김광균 시의 인물 형상화와 죽음의식

Abstract

This study purposed to show that ‘persons’ occupied a large part in the poetic world of Kim Gwang-kyun, and to illuminate the meaning of ‘death’ observed in his poems. In his early poems in Gaslight (瓦斯燈) and The Port of Call (寄港地), he described others as a part of the present scenery by reifying and anonymizing them, but with the lapse of time, he configured the death of individual relatives through the retrospection of the past. Particularly in The Port of Call, he revealed his negative consciousness against the present urban life by associating the death of relatives to a sense of loss of home. Later with the Liberation, however, the focus of Kim Gwang‐kyun’s poems shifted from relatives to others. In the liberation period, his poems can be divided into those during the period of a leftist, those during the period of centrist poetic debates, and those during the period disengaged from literary circles. During the period of a leftist, his poems mourned the death of others who had been involved in specific political incidents. Turning to centrism, however, he encountered collective criticism by the leftist literary circles, and he expressed the resultant wound in his heart and his will to overcome it through Chinese literary man Lu Xun (魯迅). Afterwards, keeping a distance from literary circles, his poems were committed to the planning of life and he appeased his grief of life and loneliness through Kim So-wol. After 30 years’ disengagement from literary circles, Kim Gwang-kyun returned to the poetic circle in the 1980s and published The Autumn Wind a Departed Rainfall (秋風鬼雨) and Imjinwha (壬辰花). Especially through these poem collections, he described various others and relatives. In his poems on others, depicting his acquaintances’ successive deaths, he viewed the two worlds of life and death as separated from each other, and expressed the existential sorrow and loneliness of himself left alone in this world. In the poems on relatives, however, he concentrated on the death of his mother and configured the mother as a reincarnated being who appeared before him again along the cycle of seasons, and consequently, expressed life and death in a cyclic and generative relation with each other.