Hwang Chini

"Hwang Chini is an iconic figure in Korean tradition, and it is notable that the author—instead of writing a novel of socialist realism about present-day life in Korea—chose to go back 500 years or so. I think this is what made it possible for this novel to be published in North Korea. The writing is superb. And we should remember that the author’s grandfather was Hong Myŏnghǔi, also a writer of note. The grandson has obviously inherited the grandfather’s gift for storytelling. Well, originally, of course, yes, before South Korea and North Korea became distinct geopolitical entities in 1948. But the emphasis of literature in North Korea necessarily had to connect with the raison d’être of the North Korean leadership, which has always claimed patriotic background. Kim Il Sung, the original leader, was supposedly an anti-Japanese activist. After 1945, the division of the Korean Peninsula was effected as a temporary measure to take care of the surrender of demilitarised Japanese forces that ran the Korean Peninsula. Soviet military advisors entered the North and the US established a military government in the South. There in the South, writers seized on a tendency to reflect contemporary realities in their writing—that’s been omnipresent in South Korean literature from the beginning—but in the North it was necessary to help the Kim family solidify their rule. So from the 1960s, we see a standard, almost formulaic, North Korean plot structure and characterisation."