Curious Forms: Observational Ethics in Anatoliy Kim’s Sakhalin Korean Sketches

• In Event: Whose Gaze?: Capitulations, Compromises, and Reconstructions of Non-Hegemonic Identities in Soviet and Post-Soviet Spaces

Abstract

This paper considers the earliest short stories of the Soviet-born writer Anatoliy Andreevich Kim (b.1939), which have been referred to as his “Korean cycle.” How do these texts estrange their implied readers from the diasporic Korean protagonists of these stories, and how do they simultaneously paint them as normatively Soviet? If the sketches are characterized by intense emotions, featuring murder, suicide and adultery, what kinds of judgments does the narrative offer towards this intensity? Looking at Chekhov’s travelogue Ostrov Sakhalin as an intertext, this paper will suggest that in choosing Sakhalin Koreans as his object of early literary observation, Kim was not seeking, as some scholarship has contended, to merely bring literary attention to a region and community with which he was familiar, but rather to draw upon his own personal history to write a quintessentially “Russian” cycle of stories, which were to form the earliest iteration of his “world literary” project. This paper considers Kim as an ethnographer, and the Orientalist tools that he inherits from 19th and early 20th century writings in Russia and consciously and ironically refashions as his own.

Author

• Sophie Lee, UC Berkeley