The RAS Korean Literature Club discussion
Clash of visions in 1920s-30s Soviet-Korean literature (focused on Ch'oe Horim), a talk by Vladimir Tikhonov (Aug. 2025): My summary
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Mod
(Thanks to one of the other attendees for looking over the above summary-essay before I published it.)
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Alternate summary of the Soviet-Korean talk focused in "non-content" observations
I could've written a very different version of this "event-report," focused not on the contents or analysis but, for example, on the types of people in attendance. Or the fact that it being summer, the Korea University campus was pretty empty. The buildings are seemingly always unlocked during regular hours, and so outside attendees just wandered in.
It was a large, stadium-seating-style room that might fit 150 people. There were lots of Koreans, naturally, among whom were lots of students, typically seemingly graduate students. Many of the Koreans in the far-rear rows I suspect were not quite fully listening given they had devices out.
I could comment on the somewhat lackadaisical organization or event-running (which I've noticed is common in Korea, as people tend to be embarrassed to take charge of situations, unless they are explicitly assigned authority positions in which they can "order people around"; that leadership style doesn't translate to voluntarily attended events like this.)
Professor Tikhonov spoke entirely in Korean, which I guess I didn't state explicitly. I greeted him when he came into the room in English and said I had read some of his papers (which is true; they were in English). He said, What are you interested in. I told him I had some interest in the Koreans of the late-19th century active in Russia. He said he didn't know enough about that and wouldn't talk about it today, then about-faced to get his presentation ready.
His Korean speech-making was seemingly without a single, "uhh"-type stumbling over words. He also raised his voice in pitch, noticeably, to emphasize points in Korean, but I am told he does not do this either in his native Russian or in English much.
Helping my own comprehension considerably were his vast amount of slides which spelled things out.
It was also interesting to see him handle so fluidly and confidently the various questions from Koreans in the audience. A number of non-Koreans were there (including about half of the people in our little Korean Literature Club delegation), but they asked no questions. Another strange thing about this event is how the non-Koreans, despite on average understanding less, seemingly all sat towards the front.
I also recall that of this Club's attendees, several were delighted by learning about this completely new-to-them topic. One somehow had one of the speaker's books on hand (they are easy to find in bookstores) and got it signed.
The Q&A portion, however, dragging on made those of us who went from there to the Sean Lin Halbert translation-philosophy event, a bit late (for that event-summary, see here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...).
Mod
Dr Tikhonov appears to be the only person who has published lately on Ch'oe Horim:
His papers or talks just this year (2025) have included:
--> "1930년대 소련의 한인 문학: 최호림의 시 세계와 민족 공산주의" [Soviet-Korean Literature of the 1930s: Ch'oe Horim's Poetic World and National Communism]
--> "Ch’oe Horim (1896-1960) and ‘Red’ Korean Diasporic Nationalism in Russian Far East."
--> "Creating a Soviet Korean Nation: Ch’oe Horim’s (1896-1960) Literature as Diasporic Nation Building. "
(See his listing of recent works and research at his University of Oslo page: https://www.hf.uio.no/ikos/english/pe... ).
My own summary (above) of Tikhonov's talk "Ch'oe Horim's Poetic World and National Communism" is something you'll be hard pressed to find anywhere else. Even his page at the University of Oslo has no summary of the "Ch'oe Horim's Poetic World and National Communism" talk! --- For the small numbers of you out there who are interested: You're welcome.
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Mod
Vladimir Tikhonov's works related to Ch'oe Horim research:
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(1.) Tikhonov, Vladimir (2025). 1930년대 소련의 한인 문학: 최호림의 시 세계와 민족 공산주의 (Soviet-Korean Literature of the 1930s: Ch'oe Horim's Poetic World and National Communism)
--> No summary provided by author; See first post in this thread for my own summary.
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(2.) Tikhonov, Vladimir (2025). Ch’oe Horim (1896-1960) and ‘Red’ Korean Diasporic Nationalism in Russian Far East.
[Tikhonov's summary:] This presentation will deal with Ch’oe Horim (1896-1960), a Soviet-Korean revolutionary intellectual and Communist Party bureaucrat whose life and works remain so far unknown in Anglophone academia.
