Viktor Platonovich Nekrasov

Viktor Platonovich Nekrasov (1974)

Nekrasov's house in Kiev, Khreshchatyk No. 15 (1950–1974)

Viktor Nekrasov ( Russian Виктор Платонович Некрасов , scientific. Transliteration Viktor Nekrasov Platonovič ; born June 4 ^{. Jul} / 17th June  1911 ^greg. In Kiev , † 3. September 1987 in Paris ) was a Soviet writer .

Life

Viktor Nekrasov's father, Plato, was a bank clerk and died in 1917 shortly after he left the family. The mother Sinaida Nikolajewna Nekrasowa was born Motowilowa by Ern and came from high Swiss nobility. She worked as a doctor and throughout her life had an almost symbiotic relationship with her son, in whose apartment she lived at number 15 on Kiev's boulevard Khreschtschatyk until her death in 1970. Nekrassov's older brother Nikolai (1902-1919) was beaten to death by Red Guards in Kiev at the age of 17 and his body was thrown into the Dnieper because he was carrying a French book. The mother's medical profession ensured the aristocratic family's survival during the Stalinist terror of the 1930s - because, among other things, they treated Chekists who had been billeted in the family's apartment.

From 1926 to 1929 Viktor Nekrasov attended the Technical School of Railway Construction in Kiev with a degree in communication technology. Then he worked on the construction of the Kiev train station . In the early 1930s to 1936 he studied at the Faculty of Architecture of the Kiev Building Institute. He was only an architect for a short time because he was primarily interested in the theater . While studying architecture, Nekrasov began studying at the Kiev Institute of Russian Drama, which he graduated in 1937. He then worked as an actor, director and set designer in various cities in the Soviet Union.

When the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 , 30-year-old Nekrasov was at the Red Army Theater in Rostov-on-Don . In August 1941 he was drafted from there for military service.

Due to his architectural training, Wiktor Nekrasov was deployed as leader of a pioneer platoon and later as regimental engineer of a rifle regiment and from 1943 as deputy commander of a pioneer battalion on the front line. The main tasks of his department consisted of building trenches, defensive positions and shelters as well as laying or clearing minefields and thus preparing tactical attacks. In April 1942 he was with his engineer battalion near Kharkov . The combat troops had to withdraw in the direction of the Don and the Volga due to the existing danger of being encircled in the Battle of Kharkov (May 12-28) . As a result, he took part in the fighting in Stalingrad , Donetsk , Kiev, Odessa , Warsaw and Lublin . Nekrasov was wounded twice during his three-year military career. He was awarded the Medal of Bravery, the Red Star Order and the Medal for the Liberation of Stalingrad. In January 1945 he retired from military service with the rank of captain. The pioneer battalion that he was last in command was stationed in the GDR after the end of the war .

"Stalingrad"

Wiktor Nekrasov describes his war experiences from May 20, 1942 in his novel In den Stalingrad's trenches (V okopach Stalingrada). The battle for Stalingrad and its personal experience play a central role in it.

Nekrasov: In the trenches of Stalingrad (first edition in German 1954)

In Stalingrad, Nekrasov took part in the defensive battle against the German troops advancing up to then and witnessed the German air raids and the bloody battles over every section and block. In his book he describes his combat missions in the power plant and in the tractor plant. In July and August, 30 to 50 tanks were being built and repaired in the tractor factory every day, and some of the equipment had already been moved to the Urals . In order to be able to transport the existing production facilities away, the tractor workers needed free access to the landing stages on the Volga . This is where Viktor Nekrasov fought, in the book he describes himself as Lieutenant Yuri Kerzhenzew , in the 62nd Army, alongside the famous sniper Vasily Saizew , against whom Nekrasov had a personal aversion after the end of the war due to his bourgeois lifestyle he never made a secret. With his unit he found himself in a very difficult section, in which there was bitter struggle over the strategically important Mamayev Hill . He reports very clearly from his operations in night battles . The book ends with the formation of the Stalingrad basin, the subsidence of the German attacks and the victory of the Red Army in Stalingrad.

"In the Trenches of Stalingrad" was created during the war in a Kiev military hospital after Viktor Nekrasov was seriously wounded by a German sniper in Lublin, Poland in July 1944. The working title at that time was "At the edge of the earth". The injury - a bullet through the right shoulder - led to a temporary paralysis of the right hand and thus to his retirement as a war invalid 2nd stage in January 1945. From August 1946 "Am Rande der Erde" appeared for the first time in its uncut version as a three-part series novel under the Title "Stalingrad" in a Kiev monthly magazine. In the same year it was printed in book form with the title "In den Schützenträben von Stalingrad" and, according to Nekrasov, in a considerably shortened and censored version. At that time (1945/47) Nekrasov was the head of the department of a Kiev newspaper. In 1947 it appeared in large numbers under the well-known title "In den Schützengräben von Stalingrad" ("v okopach Stalingrada") and was translated into 36 languages. Viktor Nekrasov received the Stalin Prize for it that same year . Nadeshda Ludwig translated the novel into German, which was first published in Germany in 1954 by Aufbau-Verlag Berlin . In more recent German editions it appeared under the abbreviated title "Stalingrad".

