Daniil Alexandrovich Granin

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Daniil Granin (2012)

Daniil Granin ( Russian Даниил Александрович Гранин * 1. January 1919 as Daniil Alexandrovich German - Russian. Даниил Александрович Герман - in the village of Volyn, Kursk , Soviet Russia ; † 4. July 2017 in Saint Petersburg ) was a Soviet and Russian writer .

Live and act

Granin (far right) with Günter Grass (far left), Jurek Becker (2nd from left) and other writers at a panel discussion on the “Berlin Encounter for Peacebuilding” on December 18, 1981 in East Berlin

Daniil Granin spent his childhood in Saint Petersburg (then Petrograd) and studied electrical engineering at the Polytechnic Institute there . He became an engineer , worked in an electrical laboratory from 1940 and then at the Kirov factory until 1950 . During the Second World War he volunteered in 1941 and became a tank officer. At times he was deployed on the Leningrad front . In 1942 he joined the CPSU . From 1954 to 1969 he was secretary of the Leningrad Department of the Writers' Union of the USSR .

Granin published his first short story in 1949, his first novel in 1954. Many of his short stories and novels deal with the work of scientists and technicians and their ethical responsibility, the others mostly with everyday life and its adversities as well as the Second World War and its consequences. In addition, he is famous for his travel stories (for example "Garden of Stones", Сад камней , about the stay in Japan), in which Heinrich Heine was considered his role model. At least ten of his works have been filmed or adapted by the theater. He also worked for the magazines Neva (from 1967) and Nowy Mir (from 1987). Only the beginning of perestroika made the biographical novel Зубр (The Geneticist) possible , which describes the life of the Russian geneticist Nikolai Timofejew-Ressovsky in Berlin.

Granin was a board member of the writers' associations of the USSR (from 1954) and the RSFSR (from 1958) and in 1989 became president of the newly founded Russian PEN club . In 1969, despite all concerns, he voted for the expulsion of Alexander Solzhenitsyn from the Writers' Union. "I saw that I had ruined myself but not helped Solzhenitsyn," he said in an interview after the fall of the Soviet regime. "Granin understood better than many writers in Russia how to survive and stay productive among powerful hypocrites."

Daniil Granin died in Saint Petersburg in July 2017 at the age of 98.

Relationship with Germany

The acquaintance and later close friendship with Anna Seghers , Konrad Wolf , Ernst Busch , Bruno Apitz and Alex Wedding helped Granin to overcome the hatred of the Germans and to develop friendship through understanding.

The editors Leonhard Kossuth, Ralf Schröder and Antje Leetz were responsible for German publications in the Volk und Welt publishing house . Translations were u. a. by Erich Ahrndt , Hilde Angarowa , Sigrid Fischer , Charlotte Kossuth , Renate Landa , Marlene Milack , Dieter Pommerenke , Liselotte Remané , Thomas Reschke , Werner Rode and Heinz Stern .

On January 27, 2014, Granin gave the speech in the German Bundestag on the occasion of the commemoration day for the commemoration of the victims of National Socialism . Helmut Schmidt wrote about the novel Mein Leutnant : “Peace is an inestimable good. The book by Daniil Granin reminds of this very emphatically. "

Honors

Daniil Granin with Dmitri Medvedev after being awarded the Order of Andrew on January 26, 2009.

Daniil Granin has received numerous prizes, including a .:

Works (selection)

Novels and short stories (first editions and translations into German)

  • Победа инженера Корсакова (story 1949)
  • Искатели (novel 1954)
    • Pioneer . Dietz, Berlin 1955.
  • Собственное мнение (story 1956)
  • После свадьбы (novel 1958)
  • Иду на грозу (novel 1962)
    • Towards the thunderstorm . Publishing house culture and progress, Berlin 1963.
    • slightly abridged edition under the title Taming the Sky . DVA, Stuttgart 1963.
  • Наш комбат (story 1968)
  • Кто-то должен (story 1969)
  • Эта странная жизнь (story 1974; German A Strange Life , 1974)
  • Однофамилец (story 1975)
  • Клавдия Вилор (story 1976; German Claudia Vilor , 1977)
  • Картина (novel 1980)
  • Ещё заметен след (amendment 1984)
  • Зубр (biographical novel 1987; about Nikolai Timofejew-Ressovsky )
    • They called him Ur. Novel of a life . Volk und Welt publishing house, Berlin 1988.
    • also under the title Der Genetiker . Pahl-Rugenstein, Cologne 1988.
  • Наш дорогой Роман Авдеевич (Novella 1990)
  • Неизвестный человек (1990)
  • Бегство в Россию (novel 1994)
  • Вечера с Петром Великим (Roman 2000)
    • Peter the Great. A novel about Russia's splendor and misery . Verlag Volk und Welt, Berlin 2001.
  • Мой лейтенант (novel 2011)
    • My lieutenant . Translated by Jekatherina Lebedewa. With a foreword by Helmut Schmidt. Structure, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-351-03591-4 .

