정치적 유토피아와 전통지향적 미학의 이합(離合)관계-이태준의 소련·중국 기행문과 소설 「먼지」 겹쳐 읽기

Abstract

By offering a close reading on the Soviet travelogue A Trip to the Soviet Union(1947), the China travelogue The Great New China(1952) and the novel The Dust(1950) of Korean writer Yi Taejun after liberation, this article aims at exploring how Yi Taejun rethought the relationship between his traditional aesthetics and the new reality in the process of participating in the construction of a new socialist society in North Korea. Previous researches have specifically shed light on Yi’s political conceptions of Soviet and China by examining his overstatements of Soviet and China’s achievements and eulogies to the solicialist way of life. However, this is only one of the important aspects that these travelogues show to us. In this article, I will focus on how Yi Taejun tried to open up the potential avenues to socialist society through his own aesthetic vision and literary practices as a writer. After liberation, Yi first visited the Soviet Union, then chose to stayed in the early North Korea, and visited China during Korean war. This is a kind of ‘travel’ behavior that transcends the boundaries of different political systems, cultures and history. The cross-border or transnational experiences have been ‘translated’ and ‘fictionalized’ as a kind of knowledge, which constitutes Yi Taejun’s travelogues and novels. In this process, Yi’s traditional aesthetics and cultural outlook interacted with the task of building a socialist country, and was eventually modified and lost its usefulness under the increasing strengthening of mainstream ideology. In this regard, this article, in order to laying open potentials of meaning with and beyond the literary texts of Yi Taejun after liberation, will mainly explore the multi-level relationships between his political behaviors and literary practices, and further figuring out how the literary works and the author served as a medium to connect the development of socialist society with the problem of traditional aesthetics.