36 Facts About Han Sorya

Han Sorya was a Korean writer, literary administrator and politician who spent much of his career in North Korea.

Han Sorya, motivated by personal grievances against his rival writers, sometimes acted as the force behind the purges within the cultural establishment as well.

Han Sorya's influence is felt in North Korea even today, though his name has been forgotten from official histories.

Han Sorya was born on 3 August 1900 in Hamhung, in the north of Korea, Empire of Japan.

Han Sorya graduated from middle school in 1919 and attended Nippon University in Tokyo from 1921 to 1924, studying sociology.

Han Sorya emigrated to Manchuria in 1925 but returned to Seoul in the south in 1927.

Han Sorya was one of the most prominent fiction writers in the history of North Korean literature.

Han Sorya disagreed with this approach, accusing it of forgetting class questions.

Since the 1930s, Han Sorya had already had bad personal relations with these writers originally hailing from the south of Korea.

Han Sorya acted in his writing as a "curator of the personality cult" of Kim Il-sung and was, in effect, the official hagiographer of Kim.

Indeed, the cult's beginnings can be traced as far back as 1946 when Han Sorya coined the appellation "our Sun" to describe Kim.

Han Sorya was the first to employ the phrase "Sun of the Nation" in referring to Kim.

Later, between 1955 and 1957, Han Sorya attacked the Soviet Koreans faction, accusing them of "factional, splitting activity" and "not allow[ing] the party and the people to demonstrate their good feeling and love toward their leader".

The speech credits Han Sorya for uncovering "serious ideological errors on the literary front" and can be considered an expression of public support for Han Sorya.

Since 1953, Han Sorya was the chairman of the Korean Writers' Union.

In 1946, Han Sorya became a member of the first Central Committee of the Workers' Party of North Korea.

Han Sorya maintained the post in the party and its successor, the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea, until 1969.

Han Sorya became the minister of education in May 1956 and retained his post as the chairman of the Writers' Union.

Han Sorya started to enlist writers with a proletarian background.

In 1962, Han Sorya was accused of "parochialism" and "bourgeois decadence" by the NKFLA.

Han Sorya was consequentially expelled from the party and stripped of his offices.

Han Sorya's purge coincided with the election of the third Supreme People's Assembly.

Han Sorya was likely pardoned later, in 1969, when his name reappeared as a member of the party Central Committee.

Han Sorya was never reassigned to any other post he had held.

Myers to conclude that it is likely "though by no means certain, that Han Sorya died sometime between late 1969 and late 1970", with some preference for the year 1970.

In Han Sorya's wake, other cultural figures, like Ch'oe Sunghui and Sim Yong, were purged.

The regime faced a problem in Han Sorya's work being politically useful in nature, but his name tarnished.

Han Sorya's name began to be disconnected from his work, which was still widely disseminated.

Some aspects of the struggles are baseless, too, as some works by Han Sorya include rather sympathetic depictions of Japanese soldiers, while it was many of his rivals who were purged because of their "pro-Japanese" tendencies.

Yearn Hong Choi assess that "Han Sorya is not a typical North Korean writer" but an extremely political one in his attempt at pleasing Kim Il Sung.

The style of Han Sorya based on Korean ethnic nationalism ultimately established itself as the standard of propaganda over Cho's.

An exception to Han Sorya's forgotten legacy in North Korea exists.

The multi-part film Nation and Destiny not only features him but allows Han Sorya to be a hero of the film.

In South Korea, Han Sorya's works were banned by the Ministry of Culture and Information.

Jackals, is a 1951 novella by Han Sorya, noted for its anti-American and anti-Christian tendencies.

The emotional story is inspired by Maxim Gorky's sentimental novel Mother, which is considered the first socialist realist novel, and a story that Han Sorya was familiar with.