The Sakhalin falcon

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Vladimir Korolenko

The Falcon of Sakhalin , also The Refugees of Sakhalin ( Russian Соколинец , Sokolinez ), is a short story by the Russian writer Vladimir Korolenko , which was written in 1885 and published in the same year in issue 4 of the Severny Westnik . Julius Grünberg's translation into German came onto the German-language book market in Leipzig in 1891 .

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Frame narration

In his Yakutian dwelling, a properly heated yurt , the anonymous first-person narrator is visited by the Russian tramp Vasily, alias Bagylai. The narrator has heard of such a vagabond from the Urals and invites him to stay the night. Vasily does not deny the presumed origin and gladly accepts the welcome, because the outside temperature is around minus forty degrees Celsius.

The narrator has also heard that Vasily has been living in a neighboring Yakut community for two years. The good-natured Yakuts gave the "settler vagabond" a house, a bull and grain to start with. Nevertheless, Vasily hates life in the inhospitable foreign country far from home. He mourns his sheltered youth. Vasily does not want to talk about his “life that was broken into pieces” afterwards. Instead, he tells the host the story of his escape from Falcon Island.

After Vasily finished the report and made use of the hospitality of the narrator, the latter experienced the guest at a folk festival in an equestrian competition against the Tatars . Vasili finally leaves the court that the generous Yakuts had given him. The trail of the vagabond is lost in Eastern Siberia .

Internal narration

In the 1870s, Vasily landed in Due on a prisoner transport. The elderly inmate Buran who was incarcerated there had been a vagabond for forty years, fled from Falcon Island years ago and knows the only possible escape route. A group of at least ten exiles could, in Buran's opinion, dare to take the boat trip across a shallow stretch of sea north of Due. Two boats could be exchanged for winter coats by the fishermen - local Giljaks . Besides Buran, Vasily persuades several other prisoners to flee: the tramp Volodjka, the athletic Makarov, two Circassians , a sly Tatar and a few more Siberian experts from the guild of banished tramps. Twelve good coats, long knives, hatchets and a kettle for cooking fish soup are provided.

Wassili commands the company. Buran, who knows the way including all the military posts along the way, marches northwards for twelve long days. When the refugees, who are resting for the next stage, are surprised in their sleep by a military patrol led by a certain Saltanov, one of the two Circassians cuts off Saltanov's head with a knife. Buran is hit by an enemy bullet during the skirmish. Before the old man dies on Falcon Island, he refers his cronies to a merchant Tarkhanov, who lives in a deserted farm near Nikolayevsk on the mainland . After the happy crossing, a Russian from Tobolsk also helps the refugees : Stepan Savelyich Samarow, a veteran Nikolayevsk prison guard, is retiring in Eastern Siberia and cheating the incumbent Nikolayevsk state power.

German-language editions

Used edition

  • The Sakhalin falcon. German by Cornelius Bergmann . Pp. 115–188 in Vladimir Korolenko: Makar's Dream and Other Tales. With an afterword by Herbert Krempien . 275 pages. Verlag der Nation, Berlin 1980 (1st edition)

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ The author can be accepted as the narrator, because from December 1881 to the end of 1884 Korolenko lived - exiled to Siberia - in an Amgaer yurt (edition used, p. 269 below). The narrator counts himself among those circles "of the intelligentsia who have an adverse fate in these remote areas" (edition used, p. 125, 10th Zvu).
  2. ↑ With the falcon island Sakhalin is meant.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Russian Korolenko bibliography 3rd entry 1885
  2. ↑ Russian Дуэ