Tolstoy’s Gospel of Agape/Karuna and Modern Korean Religions

Prof. Vladimir M. Tichonov, one of the world leading specialist in Korean Studies, will deliver a lecture on Tolstoy’s role in the East/West encounters in early 20th century.

Abstract: Tolstoy was the most translated Western writer in colonial Korea. He was revered by the intellectuals across the whole ideological spectrum – both by extreme right-wingers and Communists. Tolstoy’s reception in colonial-time Korea was just as multi-sided as Tolstoy’s talent itself. Initially seen as a modernist religious figure (rather
than a pacifist radical), he was then regarded as a religious prophet, radical thinker or/and melodramatic writer with great compassion towards the female victims of the bourgeois order by different socio-political
and cultural groups. In all the cases, however, from the 1920s onward, «compassion» was the keyword in Tolstoy’s understanding by the Korean public. Tolstoy contributed greatly into making «compassion» a more universal concept free from its initial Buddhist or Christian doctrinal context, and recognizing it as a modern virtue.