To contemporary history

  • together with Ales Adamowitsch : Блокадная книга (a chronicle of the Leningrad blockade ; first part 1977 in the magazine Novy Mir ; as a book 1979)
  • The lost mercy. A Russian experience . Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau 1993, ISBN 3-451-04043-3 .
  • Страх (Essays / Memoirs 1997)
    • The century of fear . People and World, Berlin 1999.

Travel reports and travel pictures

  • Four weeks with your legs up . Verlag Volk und Welt, Berlin 1968 (Russian 1966). Contains travel reports from Australia called "impressions".
  • Garden of stones. Travel pictures . Verlag Volk und Welt, Berlin 1973 ( Сад камней , 1971). Contains travel sketches
    • from Japan (the eponymous travel story Garden of Stones )
    • from London and Scotland ( notes on the travel guide )
    • from Germany, including:
      • An unexpected morning (Rostock- Warnemünde )
      • The city in the Harz ( Wernigerode )
      • The grave of Bach (in the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig)
      • The beautiful Uta ( Прекрасная Ута , 1970) about Uta von Naumburg and a meeting in Leutenberg , which gives rise to fundamental reflections on the German-Russian relationship
      • Look and see (on the GDR as a whole)
  • Leningrad. Memories and discoveries . Verlag Volk und Welt, Berlin 1981.
  • Goal setting. 3 stories . Damnitz, Munich 1982.

Further anthologies and contributions to anthologies in German translation

  • Own opinion ( Собственное мнение ). In: Jürgen Rühle (ed.): The process begins. New Russian storytellers . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1960, pp. 149–166.
  • The place for the monument. Novellas and short stories . Reclam, Leipzig 1975; Also in Röderberg-Verlag , Frankfurt 1975. Does the title story, the science fiction -narrative The place for the monument .
  • Two faces. Essayistic prose . Verlag Volk und Welt, Berlin 1978.

To individual works

  • Granin's 1956 published story The Own Opinion ( Собственное мнение ) was much discussed . It is an important testimony to the thaw literature , although it does not radically settle accounts with Stalinism , but merely criticizes the officialdom and its arbitrariness.
  • The blockade book describes the siege of Leningrad in World War II. For this, Granin had spoken to many survivors in the 1970s. He had to wait before the publication of an unabridged edition until Grigory Vasilyevich Romanov , who had been the almighty First Secretary of the CPSU Regional Committee in Leningrad , was removed from his office in 1983. Because Granin did not follow the party line in his book. He did not focus on the heroism of the besieged under the leadership of the party, but on the appalling suffering of the starving population.
  • In his retrospective under the title The Lost Mercy. A Russian experience tells Granin how the communist regime tried to cast out mercy from the people .
  • In his memoirs, entitled The Century of Fear , Granin bears witness to how the repression of the Soviet system (and the constant fear of it) depressed and distorted him and his contemporaries.
  • In the novel Peter the Great , a group of five men retell the original anecdotes of Peter the Great by Jacob von Staehlin (1742) and cannot avoid comparing “Russia's splendor and misery” of that time with Russia at the beginning of the 21st century.
  • In the novel Mein Leutnant , whose title character is his alter ego , Granin shapes the conflict between the official certainty of victory and the horror of war. Granin describes how the commanders “burned” their soldiers in senseless attacks. In doing so, he sets himself apart from the Stalin renaissance that has emerged in some places in Russia in recent years and a "patriotic", nostalgic view of the Great Patriotic War .

literature

  • An overview of Russian Soviet literature, Leipzig 1970.
  • Lexicon of 20th Century Russian Literature, Munich 1992.

Web links

Commons : Daniil Granin  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Quoted from: Tim Neshitov: Towards the thunderstorm. He erected a memorial made of words to the victims of the siege of Leningrad. Now the Russian author Daniil Granin has died. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of July 6, 2017, p. 12.
  2. ↑ Tim Neshitov: Towards the thunderstorm. He erected a memorial made of words to the victims of the siege of Leningrad. Now the Russian author Daniil Granin has died. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of July 6, 2017, p. 12.
  3. ↑ Daniil Granin is dead. In: Der Tagesspiegel, July 5, 2017.
  4. ↑ Alexander Alexandrow: Conversation with Daniil Granin . In: Soviet literature , 10/1984, p. 92 ff.
  5. ^ Die Zeit, April 1, 2015, p. 45.
  6. ↑ Awarding of the State Prize to Daniil Granin (Russian)
  7. ↑ a b Kerstin Holm: Blockade book. On the death of the Russian author Daniil Granin. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of July 6, 2017, p. 14.
personal data
SURNAME Granin, Daniil Alexandrovich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Гранин, Даниил Александрович (Russian spelling); German, Daniil Alexandrovich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Soviet or Russian writer
DATE OF BIRTH January 1, 1919
PLACE OF BIRTH Volyn, Kursk Governorate , Soviet Russia
DATE OF DEATH 4th July 2017
Place of death St. Petersburg