Cho Ki-chon

Cho was dispatched by the Soviet authorities to liberated Korea when the Red Army entered in 1945. By that time, he had substantial experience with Soviet literature and literature administration. The Soviets hoped that Cho would shape the cultural institutions of the new state based on the Soviet model. For the Soviets, the move was successful, and Cho did not only that but also significantly developed socialist realism as it would become the driving force of North Korean literature and arts.

Cho offered some of the earliest contributions to Kim Il Sung's cult of personality. His most famous work is Mt. Paektu (1947), a lyrical epic praising Kim Il Sung's guerrilla activities and promoting him as a suitable leader for the new North Korean state. Other notable works by Cho include "Whistle", a seemingly non-political love poem which was later adapted as a popular song that is known in both North and South Korea.

During the Korean War, Cho wrote wartime propaganda poems. He died during the war in an American bombing raid. He and his works are still renowned in North Korean society.

Life and career

Cho Ki-chon was born to poor Korean peasants in the village of Ael'tugeu not far from Ussuriysk in the Vladivostok District of the Russian Far East on 6 November 1913. The Pacific region of the Soviet Union, where he lived, was a center for Korean independence activists. He particularly drew literary inspiration from Cho Myong-hui, a fellow Korean writer living in the Soviet Union who – in believing in national emancipation by upholding socialist principles – had already written about anti-Japanese guerrillas. Thus he acquired a nationalistic and class conscious worldview in his literature.

Before emigrating from the Soviet Union

Cho studied at the Korean Teachers College in Voroshilov-Ussuriysk between 1928 and 1931. During that time, he was also a member of the communist youth league of the Soviet Union, Komsomol.

Cho was initially supposed to enroll at the Moscow University, but he was robbed at a train station in Omsk. With no money, Cho was stranded and had to work at a kolkhoz in Omsk for the summer to get some. The rector of the Omsk University, Aleksandr Sergeevitch Slivko was touched by his fate and decided to admit him in the university. Thus, from 1933 until his graduation in 1937, he attended the Faculty of Literature of the Gorky Omsk State Pedagogical University. Although he was not fluent in Russian upon entering the university, he graduated with excellent marks, and his time spent there amplified his Russian and Soviet sides.

He returned to the Far East and took up teaching responsibilities at the Korean Pedagogical Institute in Vladivostok until all ethnic Koreans were forcibly moved to Central Asia, and the Institute along with Cho were relocated to Kzyl-Orda, Kazakh SSR in 1937. The following year Cho went to Moscow and tried to enroll at the Moscow Literature University, only to find himself arrested on the spot for breaking the law confining Koreans to Central Asia. He then returned to the Institute in Kzyl-Orda and worked there until 1941. In the late 1930s, Cho married Kim Hae-sŏn. The two had a son, Yurii Cho, born in 1939.

Between 1942 and 1943, Cho served in the Soviet 25th Army's headquarters in Voroshilov-Ussuriysk in desk duty, and in a similar assignment in the Pacific Navy in Khabarovsk between 1943 and 1945 and in the First Far Eastern Front from October 1945. A part of his job was to write propaganda leaflets spread by the Soviet Red Army in Korea. Biographer Tatiana Gabroussenko thinks it is probable that he also translated the first speech given by Kim Il Sung after the liberation, on 14 October 1945, called "Every Effort for the Building of a New Democratic Korea", into Korean. The original speech was written by Soviet officers. Cho entered North Korea with the Red Army that year.

Creating model literature in North Korea

Immediately after the liberation of Korea, Soviet authorities sent Cho, who was fluent in both Korean and Russian, to North Korea in order to shape the country's literary institutions on the Soviet model. Cho diligently followed the Workers' Party's instructions to "immerse [oneself] in the masses" and would visit factories, villages and farms and write poems based on these experiences. His experiences in the Soviet Union helped him in producing explicitly political works. Many other authors were not equally adept to write about political subjects and were reluctant to visit places of work.

His role in shaping North Korean literature was to be pivotal. Cho's early works Mt. Paektu (MR: Paektusan, 1947) and Land (MR: Ttang, 1946) would point out the direction that North Korean literature was about to take. These works would soon become models for North Korean literature. Upon his return, he started writing for Chosŏn Sinmun, the Soviet Red Army's Korean-language paper, working as a correspondent and translator. He translated works of such Soviet poets as Mayakovsky, Gribachev, and Jambyl Jabayev.

The literary circles of the time were based on divisions in North Korean politics as a whole. Cho associated himself with the other ethnic Koreans who had come from the Soviet Union. This literary group was close to the political Soviet Koreans faction.

During the Korean War, Cho worked for Rodong Sinmun and also wrote propaganda poems. Before the war, he had been a member of the Standing Committee of the North Korean Literary and Art Federation. In 1951, he was selected the vice-chairman of the unified Korean Federation of Literature and Arts (MR: Chosŏn munhakyesul ch'ongdongmaeng, KFLA) which was chaired by Han Sorya. He was a member of its subdivision called the Literature Organization (MR: Munhak tongmaeng).