Pak Taewon (1909 – 1986) was a modern South Korean writer who moved to North Korea.
1. Life
Pak Taewon was born in Seoul, Korea on December 7, 1909. He wrote under the pen names Mongbo and Gubo. Pak attended Hosei University, Japan, but did not graduate. Pak debuted as a poet while still a high school student, when his poem Nunim (누님 Elder Sister) won honorable mention in a contest sponsored by the journal Joseon Mundan; and as a fiction writer in 1929 with the publication of his short story, Suyeom (수염 Beard) in Sinsaeng magazine. Pak joined the Group of Nine (Guinhoe, a group that also included Yi Sang) in 1930 and devoted himself to fiction thereafter. Upon the liberation of Korea in 1945, he became a member of the Central Executive Committee of the Korean Writers’ Alliance. In 1950, Pak crossed the 38th Parallel into North Korea where he wrote and worked as a professor at Pyeongyang Literature University. He was purged and prohibited from writing in 1956, but his writing privileges were reinstated in 1960. Pak died on July 10, 1986 in North Korea. His grandson, through a daughter he left in South Korea, is the film director Bong Joon-ho.
2. Writing
A modernist writer who boldly embraced experimental techniques and meticulous craftsmanship, Pak Taewon was primarily concerned with the aestheticism and the mode of expression itself rather than the ideas expressed. His early fictional works, in particular, were a product of his attempt to engineer a new writing style: Piro (피로 Exhaustion) and Ttakhan saramdeul (딱한 사람들Forlorn People) contain symbols and diagrams from newspaper advertisements; Jeonmal (전말 Circumstances) and Biryang (비량 Sorrow), contain long phrases composed of over five sentences strung together with commas. Pak, along with Yi Sang, rejected didactic literature, and stressed the importance of appreciating literature as a linguistic art, not as a medium for conveying ideologies. In the latter half of the 1930s, however, he came to focus increasingly on the customs and mannerisms of the time, and eventually abandoned his interest in stylistic invention. Soseolga gubossiui iril (소설가 구보씨의 일일 A Day in the Life of Mr. Gubo, Novelist), serialized in the Chosun Joongang Ilbo from August 1 to September 19, 1934, is a semi-autobiographical novella depicting a series of observations made by a writer taking a walk around the city. Pak's Cheonbyeon punggyeong (천변풍경 Scenes by a Stream), an elaborate portrait of urban manners and working class life presented episodically, is often regarded as the representative modernist novel of the 1930s. After Korea regained independence, Pak turned to historical issues and problems of national identity, and began to write historical novels almost exclusively.
