The Village (Ivan Bunin)
The village ( Russian Деревня , Derewnja ) is a short story by the Russian Nobel Prize winner for literature Ivan Bunin , written in Moscow in 1909 and published in 1910 in the October and November issues of the St. Petersburg magazine Sowremenny .
Bunin tells about the life of the brothers Tichon and Kusma Krassow in the Russian black earth belt. The introverted poet Kusma says of the unscrupulous, successful brother Tichon: "Your biography should be written."
content
Great-grandfather Krassow was chased to death by a pack of greyhounds near the Durnowka manor because he had got involved with the wife of the landlord Durnowo. Grandfather Krassow bought himself free from serfdom, moved to the city - more precisely, he moved into a hut in the poor suburbs - and finally confessed to the judge every one of his atrocities as a church robber. Father Krassow ran a general store in Durnowka.
Tikhon became - like his father - a shopkeeper and leased a tavern at the Worgol train station near Durnowka. Tichon - called Strammbein by the Russians - “takes care of” Junker Durnowo and takes over his estate. The now 50-year-old Tichon was less fortunate with his wives. The first, a deaf-mute cook, accidentally crushes their youngest child in their sleep. Nastassja Petrovna, his second wife, gives birth to dead girl after girl.
Troubled times are coming. Landowners seek protection from the authorities. It is said that Durnowkaers want to kill Tikhon.
After the death of their dear mother, the brothers had roamed the governorate as peddlers for several years and finally parted in anger. Unexpectedly, the two make up. Tikhon is amazed - Kuzma, an avid reader of Turgenev's Rauch , has composed a volume of poetry and has written about the Russo-Turkish War . He had worked for a Jelezer cattle breeder and spent ten years in Voronezh as a broker . In Voronezh he had had a relationship with a married woman and had become a Tolstoyan . Tikhon would like the clerk Kuzma to manage Durnowka. Without further ado, Kusma does not accept, because he is an atheist and an anarchist . Flaying people is out of the question. Kusma knows about the brother's business practices - for example, delaying payments.
Nastassja Petrovna dies on the way to the train station. Tikhon finds a buyer for Durnowka and moves to town. He invites Kusma to the trip: "Come ... with ... brother, get away from these bandits!" Kusma goes with him, even though he thinks the brother is a crook - if only because he is the "bandit" Denis, a shoemaker, who has returned from Tula . also called Deniska, with Avdotja, called "the young", married.
Kusma tries to work as a grain dealer with his brother in town.
shape
Minor characters, who are mostly mentioned in an episode, contribute to the confusing impression of the text. However, Bunin makes an exception when he narrates the story of the shoemaker Denis and the docile, hardworking wife Avdotja: Denis, one of Tikhon's rebellious subordinates, leaves his superior and wants to forge his fortune in distant Tula. At the very end of the text, Denis comes back to Durnowka, the scene of the action, and Kusma marries him to Avdotja in a sprawling sequence. The reader has to turn back: Who was Denis?
For long stretches the prose work is poetically dense. Descriptions of natural phenomena in southern Russia across the seasons guarantee a high level of enjoyment if you read carefully. For example, the winter: "... in the background shone yellowish, surrounded by frost rings, the low sun ... the snowdrifts blinked corpse-green in the rosy glow, their ridges and nicks cast bluish shadows."
Philosophical views of the world are repeated over and over again, but are by no means boring; one of these topics: How quickly that little human life goes by! Or - Ivanuschka, a minor character, is convinced: "Whoever takes the sacrament dies." The dying man impresses on the daughter-in-law, "when death knocks, she should say he is not at home."
The narrator's omniscience - even the secondary character Denis is allowed to think - betrays the novice Bunin. The text has form weaknesses. The most serious is superficial indifference. Despite reading a passage several times, the reader can only guess what is really meant. If, for example, Tikhon "takes care of" Junker Durnowo, the question must be allowed: How? But Bunin is silent.
As a rule, the mentioned villages cannot be moored in large parts of Russia - for example Ulyanovka .
