Seocho-gu Banpo Library held humanities lecture

A total of eight online humanities lectures were held at the Banpo Library in Seocho-gu, Seoul from Monday, November 13, 2023 to Wednesday, December 20, 2023. In this course, which was conducted as part of the National Research Foundation of Korea's HK+ Project Regional Humanities Center project, Seoul National University Professor Seungmoo Baek and Dr. Seohyun Yoon each lectured four times.

Professor Baek Seung-moo will deliver a lecture on the theme of “Chekhov's Psychotherapy: Love, Forgive!”, seeking to understand the core content contained in Chekhov's four major plays, and specifically discussing the meaninglessness of life and intellectualism. Focusing on [Uncle Vanya], which deals with isolation, [The Seagull], which depicts the frustration and ruin of a father's absence, [Three Sisters], which depicts cruel times and pushed lives, and [The Cherry Blossom Garden], which depicts historical time and the downfall of generations. The story unfolded. Professor Baek said Chekhov said, “Before I experienced real love, I thought I knew everything about love. The same goes for life. You don't really know what life is until you live it. I encourage you to be humble in front of life. He mentioned that “when you bow your head before life like that, you can love and forgive yourself,” and emphasized that we should experience a life of humility, love, and forgiveness through Chekhov’s four stage plays.

Dr. Seohyun Yoon gave a lecture on the topic “Reading Russian Novels: Who Doesn’t Know This Person?” and looked for similarities between us and our contemporaries in the characters of classical Russian novels and through this process, learned about the things that do not change even as times change. I wanted to approach the essence of humanity. Specifically, in the first lecture, “Gogol <The Overcoat>: The One Who Saved,” Dr. Yoon looked into our desires revealed in the story of a 9th-rank civil servant seduced on a night in St. Petersburg when purchasing an overcoat, and in the second lecture, “Dostoevsky, Notes of an Underground Dweller.” >: In “A person oppressed by self-consciousness,” we looked at the closedness of human thinking through the appearance of a character full of entitlement and delusions of grandeur. In the third lecture, “Tolstoy's <Anna Karenina>: A person who is 'all or nothing',' the meaning of a life without lies was examined in the images of Anna Karenina and Konstantin Ryovin, and in the fourth and final lecture, 'Chekhov's <The Man with the Dog' In “Woman>: A person who lived life the way it is meant to be lived,” we captured moments in which the truth about human essence is revealed in banal everyday occurrences.

This event, which was thought to have sublimated the limitations of the awkwardness and inconvenience of online lectures into lively Q&A in the chat window, was so successful that all lecture attendees requested that follow-up lectures be opened as soon as possible.