계봉우와 미하일 朴의 한국학: 근현대사 서술을 중심으로 해서

Abstract

Kye Pong’u(1880~1956) belonged to an older generation than MikhailPak(1918~2009). Despite the family connections with the anti-Japanese independencemovement, Mikhail Pak was more of a “pure” academic, and, with the exceptionof the Soviet-Korean movement after the late 1980s, was not personally involvedin the political movements. By contrast, Kye Pong’u was a noted independencemovement activist - in addition to being a “universal” Korea scholar, who combinedhistorical, philological and literary interests in his work. Much earlier than MikhailPak, already in the 1930s, Kye Pong’u defined a “materialistic” re-interpretationof Korean history as his scholarly task. His manuscript, Chosŏn Yŏksa(KoreanHistory), was actually of important reference to Mikhail Pak, who also learnedclassical Chinese from him in the early 1940s. A comparison between Mikhail Pak’searly(beginning of the 1950s) descriptions of Korean modern history and Kye Pong’u’snarrative shows that the latter definitely influenced the former. However, therelationship between the two was not simply of teacher/disciple kind: both Kyeand Pak were sharing the same task, namely giving a “correct” Marxist-Leninist(re)interpretation of Korean history. To do so, both scholars heavily emphasizedthe “anti-feudal and anti-imperialist struggles by the masses” in modern Koreanhistory, and eagerly defined as “purely exploitive” the colonial administration andcolonial-time Japanese/Korean bourgeoisie the “masses” were opposing. The focus on the “colonial exploitation” was not unlike that in the South Korean left-nationalisthistoriography after the 1960s, but, differently from South Korea’s left-nationalisthistorians, Kye and Pak accentuated the exploitation along the class lines ratherthat ethno-national(Japanese vs. Koreans) exploitation. In this way, their logic seemsto be more suitable today, when historiographical nationalism is being criticizedas outmoded. It has also to be noted that Kye Pong’u, who, unlike Mikhail Pak,had first-hand experience of the anti-Japanese nationalist activism(in the 1910s),tended to assess religious or cultural nationalist activities, as well as the role ofsome, more nationalistically inclined groups of the domestic Korean bourgeoisiehigher than Mikhail Pak. The latter’s approach was, in a way, more dogmatic.