심훈의 ‘주의자 소설’과 ‘12월 테제’

Abstract

Widely known as a writer of Evergreens in Korean modern literature, Sim Hun communicated with nationalists, anarchists and socialists in Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing and Hangzhou of China from 1920 to 1923 and accepted socialist ideology. Seven years after returning home, his three novels, including The Lover of the East, Phoenix and Eternal Smile, released from around 1930 to 1933, are all about socialists' experiences of imprison- ment, indomitable struggles, and persistent struggles after prison. These novels are very similar to the claims of 'the December Thesis(Thesis on Korea of Comintern)', which had an absolute impact on the colonial Korea communist movement in the late 1920s. This paper studied on the relationship between the three 'socialist novels' of Sim Hun and 'the December Thesis (Thesis on Korea of Comintern)'. Sim Hun captured the direction of Korean socialism in the three novels as follows. First, Sim Hun considered the socialist revolution to be the way to solve class and colonial issues. Class liberation was considered to be the first fundamental issue but the national liberation can not be abandoned. Second, the thorough self-transformation of the petty bourgeois and intellectual class combined with the peasantry was thought to be urgent. Third, Sim Hun affirmed the revolutionary nature of the working class but criticized the conflict of the intellectual class and thought that the intellectual class should overcome it. This is much the same as the contents of the Thesis on Korea of Comintern. Considering about the time of Sim Hun's stay in China, the activities he did after returning home and the fact that the Thesis on Korea of Comintern was used as the programmatic document by Korean communists, we can probably thought that Sim Hun had seen the Thesis on Korea of Comintern.