A peasant son from Korea’s northern borderland, Ch’oe arrived to Russian Far East in 1918. He soon acquired prominence there as a guerilla commander during the Russian Civil War (1918-22), poet, journalist and Communist Party cadre: in Russia, Ch’oe transitioned from revolutionary nationalism to nationally tinged Bolshevism, becoming a Party member in 1919.
After the end of Russian Civil War, Ch’oe became one of the key ethnic Korean cadres in Russian Far East, supervising collectivisation of Korean peasantry in the late 1920s and editing Sǒnbong (The Vanguard), the main Party newspaper for Korean readers, in 1932-36.
He was known as a controversial poet employing rather conservative traditional stylistics for what was purported to be ethnic Korean revolutionary poetry, and a courageous journalist who revealed in a number of his Sǒnbong articles in the late 1920s-early 1930s the mind-boggling extent of racist abuse against Korean diaspora perpetrated both by ordinary Slavic settlers and even low- and middle-level Slavic Party cadres.
Given his record, it is little wonder that he was arrested already in 1936, even before the start of the Great Purges in early 1937: he was then imprisoned three times and died in Central Asian exile.
The focus of this presentation is the political discourse underpinning Ch’oe’s highly diverse artistic and journalistic activities. I would define it as Korean diasporic national-Bolshevism, and will attempt to contextualize it as a part of a huge wave of the 1920-30s ethnicized Bolshevist discourses and practices. Furthermore, I will compare it with the politics of other key actors in Russian Far East’s Korean diasporic milieu.
[End of summary]
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(3.) Tikhonov, Vladimir (2025). Creating a Soviet Korean Nation: Ch’oe Horim’s (1896-1960) Literature as Diasporic Nation Building.
[Tikhonov's summary: This presentation will deal with Ch’oe Horim (1896-1960), an important representative of the Soviet-Korean literary world of the 1920s and 1930s who remains unresearched so far in Anglophone academia.
A Korea-born schoolteacher of peasant background, later a Communist guerilla commander in Russian Far East, a poet and the editor-in-chief of Sŏngbong (The Vanguard), the central Soviet-Korean newspaper, in 1932 and 1935-6, Ch’oe stood in the very centre of Soviet-Korean diasporic nation building project.
As I will argue, this project was comprehensive enough to include the development of modernized Soviet Korean language (with hundreds of translated terms needed for Soviet Koreans to function in rapidly modernizing Soviet society), Soviet Korean literature weaving together traditional motifs and stylistics and Soviet ideology, Soviet Korean theater and ethnic education system.
I will especially focus on how Ch’oe’s poetry attempted to modernize, in a specifically Soviet way, the pre-existing national literary tradition. While the project Ch’oe devoted his lifework to was thwarted by Stalinist forced deportation of Soviet Koreans from the Far East to Central Asia in 1937, I will argue that its legacies were important for the future developments in both Soviet Korean and North Korean culture, literature included. I will attempt to trace the formative influences of Ch’oe’s poetry in the work of such Soviet Korean-turned-North Korean literary figures as, for example, Cho Kich’ŏn (1913-1951).
Overall, my presentation will provide the first-ever introduction to Ch’oe’s life and work in English.
https://asianstudies.confex.com/asian...
[End of summary]
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(comment -- I see that Tikhonov consistently gives "1896" as the birth year for Ch'oe Horim, without any "?" or similar markings. Some Korean listings give his birth-year as 1893. Which is right? How sure are we? The uncertaintiy-range looks symbolic of how weak records were among this type of Korean in the 1890s; and this was no uneducated country-bumpkin, at least not in his adult life, but an educated literary-type man.)
Mod
An interesting connection:
In 2017, the RAS Korean Literature Club read a work by Cho Myunghee, a.k.a. Cho Myŏng-hŭi (조명희). That is the Korean whom Tikhonov posits or frames as the major rival to the vision of Ch'oe Horim. Rivals, that is, over the desired destiny of Koreans in the Soviet Union, at least; and/or of the Koreans -- and possibly other ethno-national groups -- in the 20th century in general.
And, as I say at the end of my summary write-up, I find a lot of these themes still resonate here at the precipice of the "mid-21st century," a full century past Cho Myong-hui's time.
