Soldiers on the Cultural Front: Developments in the Early Literary History of North Korean Literature and Literary Policy by Tatiana Gabroussenko (review)

Tatiana Gabroussenko's Soldiers on the Cultural Front is the second book in English on North Korean literature to be published after sixteen years. An abridgement and revision of a 2004 dissertation written at Australian National University and supervised by North Korea historian Andrei Lankov, the work argues with empirical evidence that Soviet Stalinist socialist realism was successfully implanted in North Korea from 1945 to 1960. As suggested by a reference to a 2000 research trip on page one of the original dissertation, the study involved at least four years of research, with consultation of archival sources, colonial-era and North Korean literature, and Korean and Soviet participants in North Korean history ("Implantation" 1).

Gabroussenko's book is divided into five chapters, which are more objective than the unfortunately disparaging, hostile, and moralizing introduction and conclusion. The first chapter deals with literary patterns and themes in North Korean writers' Soviet travelogs; the second to fourth are biographies of the contrastingly fated party writers Cho Ki-ch'ŏn, Yi Ki-yŏng, and Yi T'ae-jun; and the fifth is about party critics as political executioners. Surprisingly, the literature review in the introduction cites only two English-language works on North Korean literature, Marshall R. Pihl (1977) and Brian Myers (1994), when some twenty-two articles in English were available in academic journals by 2010, when Soldiers on the Cultural Front was published.¹ Odder still are seven pages of introductory discussion on Soviet socialist realism without explicating the North Korean understanding of socialist realism.

The discussion on Soviet socialist realism, however, reveals that the "ascetic, militant" socialist realism of the Soviet 1930s and 1940s is what North Korea adopted. Gabroussenko does not clearly define socialist realism, but attributes it to a statement by Stalin in 1932, though it was Ivan Gronsky who introduced the term that year; claims the "real meaning" is in Lenin's "Party Organization and Party Literature" from 1905; and mentions Zhdanov at the Soviet Writers' Congress in 1934, but not his landmark speech "Soviet Literature." Here, the association with Lenin is an old mistake and actually repeats Zhdanov in 1946.² As for what unites socialist realist literatures, Gabroussenko says it is the "Purpose [. . .] to serve the state and society ruled by a Leninist Party" (Soldiers 10). The last two words should be read as "Stalinist party."³

Lenin's 1905 speech, it must be underlined, was not addressing "science, philosophy, or aesthetics," but the problem of "literary supermen" (i.e., Nietzschean intellectuals) and the necessity of writing party documents in accordance with the perspective, program, and principles within the workers' party ("Party Organisation"; see Eagleton 38; Read 82). The position is the same as in Karl Kautsky's "The Intellectuals and the Workers" (1903). Kautsky, as is known, strongly influenced Lenin.

On the term "Stalinist party," it is consistent with Gabroussenko's reference to "North Korean Stalinism" and North Korean "national Stalinism," the latter term coming from her supervisor Andrei Lankov, who appropriated it from Ivan T. Berend, the historian of Central and Eastern Europe (Gabroussenko, Soldiers 1, 2, 25; Lankov, From Stalin xii, 99, 99n39, 195). Berend defines Stalinism as a "strongly nationalistic" phenomenon based on Stalin's theory to "build up socialism in one country," a regime with "monolithic party-state structures," a form of "state socialism," and a policy "line" (39, 42, 114, 129, 158, 173, 289).

Gabroussenko's first chapter suggests that Soviet clichés, motifs, and patterns entered North Korean literature through the travelogs of party writers who went on staged trips to the Soviet Union in 1947, 1952, and 1954. Social idylls she identifies are as follows:

• • The "industrialized paradise"

• • The "agricultural paradise"

• • The "educational and cultural paradise"

• • The "center" and "last hope of the world"

Reference is made to eight million Soviet books in North Korea from 1945 to 1954...