박태원의 월북 전후를 통해 본 냉전기 남북의 이순신 표상 연구

Abstract

Park Tae-won visualized Admiral Lee Soon-sin nine times for approximately 15 years immediately after the liberation. The prestigious admiral was admired by everybody in our country, no matter whether he or she belonged to the left or the right and to the South or the North, and he was revered enough to be taken advantage of by Lee Seung-man who wanted to stress patriotism and also by Kim Il-seong who wanted to idolize himself. Likewise, the writer Park Tae-won could relatively easily settle down in the North by repeatedly visualizing the admiral after he defected to it. His political actions represented that he gave top priority to the independent unification of the nation, and it was an important task for him to record the national crises after the liberation and to shed light on the lessons that they could learn from the crises. He had to rely on historical records to ensure the objectivity and substantiality of his writing. He told various groups of readers about the oughtness of autonomous independence and unification when he described historical events. In the South, he yearned for the establishment of a unified country through the joint efforts of the left and the right, and advocated anti-feudalism and resistance against foreign power by describing the admiral. After defection to the North, he subtly adapted his work on the admiral and Japanese invasion of Korea in 1592 in accordance with the shifts of society and international situations. In the Cold War, the two Koreas viewed Japanese invasion of Korea in 1592 as an international war in East Asia, and it should be noted that the admiral was highly regarded in both Koreas as a great man who defended East Asia. Lee Seung-man and Kim Il-seong tried to take the initiative in the Cold War by admiring the admiral as an Asian hero and by linking Japanese invasion of Korea in 1592 to anticommunism and antiimperialism respectively. Park Tae-won's long career was also associated with the macroscopic flow of the times. The writer repeatedly wrote about the admiral and Japanese invasion of Korea in 1592 to a greater or lesser extent both before and after defection to the North, and his writings remained true to historical records all the time. At the same time, however, the fact that he relied on various historical materials and cited different interpretations also meant that he might be devoid of his own perspective about history. Besides, he reflected the rapidly changing situations of the two Koreas appropriately while he wrote the two different works on the admiral, but how he looked at history was overshadowed by it. This is why Park Tae-won's works on the admiral are meaningful yet has limitations at the same time.