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The following is from the Club's monthly-gathering records I compiled earlier this year:
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[September 4, 2017]
- Book: NAKDONG RIVER
- Author: Cho Myong-Hui
- Translator(s): Brother Anthony of Taize
- Publisher: Literature Translation Institute of Korea (KLTI)
- Year of publication: early 2010s?
- Original story info: Title, "Nakdong-gang" [낙동강]; author, Cho Myŏng-hŭi (조명희, 1894-1938); published orig. July 1927 in a Seoul literary magazine (조선지광, existed 1922-1930).
- GR entry: n/a
- Translated version available online? YES, at https://tinyurl.com/58zpv98d (3000 words)
- Discussion leader(s): Patrick Bourgo
- Note: Within months of publication of this story, Cho Myong-hui fled Korea/Japan (eventually) for the Soviet Far East. He had been involved in the left-wing political-literary group KAPF.
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Cho Myŏng-hŭi published "Nakdong River" the year before leaving the realm of the Empire of Japan (including Japanese-administered Korea) for the Soviet Far East. He arrived in Vladivostok in 1928 and the following six or seven years are the crucible of interest to Soviet-Korean literature developments, before the deportations.
We can use the "Nakdonggang" story as a literary picture of what Cho Myong-hui was thinking, upon arrival in the Soviet Far East. The large community of Koreans living there was on its way to numbering in the hundreds of thousands. but the intellectual tradition had been relatively weak until recently. On the other hand, the openness of the Russian/Soviet Far East always allowed a sharp, ambitious, and lucky young man to go far. I think that explains a lot of the ongoing momentum towards Korean emigration to Russia, even back to the earliest days.
The "Nakdong River" story is available freely online in English. The translator, Brother Anthony, was almost always able to retain rights to his own translation. He simply hosts them himself, as he sensed (rightly) the original places-of-publication would become unreliable or at least difficult to find. (And indeed, whatever volume the "Nakdonggang" translation appeared in originally, i cannot find it.)
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The RAS Korean Literature Club
Authors mentioned in this topic
Brother Anthony of Taizé (other topics)박노자 (other topics)
On Wednesday, August 13, 2025, six members of the Korean Literature Club were among about fifty attendees at a talk by Vladimir Tikhonov. This is a Korean Studies scholar of Russian origin, long active outside Russia and currently at the University of Oslo.
Professor Tikhonov was visiting Korea and was invited to give a talk at Korea University. The subject was on the relatively-little-known subject of leading literary figures among the Soviet-Koreans in the Russian Far East in the 1920s and 1930s.
I give my summary of his talk below, influenced by my own background-knowledge of the subject of the Koreans active in the Russian Far East back to the 1860s.
To Koreans, Vladimir Tikhonov is far-better known as " 박노자 ," his pen-name when writing in Korean. (His original name is cumbersome, at best, to Hangulize). He was considered a language prodigy, acquiring native-level Korean and writing in native-level Korean. His books about Korean subjects are all written in Korean (not translated). He himself is a White-European with no recent non-European ancestry that is visible, but despite no connection to these Russian-/Soviet-Koreans, he has become quite an expert on them.
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SUMMARY OF TALK ON CH'OE HORIM & TENDENCIES IN SOVIET-KOREAN LITERATURE OF THE 1920s-1930s
Title: "Soviet-Korean Literature of the 1930s: Ch'oe Horim's Poetical Universe and National Communism"
Talk by Vladimir Tikhonov
Aug 13, 2025
Summary by Peter Juhl
Ch'oe Horim (최호림/崔虎林/Чхве Хорим, 1893?-1960) was a Korean literary figure in the early Soviet Union. Born in North Hamgyong Province (today N.Korea), he had cross-border ties with the Russian Far East, in the tradition of many Koreans since the late 1860s. He was 21 when the Tsar's regime went to war in 1914.
As with many upwardly-aspirant young Koreans in the 1910s in the Russian Far East, Ch'oe Horim became involved in the leftist movement. He helped form a Korean-leftist cell in Vladivostok around the time of the Bolshevik agitation.
The city of Vladivostok fell to Soviet power in late 1922, the final act of the dragging conflicts known as the Russian Civil War. With this, Ch'oe Horim was suddenly well-positioned to emerge as leading literary figures under the new leftist regime (i.e., the USSR).
By early 1923, Ch'oe Horim co-founded a Soviet-Korean literary magazine published in Hangul. The magazine was titled Sunbong (<선봉>; Eng. "Vanguard").
