[석사논문] 이영은, 「러시아인이 본 19세기 조선 : 곤차로프의 『군함 '빨라다'』와 짜가이의 『조선여행기』를 중심으로」, 2002
- 비교문화협동과정
- 조회수968
- 2023-01-26
[영문초록(Abstract)]
Centered on the records of Russian travellers who visited Chosun in the middle and latter halves of the nineteenth century, this study started with the concern of what perspectives they observed Chosun with. Foriegn missionaries, merchants and soldiers entered Chosun before and after it opened ports to foreigh vessels in the latter half of the nineteenth century. They showed the shape of Chosun reflected on others' eyes by leaving their own impressions of it as records. It means beind associated with the complex process called the compromise between their own will of of others' will. Each of these aliens called Russians is describing from his own perspective what Chosun and its people looked like and as what it was and in what relationship its people and with them.
This study will be progressed focusing on 'how' they saw it rather than 'what' they saw in it. That is, I will investigate how it was reflected rather than what of it was reflected on the eyes of Russians.
Contradiction has existed in Westerners' attitudes towards the East since ancient times. On the one hand, the East has been regarded as the classical source of wisdom with much more abundant civilization thant the West. On the other hand, it has been considered as an obscure, myterious and faraway place which had been stagnant in closed state until before the West modernized it. The thought that the East was vague and threatening in sharp conflict with the West and that the East and the West were two kinds of simple and contrastive categories which are intrinsically different traces back even to the Greek Age. With such bipolar recognition for the East, the West becomes a new other of masculine characteristics to control the East with masculine power.
To the Westerners of the nineteenth century, the mission of civilization was establishing itself in the east as dominant value which nobody could oppose. To modern Europeans with a burning sense of mission that the whole mankind should be civilized, the nation called Chosun, was uncivilized, savage and strange one. In this study, I want to examine the culture shock that Russians, Westerns travellers, had when looking at Oriental Chosun through their eyes as observers, and the authors' attitudes of decribing it. In Goncharov's travels(Part II), Iwill read Orientalism owned by the author who observed Chosun(an inferior Oriental country), as a superior Westerner with a sense of mission for civilization. He was seeing Russia and Chosun with other's eyes as the countries of civilization and barbarousness. In Travles in Chosun(Part III), I will examine culturally relativist aspects in the describing attitudes of Russian offivers and dukes who described the stuation of Chosun after it opened ports with objective and accurate facts. Unlike Goncharov's biased perspective, these writers of travels had the recognition that Chosun and Russia were 'different'. But, they said that the 'difference' was simply strangeness, not 'wrongness'. The acknowledge the diffierence that Chosun people had not the sameness as theirs. That is, difference is not inferiority. No cultural calue can have absolute validity or superiority compared to the other one, and there is also no epistemological ground on which to prove such logic.