelled disaster. However, in the cultural field, relaxation brought a sort of moderate revival. For an outsider, the products of North Korea's official culture still remain dull and unpalatable ― as unsuccessful attempts to market them in the South testify. However, for the North Koreans themselves, the fiction of the last fifteen years is, at least, readable.

There is no such thing as a best-seller in the DPRK. The number of printed copies of a particular book is determined according to its political and moral benefits (of course, these benefits are measured by the wise people in the Party bureaucracy). Thus, the truly popular books sell out immediately ― many of their copies do not even reach the shelves, being privately purchased by the friends and relatives of the bookshop personnel. At the same time, the less popular books ― largely those with a particularly wholesome ideological message ― collect dust for years.

Thus, getting a good book is difficult, especially for somebody who lives outside Pyongyang. Libraries help a lot, even if waiting lists for the more popular books are sometimes quite long.

And what are the books which attract attention? They do not deal with the heroic epics of Kim Il-sung's anti-Japanese resistance, or the equally heroic struggle against the "U.S. imperialists'' during the Korean War. The topics are more pedestrian, more quotidian: the themes of love, family relations, marriage, and even divorce, have all made a comeback.

Among the locally produced hits one should mention Nam Tae-hyun's Song of Youth, or Yi Tae-yun's Love. Both novels deal with the problems of romance and relationships, even if these topics are still decorated with the obligatory rhetoric of "loyalty to the Leader and Party" as well as scenes of selfless labour for the sake of the country.

Translated fiction is another important medium. The ban on Western literature was lifted in 1984, and since then North Koreans have had access to foreign classics. Their choice is largely limited to the fiction of the 19th century, and mostly to the writers who are deemed "progressive". The North Koreans nowadays can read Alexandre Dumas, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Charlotte Bronte ― and they do so with great enthusiasm, finding in these great works the realistic depiction of human feelings and emotions, sadly lacking from contemporary North Korean fiction.

Translated literature also provides North Korean readers with recreation. Generally speaking, the genres of crime fiction and thrillers are not produced locally. After all, the DPRK is supposed to be a country without criminals! However, the translated detective and spy stories by Russian writers enjoy tremendous popularity. Recent hits include the works of Yulian Semenov, a gifted storyteller and close personal friend of long-time KGB chief Yuri Andropov. Semenov produced a number of spy sagas depicting the overseas adventures of KGB operatives in the 1930s and 1940s. Once upon the time his books were very popular in the USSR ― and nowadays they are among the more popular books in North Korea!

Over the last decade, some works of South Korean writers have also been reprinted in the North. Of course, those works were chosen to confirm the image of the South as a ``living hell,'' but those publications might end up having a different impact as well. But that is another story…