Yi T’aejun was born in 1904 in Gangwon Province (northeast Korea). In 1909, he moved to Vladivostok with his father before returning to Korea and living with his mother in North Hamgyeong Province (in modern-day North Korea) after the death of his father. In 1921, he enrolled at Hwimun High School(휘문고등보통학교) but was expelled after being framed as the organizer of a school boycott. In 1926, he moved to Japan as an international student to study at Jochi University (조오치대학[上智大學])) but dropped out after only a year.
Yi made his literary debut when his story “Oh Mong-nyeo” (오몽녀) was selected as a winner by Joseon Mundan. He is best known for his short stories “The Crow (가마귀), “Moonlit Night” (달밤), and novels such as “The Feminine Statue of Salvation” (구원의 여상). His work explores questions of loyalty after liberation and his experiences as an exiled migrant to places such as Japan and Russia. He also wrote essay collections and memoirs on Korean liberation and his travels through Korea, Manchuria, and Japan.
Yi was a founding member of “The Group of Nine” ( 구인회), a collective of artists who pursued an art for art’s sake vision of aesthetic modernism. Yi’s meticulously structured and technical writing on the lives of Koreans under the Japanese colonial period reflects his orientation as a modernist author with socialist sympathies. After liberation, he defected to North Korea in 1946. In 1954, he was investigated for his communist sympathies and sentenced to labor at a communist camp in Jagangdo in 1953 before he passed away in the 1960s.
For more information see: