Arseniev's life

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The Life of Arsenyev ( Russian Жизнь Арсеньева , Schisn Arsenjewa ) is a novel by the Russian Nobel Prize winner for literature Ivan Bunin , which was written in France between 1929 and 1939 and was published in full by the Chekhov Publishing House in New Vork in 1952 .

Ivan Bunin in 1901 in a photo of Maxim Dmitriev

The storyline of the novel broadly spans the years 1871 to 1891 in Russia . Bunin was born in 1870. Nevertheless, literary scholars and contemporary witnesses largely agree: the five books in the novel have autobiographical traits. Vladislav Khodasevich takes the text as a “fictional autobiography” of Bunin.

content

1

The 50-year-old aristocratic first-person narrator Alexej Arsenjew, called Aljoscha, names his father's manor in central Russia as his place of birth; more precisely - the Vorwerk Kamenka. The landscape there essentially consists of almost endless black earth fields. Wysselki, Roshdestwo, Novossjolki and Baturino are in the vicinity. Chernava, Jelets and Lipetsk are further away .

The father Alexander Sergejewitsch Arsenjew had gambled away his fortune in Tambov . In the impoverished family, at least a tutor was teaching the children. By the time he was admitted to high school, Alyosha learned the Don Quixote , Robinson and, at his mother's behest, the French language from this tutor named Baskakow .

Aljoscha's older brother Georgi studies Lavrov and Chernyshevsky during the holidays . After the Epiphany , Alyosha is confronted with death for the first time. His sister Nadja has a fever, loses consciousness and dies. In the following spring, the maternal grandmother dies. In contrast to the death of the sister, the death of the grandmother creates amusement. Because the family becomes wealthy and moves to Baturino on the inherited estate. The father will later gamble it away again. Kamenka will be sold and Baturino mortgaged.

2

Aljoscha has to go to town first. He doesn't mention her name, but its walls are reminiscent of the history of the principalities of Suzdal and Ryazan . Aljoscha enters the grammar school that Georgi graduated with flying colors. The brother is now studying at the Imperial University in Moscow . Aljoscha spends four years in high school. Learning is easy for him.

Brother Georgi is arrested as a socialist for "criminal activity". The father is beside himself. Such people are known from the area - for example the Rogachev brothers or Fraulein Subbotin. Is someone from your own family supposed to have "worked underground"? That seems quite impossible to the father. Even Aljoscha cannot understand why Georgi, a nobleman who was predicted to have a bright future as a scientist, wants to “go among the people”. In any case, Georgi had been in hiding for a long time. When he had left cover, he had been reported to the police by the administrator of one of Arsenyev's neighboring properties after his arrival in Baturino. God immediately punished the steward. When the gendarmes appeared in Baturino, the traitor had been killed on the same day by a mighty old falling tree. Georgi was meanwhile being brought to Kharkov , the seat of that underground organization, under police surveillance . The mother, in tears, had vowed constant fasting. God heard the mother. Georg was released from prison a year later, banished to Baturino and placed under police supervision.

Aljoscha's father, who gambled away all good and was nevertheless a realist in his own way, had to admit that there is nothing left to manage. So Aljoscha could also become a second Pushkin or Lermontov because of his wishes . Aljoscha is thrilled. He is leaving high school. He would like to become a second Shukowski or Baratynski .

Aljoscha's brother Nikolai marries a German - the daughter of a manager in the village of Vasilievskoye. Aljoscha visits Nikolai and gets to know the first love of his life - the neat Annchen, a young girl from Reval ; Niece of the German relative Wiegand by marriage. For Aljoscha there is another reason to visit Vasilyevskoye more often. There is no library in Baturino, but there is in Pissarev's house, the husband of a cousin. Aljoscha rummages and finds books by Sumarokow , Anna Bunina, Dershawin , Batjuschkow , Shukowski, Wenewitinow , Jasykow , Koslow and Baratynski. Aljoscha is again confronted with death. Pissarev dies after a stroke .

3

After Pissarev's funeral it is difficult to say goodbye to Vasilyevskoye. Aljoscha found Faust in the library :

So I create on the whizzing loom of time ...

Saying goodbye to Annchen is a minor matter. After all - she sits on his lap. He feels "for the first time in life the sweet burden of a female body".

Alyosha was not yet sixteen when one of his poems appeared in a Petersburg magazine. Poems are Aljoscha's world. Why did his idol Nadson have to die so early! Alyosha also wants to become famous. The next love, that of Lisa Bibikowa, is of a poetic nature of its own: Aljoscha observes how the way of life of the Russian landed gentry is becoming increasingly poor. The above-mentioned poet Jasykow described the shabby wallpaper on the walls of certain dwellings of the nobility to match the decline. And Alyosha strives for the open air; spent the early Russian summer with Lisa during the first bathing days in June. Jasmine and rose scents are inhaled as well as the "smell of the mud in the pond warmed by the sun".