In the trenches of Stalingrad is one of the first literary processing this battle in 1956 it was in the Leningrad Lenfilm studios from a screenplay by Alexander Ivanov with Vsevolod Safonov in the lead role of Yuri Kerzhenzew entitled "Soldaty" ( "Soldiers") filmed and came to Soviet cinemas in 1957.

Walega

The character of young "Walega", the orderly of Lieutenant Yuriy Kerzhensev, plays a special role in the work. In real life, "Walega" hid Mikhail Ivanovich Wolegow (1924–1999), a young Russian from the Altai who became Viktor Nekrasov's ordinance from around the end of 1943 and who developed a special relationship with Nekrasov as the war progressed. After the war, "Walega" is repeatedly the subject of publications by Nekrasov, in which he describes in detail the person Wolegow and the time spent with him at the front. Both had lost sight of Nekrasov's injury in July 1944. Mikhail Ivanovich Wolegow was seriously wounded in August 1944 and also retired from military service in January 1945. In 1966, Wolegov traced his former commander through the Kiev militia. A lively, well-documented correspondence develops. In July 1971, Viktor Nekrasov kept the promise made at the front (which is also described in the book) to visit "Walega" in the Altai. Even after he was forced into exile, Nekrasov kept up correspondence with his friend to the end. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, Mikhail Wolegov stated that, after Nekrasov's emigration, government agencies put pressure on him and his family to stop contact, which he finally gave in.

Viktor Nekrasov wrote mainly books about the Great Patriotic War , but in his works he did not focus on the war strategy aspects of events or the heroic, but on the tragedy of the individual and his reaction to the war.

Criticism of the regime and emigration

During the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras, Viktor Nekrasov took a decisive stand against the rampant anti-Semitism of the Soviet regime and thus fell increasingly out of favor. Among other things, he fought with other intellectuals to erect a monument in the Babyn Yar Gorge in Kiev , where more than 30,000 Jewish people were killed in a massacre by the Wehrmacht in 1941 . Instead, Nikita Khrushchev wanted to build a sports stadium over the gorge. The plans failed because of the resistance of the citizens' movement led by Nekrasov. In 1976 a monument was finally inaugurated in the area of ​​the gorge, as Nekrasov had wished.

Because of his open criticism of the regime, Nekrasov came under increasing pressure from the mid-1960s. Trips to other western countries, including Italy, Switzerland and the USA, had permanently changed his view of the system, even if he remained convinced of the communist cause at heart. His book "On Both Sides of the Ocean", published in 1963, was panned by Soviet criticism. Khrushchev first called for his exclusion from the Communist Party. Ten years later, in May 1973, after several sharp reprimands, he was expelled from the Communist Party for liberal standpoints and anti-Soviet and socially damaging behavior . In May 1974 he was expelled from the Ukrainian Writers ' Union after he a. had come into contact with dissidents like Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn . In September of the same year he finally emigrated to France after being determined by the KGB and searching his home for hours. With Galina Nekrasowa, b. Basij, whom he married in 1972, and their son Viktor Kondyrew, he settled in Vanves near Paris and worked as an editor for the emigrant magazine Kontinent . His autobiography and the exiled novel Three Musketeers from Leningrad were also created here . After his secret emigration, Nekrasov was declared an "undesirable person" by Soviet propaganda. His works disappeared from libraries and could no longer be printed or sold, and public mention of his name was prohibited. In 1975 he was withdrawn from Kyiv citizenship by decree after he had made derogatory comments on Leonid Brezhnev's recently published autobiography. After his Soviet citizenship was revoked in April 1981, Nekrasov took French citizenship in 1983. On September 3, 1987 Nekrasov, who was a passionate smoker all his life, died of lung cancer in Gentilly near Paris. His grave is in the Russian cemetery of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois near Paris.

Works

• In the trenches of Stalingrad , 1946, German 1954, Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin (original title: Stalingrad , filmed in 1956 as The Soldiers ), ISBN 3-7466-0191-6 . The book is digitized at books.google.de/books and it is available as an e-book .
• In the hometown , 1954, German A man returns , 1955.
• On both sides of the ocean (travel sketches, German 1964).
• Kyra Georgievna , 1961, German 1962.
• On both sides of the wall - experiences and adventures - German EA 1980, ISBN 3-548-38005-0 .
• A little sad story , 1989, German "Three Musketeers from Leningrad" , 1993, ISBN 3-7466-1004-4 .
• Beria. Executioner in Stalin's service. End of a career , (Ed.) Berlin 1992, ISBN 3-928024-69-8 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Emmanuel Waegemans: History of Russian Literature. From Peter the Great to the present. UVK Universitätsverlag Konstanz, Konstanz 1998, p. 327.

Web links

Commons : Wiktor Nekrasov  - collection of pictures

• Oleg Yuryev : The sun of a pure heart . In: Der Tagesspiegel
• Literature by and about Wiktor Platonowitsch Nekrasow in the catalog of the German National Library