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Review of the book The Koreas: The Birth of Two Nations Divided by Theodore Jun Yoo

In 2023, the book The Koreas: The Birth of Two Nations Divided by South Korean Professor Theodore Jun Yoo was published in Russian. It was praised in the West as “a rare multidisciplinary study of the two Koreas from the division of the peninsula in 1945 to the present time.” There are very few popular science books on Korea, and the application of content analysis to the book already suggests that the author considers the inhabitants of the DPRK and the ROK as belonging to different nations. This is, to put it mildly, a bold assertion, especially if one recalls the definition of a nation in both Soviet and Russian scholarship. Who is Theodore Jun Yoo? He is an associate professor in the Department of Korean Language and Literature at Yonsei University, and this is not his first book…