Kim Dongni

Over the past half-century, Kim Tong-ni has written more and has had more written about him than any other living Korean author. He so embodies the history of modern Korean literature that one critic has asserted, "For all the credit we give Europe as our model, modern Korean fiction did not take root for sure until we were given the literature of Kim Tong-ni. What we did before him can be dismissed as practice." Kim Tong-ni was born in 1913 in Kyongju, the tradition-conscious capital of the ancient Shilla kingdom, as the third of five children. His oldest brother, distinguished for the ability to read the Chinese classics at age six, went on to become a nationally recognized classical scholar. Tong-ni early learned the meaning of nationalism when his brother, then a sixth-grader, was called in by the Japanese thought police because of his composition entitled "People in White on a Boat without a Sail." The incident created strong resentment in the young Tong-ni, as he began to understand the position of Koreans under the Japanese. Koreans respond to Kim Tong-ni as the voice of their ethos, as a writer who seeks understanding of what it means to be Korean. Accommodating ethnic materials in a perfectly modern aesthetic, he is anything but a "folk" writer. Two early and still acclaimed stories, "Portrait of a Shaman" (1936) and "Loess Village Story" (1939), demonstrate his ability to be Korean and worldly at the same time. While set in the Korean countryside, these works are invested with a universality that links the national with the shared human experience. Even in his early works, Kim says, he was trying to express a "humanistic nationalism," which he believed could "overcome cultural barriers and seek identity with universal trends in world literature." It is the universal language of symbols that lets his work, even while heavily laden with local color, reach out to readers beyond Korea's borders. Even though Kim is particularly well known for "Portrait of a Shaman," he regards it as an "imperfect work." Believing that its theme of the confrontations of Eastern and Western religions could not be handled adequately in the context of a short story, he expanded it into the novel, Ulhwa (1978), which has been translated twice into English, as Ulhwa the Shaman (1979) and as The Shaman Sorceress (1988). Religious belief---whether shamanism, Buddhism, or Christianity---is an undercurrent in nearly all Kim's work. He often speaks of his deep concern about the nihilism of the twentieth century and of so many people's inability to find a new set of principles to counter it. Kim believes his literary mission is "to seek out divinity and identify the relationship between that divinity and humankind." Kim Tong-ni has long been a prolific writer about literature as well. Since his first critical article, "On the Writer Yi T'ae-jun," appeared in 1937, he has published nearly 100 literary essays. In recent years, he has been devoting increasing attention to critical, rather than creative, writing and has produced such articles as "In What Society is Literature Possible?," "With Humanistic Literature We Can Prevail," "A New Agrarian Literature Is Possible," and "My Literature and Shamanism." Kim Tong-ni is the recipient of the Freedom Literary Prize (1955), National Academy of Arts Award (1958), Samil Literary Award (1967), Order of the Camellia (1968), Order of the Peony (1970), Seoul City Cultural Prize (1970), and May Sixteenth National Award (1983).