Bunin does set time stamps - for example he mentions Saltykov's year of death in 1889, tells about Muromzew and mentions Durnowo and Vitja , but the reader cannot use them to construct a text-related time scale. It appears, however, that the story goes back to 1906, as serfdom was abolished 45 years earlier.
The story is definitely worth reading - if only because it is bursting with primordial elements: For example, the gray man - a minor character, the father of the shoemaker Denis - slaughters a mare in winter. Although he ties her mouth shut, he accidentally does not tie her up. “Splashing blood on the snow”, the dying animal pursues its fleeing murderer as long as it has enough strength, but cannot overtake him because of the deep snow. And there is a lot going on. Makar, the pilgrim, another of the minor characters, assaults a woman on the street with a friend. Dragged into a hut, the victim is raped by the two men in turns for four days. Now the criminals are in jail.
Quotes
- The poet Kusma wants to write about the village: "All of Russia is one single village ..."
- "For Tichon the city was a pipe dream, he despised and hated the village from the bottom of his heart."
Social criticism
The brothers Tichon and Kusma live in the Russian black earth belt. The topsoil is two arsin (about one and a half meters) thick and yet a starvation winter can be survived in the fertile region every four to five years.
Bunin writes about Tikhon: "The news of the terrible defeats of the Russian army drove him into gleeful enthusiasm ..."
Tichon asks the sensible, capable farmer Jakow from Durnowka: "Are you waiting for the uprising?" Jakow replies in the negative, but replies: "... there would have been an order ... under no circumstances to work for the old wages for the rulers."
The shoemaker Denis tells about the prostitutes during one of the above-mentioned famines in the poor district of the city: "If you gave someone half a pound of bread, she ate it right under you."
Bunin writes about his Russia : ... a "country with over a hundred million illiterates ..."
In 1909, the author foresees the next Russian bloodbath: Tichon fled the village into the city because he was afraid of the "peasant pack". It wanted to beat him to death because he had beaten her too hard.
reception
- 1982. Kaspar writes that Bunin describes the conditions in the Russian village between 1861 and 1905. The model for Kuzma was the poet Yegor Nasarow from Yelez. Bunin also incorporated episodes from Nikolai Uspenski's life and his own experiences. Denis is drawn as an urbanized farmer. Although Gorky appreciated the text, a number of other writers failed to understand the writing issue. Only the critic Wazlaw Worowski did justice to the writing intention to some extent.
- Boris Saizew and Alexander Twardowski commented on the text.
- January 12, 2012 in the FAZ : Sabine Berking: All of Russia is one village
German-language editions
- Used edition
- The village. German by Erich Ahrndt . P. 273–432 in: Iwan Bunin: Antonäpfel. Stories 1892–1911. Editing and epilogue: Karlheinz Kasper . 536 pages. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1982
Web links
- The text
- Entry in the Laboratory of Fantastics (Russian)
- Entries in WorldCat
Individual evidence
- ↑ Edition used, p. 432 and eng. The Village (Bunin novel)
- ↑ Edition used, p. 321, 12. Zvo
- ↑ Russian Дурновка
- ↑ Russian Дурново
- ↑ Edition used, p. 412, 7th Zvu
- ↑ Edition used, p. 408, 7th Zvo
- ↑ See for example the edition used, p. 326 middle
- ↑ Edition used, p. 406, 11. Zvo
- ↑ Edition used, p. 332, 5th Zvu
- ↑ Edition used, p. 336, 6. Zvo
- ↑ Edition used, p. 359, middle
- ↑ Edition used, p. 411
- ↑ Edition used, p. 348, 8. Zvo
- ↑ Edition used, p. 401, 9th Zvu
- ↑ Edition used, p. 290, 7. Zvo
- ↑ Edition used, pp. 292 to 294 above
- ↑ Edition used, p. 309, 2nd Zvo
- ↑ Edition used, p. 421, above
- ↑ Russian Успенский, Николай Васильевич
- ↑ used edition, p 525, 4. ACR and S. 527
- ↑ Russian Зайцев, Борис Константинович
- ↑ eng. Critical reception
- ↑ Sabine Berking: All of Russia is one village