Yi Hyosŏk was born in Pyeongchang in 1907. After attending Kyŏngsŏng Jeil high school he graduated from Gyeongseong Imperial University (경성제국대학) in 1930. He made his literary debut in 1928 with the story “The City and the Specter” (도시와 유령) in Light of Korea (조선지광). After graduating college he briefly worked for the Japanese Government-General’s censorship department but quit after receiving censure from his community of writers and became an English teacher in Gyeongseong in North Hamgyeong. He also taught at Soongsil University beginning in 1934.
Yi’s work was initially loosely affiliated with the Korean Artist Proletarian Federation (KAPF) due to its socialist ideals, before he began his affiliation with the “Group of Nine” (구인회) that espoused “pure” art for art’s sake rather than art for a political purpose. Throughout both periods, his work uses themes of eroticism and explores women’s prostitution and sexuality as a metaphor for the human conditions. His story “Pig” (돈), for instance, is about a man who imposes human ideas of sexuality on the sow he raises to start a pig farm.
Yi took inspiration from Russian and English authors such as Anton Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield. He travelled to Manchuria in 1940 after the death of his wife and infant, where he began to fall into ill health. Perhaps taking inspiration from this time, his novel “Endless Blue Sky” (벽공문한) is set in colonial Korea and Manchuria and is a love story between a Korean writer and a Russian dancer.
He passed away in 1942 from meningitis.
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