Aljoscha is now doing something completely different than poeticizing. He helps bring in the harvest and negotiates like an adult on behalf of his father with a grain buyer. The latter has read Aljoscha's poems in the newspaper and wishes further success. Aljoscha feels encouraged to take the next step in his life: leave his father sitting on his run-down estate. Before that, the young man gets involved with the married 20-year-old Tonka. She is employed as a maid on the estate of Aljoscha's brother Nikolai. “We didn't feel love,” writes the first-person narrator. The husband makes short work - travels to the Liwna with his wife Tonka . From the dream.

4th

Georgi is no longer supervised by the police and drives back to Kharkov. Aljoscha goes hunting with his brother Nikolai in autumn. Aljoscha roams the country alone. Via Schipowo he approaches Kroptowka, the ancestral home of the Lermontows. At the place where Lermontov's father mostly lived, Aljoscha, who takes Lermontov as an example, comes to the conclusion: "Now I've had enough of Baturino."

He reads Pushkin's trip to Arzerum, deeply impressed . Where should Aljoscha turn now? He wants to orient himself on the great role models. Tolstoy is out of the question, simply because he wants to settle a debt before the people. Aljoscha neither wants to serve the people and certainly does not want to sacrifice himself for the people. He goes to Oryol , the city of Leskov and Turgenev. In the local editorial office of the voice he wants to gain a foothold. Apparently that fails because he continues to Kharkov to see Georgi, who is employed in the city library. He spent several years in Kharkov, joining people who had been in prison or who were exiled. Aljoscha cannot really make friends with these "fighters". He travels to the Crimea in early spring and returns to Oryol via Sevastopol .

Anno 1892: Varvara Pashchenko (* 1869; † 1918) is said to have taken Bunin as a model for the Lika.

In the editorial office of the voice , the landlady Nadja Avilova introduced him to her cousin Lika. Aljoscha wonders who he has fallen in love with so quickly and says: "This is how another love began for me, which was to become a great event in my life."

5

Worried Nadja Avilova once asked her cousin in the Orjol editorial office how things should go on with Aljoscha. Because - according to Avilova - Lika is only in love with this man. The latter overhears by chance from the next room. The narrator quotes Lika's answer: “Can't you see, Nadja, that I truly love him? ... it is a thousand times better than you think. "

Aljoscha is not only present in the editorial office of his newspaper. He travels to Russia - seeks out his brother Georgi, who moved from Kharkov to the Minorussian province. Aljoscha stops at his brother Nikolai's in Baturino, travels to Kursk , Charkow, Smolensk , Vitebsk , Petersburg, Polotsk , Moscow and back to Georgi's little Russian city. Aljoscha joined Georgi's side as an employee of the Zemstvo Office for Statistics, advanced to the position of custodian of the Zemstvo library and took part in the congress of Zemstvo delegates. During all the restlessness he meets Lika here and there. Eventually he loses sight of the woman who loved him so much. Finally, Aljoscha received the news of his death. Lika succumbed to pneumonia after a week's sickbed .

Quote

  • Aljoscha's father raises the son: "There is no worse evil than despair."

shape

The structure of the novel appears to be jagged in at least three ways.

First, the reader stumbles across some form experiments in the philosophical novel. For example towards the end of the fifth book - more precisely, from the 11th of the 31 chapters - the name of the beloved - meaning Lika - is always mentioned in the third person singular. Why? Kasper quotes Bunin's answer to this question on April 10, 1939: "Lika should not be" a blatantly real figure ", but rather express the inconstancy of the woman's character in general." In general, the women in Aljoscha's life seem worth mentioning at best : The first love Annchen is a simple girl and nothing more. You have to say goodbye to it, which gives "penetrating bitter satisfaction". Why? Kasper has possible answers to the question. In contrast, the description of Pissarev's funeral - which happened shortly beforehand - is practically rolled out. The unfathomable death is discussed, but love is neglected. Or another example - the covert bringing in and dealing with history: The novel was written during the disgusting years of emigration. Bunin - an opponent of the Bolsheviks - had to leave his Russian homeland for ever and ever, sung about in the novel with great affection (the prose is interspersed with poems; impressive natural shrines dominate over all four seasons). All in all, the novel could well be subtitled with a longing for the old homeland . Towards the end of the 1920s - while the second book of the novel was being written - Bunin asks: “But where was he later when Russia went under?” By the fall, Bunin means the October Revolution . And "he" is one of the numerous secondary characters - the petty bourgeois Rostovtsev, with whom Aljoscha lived in board and lodging as a sublet during high school.