Tikhonov contrasted Ch'oe Horim's activities with those of a similar figure and near-contemporary: Cho Myong-hee.
Cho Myong-hee (조명희/趙明熙/Чо Мен Хи [he went by a simplified pronunciation in Russian]; 1894-1938) was a literary figure and poet active in Japanese-Korea and Japan proper. An anti-Japanese dissident by disposition and activity.
Ch'oe Horim and Cho Myong-hee were both "Koreans" but had different formative experiences and different attitudes towards Koreannness as such and on the role of literature in their new circumstances (and maybe in "the political" in general).
Cho Myong-hee arrives in the Soviet Far East in 1928. There he found a large, robust Korean community, active in and around Vladivostok and beyond. By 1928, almost all the Koreans with reasonable lengths of residence had been granted Soviet citizenship. But their place remained uncertain in the wider Soviet project. (Stalin was not yet the dictator of the USSR that he later became.) Cho Myong-hee had lived within the Japanese Empire until 1928 (age 33/34) and so arrived on the scene with certain bona-fides and life experiences, but also a necessarily shallower connection to the Koreans of the Russian (by-then Soviet) Far East.
Cho Myonghee becomes a major rival to Ch'oe Horim. The distinction between these two men encapsulates something wider, Fleshing out the distinction seems to have been the main point of the talk, and the research.
Ch'oe Horim and Cho Myonghee are two obscure-to-us figures from a century ago. Both Koreans, both active literary men, both leftists who, in the mid-1920s to mid-1930s, were in their thirties and in the Soviet Union. Professor Tikhonov sketched out the distinction between as follows:
---> 1.) Ch'oe Horim was a "Soviet Union-focused" Korean. For him, the Soviet-Korean identity was, should be, that of loyal Soviet subjects. A new Korean identity could/would/should be formed based within the Soviet system. In other words, Ch'oe Horim's vision was inward-oriented with the Soviet-leftist paradigm.
vs.
---> 2.) Cho Myonghee was a "Korean Peninsula-focused" Korean. He was, in the 1920s-30s, committed to an active policy of confrontation with Japan, with the end-goal of seeking liberation of the Korean Peninsula from Japanese rule. For him, the Soviet-Korean identity was temporary. The real goal was reclamation of the lost homeland. In other words, Cho Myong-hee was outward-oriented.
Thought-leaders in the Korean community all over the Soviet Far East in the 1920s, reading Ch'oe Horim's Sunbong magazine, received the pro-Soviet view, in the sense of Korean identity being nurtured within the Soviet Union. Sungbong was a/the leading Soviet-Korean literary magazine of the time; many young rising figures were influenced by it. There was still, throughout the 1920s at least, a freshness to the leftist camp that energized upwardly mobile young Koreans.
Although the Soviet state's Leninist (one-party dictatorship) model had no real room for dissident views, which in the long run will always undermine literary output, in its early years the energies of the 1910s and the quasi-emancipation of Russian Far East Koreans into an emerging leftist-Soviet mainstream kept the energies fresh for some years. Or so is the impression from Professor Tikhonov's talk. The second- and third-act tragedies, however, we are all well-enough familiar with in outline.
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Ch'oe Ho-rim's Soviet Union-focused position effectively meant a strong tendency to stay out of the conflict with the Japanese Empire and its administrative apparatus of Korea at the time. Not out lack of any sympathy, or any ideological softness against the 'rightist' Japanese Empire, but rather out of a desire NOT to base Soviet-Korean identity around a questionable crusade to liberate Korea proper.
(Today's North Korean political mythology depicts all such Koreans as having been tirelessly committed to this kind of ethno-political crusade, but as usual things are never as simple as such narratives render them.)
This view being attributed to Ch'oe Horim, seems to be that Korean-ness extends beyond the peninsula. Koreans could pursue a successful leftist project within the Soviet Union.
Cho Myong-hee, the major rival to Ch'oe Horim in the late 1920s and 1930s, wanted liberate Korea and create a modern leftist Korean state on the peninsula. The project would be to reclaim a lost homeland and transform that homeland along leftist lines.
