North Korean literature

Reading is a popular pastime in North Korea, where literacy and books enjoy a high cultural standing, elevated by the regime's efforts to disseminate propaganda as texts. Because of this, writers are held in high prestige.

The partition of Korea following the Second World War led to a considerable cross-border movement, which included writers moving from North to South or from South to North.

North Korea's subsequent literary tradition was shaped and controlled by the State. The "Guidelines for Juche Literature", published by the official Choson Writers' Alliance (Chosŏn'gŭl: 조선 작가 동맹), emphasised that literature must extoll the country's leader, Kim Il-sung, and, later, Kim Jong-il. Only members of the Writers' Alliance are authorised to have their works published.

Russian, and later Soviet, literature were popular in pre-liberation North Korea. Koreans viewed Russian literature very differently from Western audiences, searching for Confucian undertones of social engineering. While Westerners appreciated works like Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and War and Peace, Koreans mostly ignored these works but enjoyed his works on religion and moral treatises. Of Soviet writers, Maxim Gorky in particular was popular.

The foundations of North Korean literature were laid in the period between 1945 and 1960s, when Soviet-style institutions were imposed on North Korean life. Along with them, restrictions and political imperatives found their way to literature. Immediately after the liberation, North Korea followed in the footsteps of Soviet literature. But by the de-Stalinization of the mid-1950s in the Soviet Union, the relationship changed. Kim saw the moment as an opportunity to lessen the control of the Soviets and increase his own. He accomplished this by denouncing all things "foreign" in literature in a speech entitled "On Eliminating Dogmatism and Formalism and Establishing Juche in Ideological Work". From there on, North Korean literature would have a nationalistic outlook, but Soviet elements introduced during the 1940s would remain steadfast.

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