金光洲의 문학작품을 통해 본 海港都市 上海와 韓人社會*

Abstract

Kim Gwangju had stayed in Shanghai from July 1929 to February 1938. This article interrogates the urban images and Korean society represented in his literary works which had been published in journals and magazines and been written about Korean lives in Shanghai from 1932 to the moment when he leaved from it. Kim grasped the nature of cosmopolitan Shanghai through the space of sea-port which “issues the fragments of everyday life... pleasures, melanchory, conspiracy, suicide, etc., whenever ships anchor into.” He recognized that Shanghai was a sea-port where colonialist country was connected with colony and a space like “a piteous femme fatal who has been provided as an arena of pleasures where westerners enjoyed at their disposals wearing the pretended western clothes of concession.”Not only for Korean, but also those who were bound with traditional local orders, Shanghai as an arena of pleasures appeared as ‘an anonymous island’ which could hide everything of cosmopolitan city. many of Korean patriots became degraded pursuing pleasures through drinking, sex, and opium. Accepting the anarchist influence, Kim criticized severely not only the moral decadence of Korean patriots, but also the factionalism and splits of nationalists in Shanghai who “would kill easily their own compatriots shooting gun if their doctrines and opinions differ each other” by his works. In addition, they revealed the sympathy with the lives of Korean lower immigrants who were sacrificed by the conspiracy of Imperialism and capitalism. He also suffered the self-pity of poor his own who had been interwound with the actual economic difficulties, the regret for evading from revolution, the dept consciousness for comrades, and the shyness with his choice.