The influence of poems in Turgenev's prose on the formation of the modern Korean free verse

For the century that has passed since the first acquaintance of the Korean literary community with the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy in 1906, Russian literature has began to play a huge role in the formation and development of modern Korean literature. In the 1920s, the Korean literary arena was simultaneously penetrated by the most diverse literary trends in Western Europe - from realism and romanticism to naturalism, symbolism and even artistic avant-garde. At the same time, Korean writers often perceived the works of Western writers through the prism of their own literary orientation. Sometimes Korean writers interpreted the works of the same Western writer or even the same work from different points of view, depending on their own literary attitudes. A typical example of this approach is I. Turgenev. Turgenev’s influence on the Korean literary circles was much greater than that of any other Russian author. In 1914, Korean readers were first introduced to the poem “Threshold” by Turgenev, and already in the 1920s Turgenev occupied the fourth place among Russian writers in the number of translated prose works and the first place in terms of the number of translated poems. He gained popularity, on the one hand, as the author of the series of short stories “Notes of a Hunter”, reflecting the life and routine of peasants serfs without any artifice, and the novel “Fathers and Sons”, whose characters personify a generation conflict in Russia in the 1860s, and on the other, as a poet who wrote “Poems in Prose”, distinguished by strong lyricism and a nihilistic world outlook. It is surprising that in the case of Turgenev, instead of his so widely known prosaic texts, it was precisely his “Poems in Prose” that were most actively disseminated at the initial stage of his popularization in Korea. His poetry and prose, opposed by Korean writers and translators, depending on their intellectual inclinations and literary bias, had a considerable influence on the process of formation and development of genres of modern Korean poetry and prose. For example, for poets with an orientation toward aestheticism and sentimentalism, such as Kim Ok and Na Dohyang, Turgenev was valuable for his lyricism, his “sweet sorrow.” His “Poems in Prose” became a poetic canon for their own poetry and, ultimately, contributed to the creation of the genre of modern Korean free verse. However, for the writers of KAPF, such as Kim Kizin and Pak Engghi, Turgenev was an intellectual pioneer, whose works became the epitome of radical social thought in Russia of that time.