뉴스레터

Successful Koryo-saram writer media focuses

 Korean Russian writer Anatoli Kim is widely known in Korea through a variety of channels. He began to receive media spotlights when he attended the World Koreans Festival 1989 held in Seoul. Later, he had a chance to understand Korea, his historic fatherland, and learn Korean language, working at a university in Korea.

 Anatoli Kim published his translated works in Korea; The Wanderers in Sakhalin (1987), Lotus (1988), Peja’s Log Cabin (1993), Squirrels (1993), and The Forest of Father (1994). However, he didn’t get much attention from Korean readers. He is a leading writer in Russia who won numerous literature awards and a world famous writer whose books were translated into 20 different languages. However, the pain of the Korean history is hidden behind this success of a Korean living overseas. The chain of fate, so-called “diaspora,” running through his entire life and his ontological agony to deal with the issue are engraved in his books.

A Korean Russian writer, his dual fate

 Let’s write his name full name. His full name is Anatoli Andreyevich Kim, which means that he is a son of Andrey with the given name Anatoli and the family name Kim. Russian middle names are patronymics, a component of a personal name, meaning someone's son. As you can see in his name Anatoli Kim, both he and his father have Russian names. The only thing you can guess from that he is a Korean descent is his family name Kim. Given his name, his Russian cultural characters may be superior to his genetic inheritance, blood.

 The history of his family is like a soap opera made from the tragedy of the Korean modern history. His grandfather who lost his homeland crossed the border in 1906 and went to the Russian Far East through Manchuria, leaving behind his wife and two sons in his hometown. He got newly married there and had three sons. His second son is Anatoli Kim’s father, Andrey.

 In 1918, an unexpected guest visited Anatoli Kim’s grandfather. The grandfather’s younger brother who pitied his first wife and sons left by themselves in Korea visited him. However, the grandfather suddenly died from illness, agonizing between his brother’s persuasion and his family in Russia. The grandfather’s brother who had come to Russia to bring his older brother back to Korea gave up on his own family in Korea and brought up his three young nephews. 10 years later, after his nephews grew up, he went to the Chinese border to go back to his homeland and then disappeared into thin air. Anatoli Kim guessed in his writing that his uncle might have been caught at the Chinese border and died.

 In 1937, another tragedy struck his family. Stalin, who was afraid that Japan might use Korean people as their spies, deported Korean people in the Far East to Central Asia. Consequently Anatoli Kim’s father settled down in Kazakhstan. In 1939, Anatoli Kim was born in Kazakhstan. Deportation, the tragedy of Soviet Koreans, became the background of his birth.

 His father who was born in the Far East adapted to his new home well, joined the Komsomol (All-Union Leninist Young Communist League), and received higher education. Anatoli Kim lived in a variety of places including Kamchatka in the Far East and Ussuriysk, following the workplaces of his father who worked as an elementary school Russian teacher. He first came to Sakhalin in 1947 and lived there until 1956. Dreaming to become a painter after graduating high school, he entered an art school in Moscow in 1956. Nevertheless, he decided to become a writer and dropped out of the art school when he had only one more year left until graduation. After finishing military service, he went through various jobs including a crane operator and a boiler engineer. He began to write in earnest after graduating from Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in 1971.

 He wanted to express infinite space and endless time, which cannot be shown in paintings, in his novels through the art of language. But, he began to agonize over his ontological irony while dreaming of becoming a writer. A gap between a Russian writer who had to write in Russian and a young man from the Korean ethnic minority group was huge. He was a Russian and a Korean at the same time and was neither a Russian nor a Korean at the same time. His identity crisis became his motive to create a new view of the world beyond the ethnic groups. He finally made his debut as a writer in 1976 with The Blue Island. The book consists of several short stories set in Sakhalin where he spent his childhood.

