Источниковедение и историография Кореи
219
Date
Author
Title
1874 Ch. Dallet
La langue coréenne
1877 J. Ross
Corean Primer
1878 J. Ross
The Corean Language
1879 W. G. Aston
A Comparative Study of Japanese and Korean
1880 J. MacIntyre
Notes on the Corean Language
1881 F. C. Ridel
Grammaire Coréenne
1882 J. Ross
Korean Speech
1882 W. E. Griffis
The Corean Language
1887 J. Scott
A Corean Manual or phrase book with Introductory
Grammar
1889 M. C. Imbault-Huart
Manuel de la langue coréenne parlée
1890 H. G. Underwood
An Introduction to the Korean Spoken Language
Kim Jeanyoung (Yonsei University, Republic of Korea)
White on white: Russian émigrés through Korean eyes
The 20
th
century portrayal of Russians bifurcates into two color types: the white
and the red. This color distinction undoubtedly originated from the ideological divi-
sion of the Revolutionary period, but its political connotation was soon overshadowed
by the cultural one, and among Koreans, it continued to engender something of a
myth on Russians.
Of special interest is the way how the Russian émigrés, i. e., the ‘Whites’ were
viewed by the Koreans of the colonial period. For them the whiteness of these
Russians was not simply a stigma of their ideological identity but rather a generic
sign of beauty, Russia’s exotic otherness. Russians were generically described as
‘white’, regardless of their national and social origin, and therefore ‘beautiful’; at
the same time, the ‘white’ Russians and their habitats were commonly described as
‘melancholically’ beautiful.
Both the émigré Russians and the Koreans who encountered them during the
colonial time were sufferers of the lost homeland, destined to seek elsewhere for its
surrogate. Such a surrogate replica was the village ‘Novina’, which the Yankovskys
created in the northern part of Korea, which in turn provided a fairy tale like vision
of the ‘paradise regained’for the Korean viewers outside. The “snowwhite splendor”
of the Russian émigrés, as one novelist wrote, while describing theYankovsky place,
was, for Koreans, a construct both of fantasy and nostalgia. While admiring and
mourning the ‘White’ Russians, Koreans were actually mourning for themselves,
taking refuge only in the illusion of their imagined homeland.
