1. Cho Ki-chon was a Russian-born North Korean poet.
27 Facts About Cho Ki-chon
1. 2.
Cho Ki-chon is regarded as a national poet and "founding father of North Korean poetry" whose distinct Soviet-influenced style of lyrical epic poetry in the socialist realist genre became an important feature of North Korean literature.
3.
Cho Ki-chon was dispatched by the Soviet authorities to liberated Korea when the Red Army entered in 1945.
4.
Cho Ki-chon offered some of the earliest contributions to Kim Il Sung's cult of personality.
5.
Cho Ki-chon died during the war in an American bombing raid.
6.
Cho Ki-chon was born to poor Korean peasants in the village of Ael'tugeu not far from Ussuriysk in the Vladivostok District of the Russian Far East on 6 November 1913.
7.
Cho Ki-chon studied at the Korean Teachers College in Voroshilov-Ussuriysk between 1928 and 1931.
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Hong Beom-do 8.
Cho Ki-chon was initially supposed to enroll at the Moscow University, but he was robbed at a train station in Omsk.
9.
Cho Ki-chon returned to the Far East and took up teaching responsibilities at the Korean Pedagogical Institute in Vladivostok until all ethnic Koreans were forcibly moved to Central Asia, and the Institute along with Cho were relocated to Kzyl-Orda, Kazakh SSR in 1937.
10.
Cho Ki-chon then returned to the Institute in Kzyl-Orda and worked there until 1941.
11.
Between 1942 and 1943, Cho Ki-chon served in the Soviet 25th Army's headquarters in Voroshilov-Ussuriysk in desk duty, and in a similar assignment in the Pacific Navy in Khabarovsk between 1943 and 1945 and in the First Far Eastern Front from October 1945.
12.
Cho Ki-chon entered North Korea with the Red Army that year.
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Immediately after the liberation of Korea, Soviet authorities sent Cho Ki-chon, who was fluent in both Korean and Russian, to North Korea in order to shape the country's literary institutions on the Soviet model.
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Cho Ki-chon diligently followed the Workers' Party's instructions to "immerse [oneself] in the masses" and would visit factories, villages and farms and write poems based on these experiences.
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Cho Ki-chon associated himself with the other ethnic Koreans who had come from the Soviet Union.
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Cho Ki-chon was a member of its subdivision called the Literature Organization.
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Cho Ki-chon contributed to the creation of a drama called Hong Beom-do, about the revolutionary Hong Beom-do, by Tae Jang-chun and other Koreans living in the Soviet Union.
18.
Cho Ki-chon published his first poem the age of 17 in a Korean newspaper, Sonbong, in Russia.
19.
Cho Ki-chon wrote lyrics for "Mungyong Pass", a song about Korean People's Army soldiers fighting their way through Kyonggi to Ryongnam.
20.
Some of Cho Ki-chon's poems have been adapted into popular music lyrics that enjoy popularity in the South as well as the North.
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Cho Ki-chon is represented as a popular hero that the people look up to, suggesting that he is the right person to lead the newly established state.
22.
Paektu, but it was in the Soviet Union where Cho Ki-chon had immigrated from.
23.
Cho Ki-chon died on 31 July 1951 in his office in Pyongyang during an American bombing raid in the war.
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Cho Ki-chon's works were awarded the Festival Prize, the country's highest literary honor, modeled after the Stalin Prize.
25.
Cho Ki-chon was awarded the Order of the National Flag, second class, for his work during the war in 1951, as well as a posthumous National Prize, first class, in 1952 for his cycle of poems Korea is Fighting.
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Hong Beom-do 26.
Cho Ki-chon's resting place is at the Patriotic Martyrs' Cemetery, in Pyongyang.
27.
Today, Cho Ki-chon is regarded as the founding father of North Korean socialist realist poetry, or indeed poetry in general, or even North Korean literature as a whole.