Sakhalin, Karafuto, the land of tragedy for Korean people

 The fate of Sakhalin continuously changed. In 1855, Russia and Japan signed the Treaty of Commerce and Navigation, also called the Treaty of Shimoda, with the ownership of Sakhalin left undetermined. In 1875, Sakhalin became Russian territory when the Treaty of Shimoda was revised in Saint Petersburg. As Russia lost the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, the southern half of Sakhalin was ceded to Japan by the Treaty of Portsmouth. After occupying Southern Sakhalin,  Japan formed the Office of Karafuto and used Korean people’s labor force to develop the land. Almost 50,000 Korean people were drafted to Sakhalin by force until 1945. Most of them worked at coal mines. However, true tragedy began after Japan lost World War II. As a result of the defeat, Southern Sakhalin was ceded to the Soviet Union again. Japan left Korean people behind when they withdrew from Sakhalin because they were not Japanese citizens. Neither the Soviet Union who reoccupied Sakhalin nor Korea who was in a state of chaos right after liberation cared about Korean people in Sakhalin. Korean people in Sakhalin gathered in Port of Korsakov to go back to Korea. They had waited for a long period of time on the hill overlooking the ocean for a ship to bring them to their homeland, but it never showed up. Consequently, they had no choice but to continue to live in Sakhalin.

From the “island of despair” to the “island of hope”

 Anatoli Kim described, in his works, the tragic fate of Korean people where they were thrown into Asian regions of the Soviet Union and vast areas of the Far East. He is one of few writers who talk about the period of Sakhalin under Japanese rule. In his autobiographical novel My Old Days (1998), he describes the village in Sakhalin he lived in during his childhood in detail.

 Dust flew from unpaved roads and dirty smelly water flowed along the ditches on the both sides of the roads. Huge mice sat on the ditches. The only things that caught people’s eyes were the traces of destitute, disordered, and depressed lives in the border area far away from the world, no matter wherever they looked.

 In his first book The Blue Island set in Sakhalin, he created his own literary shape for Sakhalin. Sakhalin was the island of despair to Chekhov. In his travel literature entitled Sakhalin Island, Sakhalin was the place of exile and the gloomy gray land of the severe cold and fog. For him the land was merely a temporary place he rented. Yet, for Anatoli Kim Sakhalin was the precious nostalgic place expressed in different colors and the place of poetic beauty coming from the nature of the Far East. People living in the area considered Sakhalin as their home.

 Numerous characters of The Blue Island are just ordinary people. In many cases, their fates they had to live with were tragic. But, the writer expressed the hidden shapes of their souls through their tragic fates. The world they understood was not born by the writer’s imagination but by their own lives. The main characters of The Blue Island have many different ethnic and racial backgrounds. It is natural given that ordinary people and prisoners of different nationalities and races came to Sakhalin during the Russian Empire and Korean people began to immigrate after Japan occupied Southern Sakhalin. In addition, a variety of races continuously came from the Far East. In short, Sakhalin is a place where many different ethnic groups and cultures are mixed.

 Racial conflict is not expressed often in Anatoli Kim’s works. Conflict between Korean and Japanese people is shown very occasionally. His writing is generally about peaceful coexistence. Sakhalin which had been the land of banishment and immigration became a hometown. When Grynevyc, the leading character of Berberis, one of the short stories in The Blue Island, came back to his hometown after years as a vagabond, his father’s old house in the gray village, situated at the shore of Sakhalin, always welcomed him warmly.

 Let’s take a look at the first part of The Wanderers in Sakhalin, a short story in The Blue Island.

“You have both Russian kids and Korean kids.It’s better to teach them together like this for now, isn’t it? Of course, it’s better. (...) We are all the same here, in Sakhalin. Everyone’s hometowns are far away, across the ocean. We are all here to find our own happiness.”

 Sakhalin expressed by Anatoli Kim became everyone’s “home” where a variety of ethnic groups and cultures were mixed. The blue island Sakhalin became a utopia and the place of peaceful fantasy. Perhaps it was his own way to resolve his ontological agony as a person went through diaspora who bore two different fates and two different lives.