<환구음초(環璆唫艸)>에 나타난 지식인의 근대 문명 인식과 특질

Abstract

Hwanjinkeumcho by Kim Deuk Nyon is a traveler's collection of poems he wrote during the period between April 1, 1896, when he started from the then capital Hanyang, and October 20, 1896, when he submitted a report of his mission - he accompanied Min Yeong Hwan (閔泳煥) on the travel for the coronation of the then Russian emperor. The collection consists of quatrains he wrote during his private travel. It contains a total of 111 topics (題) and 136 poems (首) according to the travel schedule. As for 7 months of the private travel around 8 countries (China, Japan, America, Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, Russia, Mongolia), he in charge of recording the travel expressed the experiences and knowledge, and the impressions in the Chinese poems. The overall work shows his literary talent and poetic sensibility and contains the cities, roads, transportation and communication, railways and trains, buildings and hotels, films and plays, etc. he saw during the travel. They visited museum, art gallery, library, church, electrical facility (e.g. telephone, light), zoo and botanical garden, observatory and dockyard, etc. and recorded the details in the poems. He intended to describe the blissful and novel experiences intensively by mainly using figurative expressions. In addition, it is significant in that it was created at the end of our history of Chinese literature. With the tradition - Chinese poetry and private travel - and experiences of new cultural environments as the center (the tradition and the experiences of the new cultural environments are an contradistinctive element), Kim Deuk Nyon (the intellectual of the turbulent Chosun Dynasty at the end of the 19th century) is vividly portraying the Western civilization he experienced and his perceptions of it in the overall work. Also in the description of his experiences in the foreign countries, his experiences of the western culture and the culture shock are realistically represented as imagery. Here one side of an intellectual of the turbulent Dynasty then was shown. Through his experiences of the Western civilization and systems, we can guess at his complex state of mind about his perceptions of the new civilization and about the backward Chosun environment and age. Notably, He not only forms a civilization discourse while encountering the Western advanced culture, but we can know about various feelings he came to have while he reflected on the reality of his backward homeland. But the work, a record of his experiences and knowledge (見聞) of the West, served as a stepping stone to Chosun encountering new modern civilization and furthering it.