Yi, Hyo-seok, novelist is famous for ``momilggot pilmuryop`` to Koreans. Until now, many researchers have supposed it that he is a companion writer of KAPF. They have evaluated for him to give up Marxism, later. However, I would like to insist that he...
Yi, Hyo-seok, novelist is famous for ``momilggot pilmuryop`` to Koreans. Until now, many researchers have supposed it that he is a companion writer of KAPF. They have evaluated for him to give up Marxism, later. However, I would like to insist that he is not companion writer of KAPF but rather he is liberalist and aesthete, in this paper. A conclusion of this paper is as follows. Yi, Hyo-seok is aesthete. By the way, such a his thoughts formed Japanese colonial circumstances. His aesthetic attitude is not transcendental but empirical. It is to have been made in special situations of a colony. Therefore his aesthetic attitude is closely connected with Japanese colonial reality. Even if he is liberal aesthete, it is to have been made at tension relation with Japanese colonial actuality. He wasn`t originally marxist. Therefore, he wasn`t to give up marxism. It is misunderstanding that he wrote on a novel as marxist, exchanged his course later. He is not a convert. He wrote on a novel in viewpoints of a liberalist. That kind of his own thought is expressed in his novel. He didn`t become a compulsion to a political ideology. instead of, he didn`t turn away about colony actuality. His liberalism exists between ideal and actuality, city and the country, the Occident and the Orient, the resistance and conformity, morality and sexual desire. His novels go freely in and out these boundaries. Such a aestheticism and liberalism are expressed in his novels. Yi, Hyo-seok was distinctive novelist in the Japanese colonial period. His aestheticism is important in order to explain the modernity of Korean literature.