Professor Tikhonov spoke a (surprisingly) great deal about Jews, the project of political-Zionism, and those identities and debates in the pre-Soviet Russian Empire and early-Soviet worlds. He compared the Zionist vs non-Zionist camps among Soviet Jews to this clash among Korean literary intellectuals in the Soviet Far East in the 1930s.
The Ch'oe Horim side -- Soviet Union-focused -- could be analogized to anti- (or non-)Zionism. This camp of Soviet-Koreans wanted to create a new Korean identity WITHIN the Soviet mega-state. A building project for a state-within-a-state.
I see the influence of the late-Tsarist Empire period's Korean community on this thinking. The Koreans of the Russian Far East did well, operating as a small quasi-state within the Tsarist state. No surprise that Ch'oe Horim, with his relatively longer ties to the Russian/Soviet Far East, represents that tendency, even if under a new political regime that no one yet understood fully in the 1920s (pre-Stalin, for one thing).
Meanwhile, the rival Cho Myonghee side can be analogized to being "Zionist." The goal: Re-capture an idealized lost homeland. For the early-20th-century Jews: Palestine. For the Soviet-Koreans: Japanese-administered Korea. It seems some of these 1920s-30s Soviet-Far-East Koreans themselves, including writers, compared themselves with the Soviet Jews/Zionists.
For most of the 1930s, the Ch'oe Horim view (pro-Soviet, Soviet-focused, non-interventionist) among the Koreans in the Soviet Far East was the stronger one. Well shepherded by Ch'oe Horim and his circle. But then, around 1935, Soviet policy shifted towards an "active anti-imperialism" policy. The tendency shifted suddenly towards an empowerment of the "longing to restore the homeland" side. Cho Myonghee (the one who wanted to turn towards anti-Japanese confrontation) naturally had his opening.
Cho Myonghee founded a briefly influential Korean-language literary magazine titled (tellingly) Workers' Fatherland (<근로자의 조국>), using the word "조국." This magazine replaced an earlier magazine titled <근로자의 고향>. The earlier title can be translated similarly (고향: hometown, native place). The emotional weight of the new "조국" is much stronger in nationalistic-territorial terms. (Thanks to M. for this insight.)
Cho Myonghee kept the leftist orientation necessary for active writers in the Soviet system, but it was a leftism with a nationalistic tinge. A crusading communism of national-liberation. (We sense some formative influences on the North Korean regime ten-to-twenty years later.)
All these active literary circles and tendencies were shut down in 1937-38, with the orders for deportations to Central Asia.
In late 1937, Cho Myonghee ended up arrested and within a few months put to death, the quintessential Stalinist "purge." On suspicion, apparently, that he was too involved with Korea/Japan affairs. (The deportations were based on the personal paranoia of Stalin related to rivalry with, and fear of, Japan. The whole justification of the mass deportations was exactly to cut off this supposed threat.)
Meanwhile, Ch'oe Horim, the pro-Soviet loyalist, survived the dramatic anti-Korean turn. He reconstituted some meager efforts in Central Asia in 1938. But the Soviet Far East Koreans' literary circles were never the same. Fifteen further years of Stalin and it was hard to pick up the pieces. The deportations to Central Asia undermined the longtime viability of Korean-specific intellectual (including literary) identity within the Soviet Union and its successor states. The Russian-speaking Korean-origin people you'll encounter in certain places in South Korea today (rarely in Seoul) have little if any Korean-literary tradition, and difficult plugging into one.
The years of 1923-1937, however, were highly influential for intellectual-literary young Soviet Koreans. Such a formative influence doesn't disappear just because of geographic removal.
A long coda to this story: Some of the members of the Ch'oe Horim and Cho Myonghee circles saw fresh relevance in August 1945 and onward, after the surrender of Japan. Many of them arrived with the Soviet administration of northern Korea, as advisers. They remained when the North Korean state was set up.
(Famously, these Soviet-Koreans emerged as a "faction" in North Korea, one of four important factions in North Korea in the ca. 1945-65 period. As usual in these stories, the Soviet-Korean advisors were purged by the Kim Il Sung regime; their influence was minimal after the mid-1950s.)
Do these century-old conflicts and clashes-of-vision remain relevant today? I see echoes: 1.) contested claims of what legitimate Korean identity is; 2.) certain Left-Right divisions; 3.) the political role of Literature; 4.) attitudes by (and "towards," I think) diasporas.
(End.)
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