김수영과 한국전쟁

Abstract

The new works included in the third edition of "The Complete Works of Kim Su-young," published in 2018, provided new information on Kim Su-young's life and literature. Based on the examination of this material, this paper intends to explain the overall relevance of poetic themes and aesthetic devices that penetrate poet Kim Su-young's career. Little is known about Kim Su-young's terrible experiences as a "civilian internee" in his words, or a prisoner of war in public view, during the Korean War. Many of the facts left to estimation and prediction have been revealed to some extent by these data. From the beginning of his conscription as a "volunteer soldier" to his final release as "civilian internee" from the concentration camp, from reading these material we came to know that Kim Su-young suffered from extreme fear and a sense of loss of humanity. Worse, even after his release from the camp, Kim Su-young was unable to live a normal life in South Korean society due to his prison experience, which gave him the stigma of being pro-communist. The confrontation between the two Koreas, political oppression, and a social environment with limited freedom of expression, which continued after the war, made Kim Su-young constantly feel uneasy. Kim Su-young is believed to have pursued his poetic ideals and embodied them into works in helplessness and anger over the oppression situation. His anxiety, sadness, and imagination of the sorrows and the contrasting freedom of the 1950s can be read in a series of war experiences in response to repressive reality, written shortly after his release from the concentration camp. Previous studies, which did not refer to the prisoner experience period and related perspectives, identified Kim Su-young as a poet of political engagement ("chamyeo siin") against the dictatorship and read Kim Su-young's pursuit of freedom as a key theme of resistance. Different from preceding researches, my paper describes that Kim Su-young pursued freedom as a poetic ideology beyond the reality of such confrontation and deep awareness of the dichotomy between anti-communist and pro-communist ideologies through his experience of war. Kim Su-young's freedom spread in the world of thought, going beyond poetic ideology. The idea of freedom operating in his poetics imagines freedom beyond all confrontations, including inter-Korean confrontation, to create a new time, new world, that never existed before. Kim Su-yeong maintained a unique aesthetic attitude that equates freedom and poetry with revolution. Kim Su-young's pursuit of sublimating poetic ideology into a social ideology was embodied through the experience of the Korean War and gained decisive momentum through the April Student Revolution in 1960, which is believed to have continued into the latter days.