Second, Bunin comes across to the reader in a surprising way. At the beginning or at the end of a chapter we sometimes look far ahead. For example, after Nikolai married the German in the second book, the narrator chats that there were three years left before the Arsenyev family dissolved.

Third, the temporal continuum is broken. Towards the end of the 4th book - in the 20th of the 22nd chapter - the first-person narrator makes a leap in time from Russia at the end of the 19th century to southern France in 1929. The 5th and last book of the novel was written in 1932 began. The fifth book goes back to the 19th century.

reception

  • 1979, Kasper writes, "With his late work, Bunin wants to say as little personal, purely private as possible, but as much general information as possible about the relationship between man and the world." Bunin justified this: "General human issues are eternal. Existence is more important than the individual day. ”(Kasper quotes Bunin in the afterword of the edition used, p. 410, 5. Zvo) Nevertheless - Bunin took his brother Juli as a model for Aljoscha's brother Georgi, the socialist.

German-language editions

First edition:
  • First passion. Novel. 187 pages. Sperber-Verlag, Zurich 1938
Output used:
  • Arseniev's life. Translated from the Russian by Georg Schwarz . 415 pages in: Iwan Bunin: Collected works in individual volumes. Published by Karlheinz Kasper . Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1979 (1st edition)

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Bunin states the place and time of origin: " Meeralpen 1927–1929, 1933" (edition used, p. 389 below). A preliminary version had already been printed in the Paris Sovremennyje sapiski in 1930 (Russian Жизнь Арсеньева , 4th Zvo).
  2. ↑ One of the two is Dmitri Rogachev (Russian. Рогачёв, Дмитрий Михайлович ) from Oryol .
  3. ↑ Since Bunin only tells the family name came from the area one of at least three Orjolerinnen in question: Nadezhda (russ. Субботина, Надежда Дмитриевна , Maria) (russ. Субботина, Мария Дмитриевна or Eugenia Subbotina) (russ. Субботина, Евгения Дмитриевна ) .
  4. ↑ Autobiographical relation to the Orjoler Zeitung Die Voice : Bunin worked in the editorial office of the Orjoler Zeitung Orlowski westnik ( Orjoler Anzeiger , Russian Орловский вестник ). In the editorial office, Bunin met Varvara Pashchenko, the role model for her lover Lika.
  5. ↑ Bunin quotes the Russian peasants who say: "Death is like the sun, you can't look it in the face." (Edition used, p. 150, 15th Zvu) Kasper writes, "One of the basic motifs of the novel, the dualism of life and death already appears on the first pages. ”(Kasper in the afterword of the edition used, p. 402, 9th Zvu) And:“ Bunin sees the main function of his book in overcoming death and fear before the inevitable end. "(Kasper in the afterword of the edition used, p. 403, 15. Zvo)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kasper in the afterword of the edition used, p. 399, 9. Zvu to p. 400, 10. Zvo
  2. ↑ Kasper in the afterword of the edition used, p. 395, 3rd Zvo
  3. ^ Russian. The life of Arsenyev, autobiographical motifs
  4. ↑ Russian Каменка
  5. ↑ Russian Выселки
  6. ↑ Russian Рождество
  7. ↑ Russian Новоселки
  8. ↑ Russian Батурино
  9. ↑ Russian Чернава
  10. ↑ Russian Васильевское
  11. ↑ Russian Бунина, Анна Петровна
  12. ↑ Russian Козлов, Иван Иванович
  13. ↑ Faust I, Night: the Spirit ( Memento of the original from April 24, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. to Faust @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.wissen-im-netz.info
  14. ↑ Edition used, p. 154, 10. Zvo
  15. ↑ Russian Надсон, Семён Яковлевич
  16. ↑ Edition used, p. 172, 2. Zvo
  17. ↑ Edition used, p. 189, 12. Zvu
  18. ↑ Russian Кропотово-Лермонтово
  19. ↑ Alexander Pushkin: The journey to Arzrum during the campaign in 1829. ISBN 3-932109-09-0
  20. ↑ Russian Голос
  21. ↑ Russian Varvara Pashchenko - probably the model for the Lika
  22. ↑ Edition used, p. 248, 13. Zvu
  23. ↑ Edition used, p. 294, 4th Zvu
  24. ↑ Edition used, p. 206, 19. Zvo
  25. ↑ Kasper in the afterword of the edition used, p. 412, 13. Zvo
  26. ↑ Kasper in the afterword of the edition used, p. 407 and p. 409 below
  27. ↑ Edition used, p. 80, 17. Zvo
  28. ↑ See also Kasper in the afterword of the edition used, p. 415, 9. Zvo
  29. ↑ Kasper in the afterword of the edition used, pp. 391–415
  30. ↑ Russian Юлий
  31. ^ First Passion , Zurich 1938