The Kurilov case

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Kurilow case is a novel by Irène Némirovsky that appeared in France in 1933 as “ L'affaire Courilof ” and was first translated into German in 1995 . He describes the life of a man who worked as a terrorist in the Tsarist era and who worked for the Russian Revolution in the Cheka for a year from 1917 . Since then, living and fatally ill under a false name in exile in France in Nice, in 1931 he wrote his memories of his first assassination attempt on the Minister for Education Valerian Alexandrovich Kurilov in 1903. - The novel dedicated to her husband Michel Epstein is after the successful David Golderand two other novellas - " The Ball " (1930 / German 2005) and " Les mouches d'automne " (1931) - the second major literary work by Irène Némirovsky.

content

The novel is a manuscript fiction based on the short frame narration as an introduction , in which the first-person narrator wrote down his autobiography shortly before his death .

introduction

The immediate trigger for Léon M., in 1931 at the age of 50, who has suffered from tuberculosis since childhood , to write his biography is his encounter with a man named Baranow, who calls him Marcel Legrand on the deserted terrace of a café in Nice and asks if he might not have been involved in the Kurilov case in 1903. Baranow pretends to be a peaceful pensioner who worked as a policeman under Tsar Nicholas II for ten years to protect Kurilov and so came across Léon M. as Marcel Legrand in the minister's environment. Whose true identity he had never found out, and Leon M. aka Marcel Legrand does not exist even now award, although he admits in the revolution " top " " pretty mitgemischt to have" (page 12). Both confess to each other that they contributed to the death of a number of people that they cannot understand. Léon M. mentions a “ simpleton ”, a “ little rosy Jew named Blumenthal from the Chicago Tribune ”, who once asked him in Russia the number of those killed on his instructions. For the ex-police officer, his killings happened while on duty and therefore he doesn't care, which Léon M. confirms with an “ indifferent, tired voice ” for the stones he “took from the board ”. Because " in those difficult times back then everyone helped out " (p. 13 ff.)

Autobiography

Childhood and adolescence Léon M. does not consider himself vain and important enough for there to be an autobiography about him. He feels too tired and too close to death for that. Nevertheless, as “ the legend Léon M. ” he belongs to the “ iconography of the October Revolution ” (p. 23), which he tries to remember for himself. It becomes clear to him that it is the Kurilov case that has seized him the most, because he had a personal relationship with him and he learned more from Kurilov than he suspected.

From his parents' point of view he sees himself “ in a kind of 'dynastic revolutionary tradition' ” (p. 20), so that he has been a Bolshevik and a member of the party since he was born. He was born after their deportation in Siberia . When the father is arrested again, his mother goes with him and his two little brothers to Geneva , where she heads a terrorist committee. When he was ten years old, she died of tuberculosis shortly after the death of her two youngest sons. He remembers her best as a woman writing with tired eyes behind a pince-nez. One of the leaders of the party in exile, a Russian-born naturalized Swiss doctor, took care of him, allowed him to heal in a sanatorium and taught him not only languages ​​but also the basics of medicine. His revolutionary life began at the age of 18, initially in France, but without fire and strength and without a tendency to sing revolutionary songs and to believe in a romantic side of the revolution (p. 23 ff.). In 1903 the committee sent him to Russia, where he was supposed to liquidate the minister of the tsarist school system. What drives him is “ the conviction that a social revolution is inevitable, necessary, as right and just as human concerns can be. The love of power drove me as much as the longing for a certain human warmth, which I lacked and which I only found there ”(p. 26). Because “ the power, the illusion, to determine human fate is addictive like smoking, like wine ” (p. 32).

The assassination After two failed assassinations on the school minister Kurilow, Léon M., as a Swiss citizen Marcel Legrand and doctor of medicine from the house of Kurilov in Saint Petersburg , is to take the third attempt to kill the minister in front of a large public so that it can be seen in the international press cannot be ignored. Kurilov was chosen by the committee because he embodies the repression side of the tsarist regime in a special way. He “ does not belong to the high nobility and, as often happens, pretended to be 'more papal than the Pope', and even surpassed the hatred of the revolution and the contempt of the people that characterized the country's ruling class ” (p. 33). The committee acts on the “ conviction that I risked my death at least as much as the minister himself ” and sees this as the justification for the murder (p. 37).

He quickly succeeds in winning the trust of Kurilov, who suffers from liver cancer and who only has a short life expectancy. After he got to know Kurilov better and better and learned that he would soon be ousted from office by an intrigue aimed at his wife's past life, he refused to carry out the assassination attempt. However, after talking to a party official, he agreed to do it anyway, should Kurilov be back in office on a certain date. When Kurilov stood by his wife and was actually dismissed, he ignored the concerns of a delegation of concerned professors who wanted to prevent the student unrest from escalating out of hatred for his scheming successor, Dahl. After Dahl is held responsible for the fatal shots at schoolchildren that fell under the Tsar's window, Kurilov, contrary to M's expectations, actually returns to the ministerial office, which forces M. to keep his promise.

Shortly before the planned assassination attempt, however, he is suspected; he flees to Persia and, given a new identity, immediately travels back to Petersburg. A party member who has been assigned to him since his entry to Russia brings the bomb to the theater, where Kurilov is to be executed on the occasion of Leine's visit to the tsar's theater, accompanied by the German Emperor Wilhelm II . Since he hesitates briefly when Kurilov recognizes him, his companion throws the bomb; but instead of them he confesses himself to be the intended perpetrator. He is sentenced to death, she to deportation. He was pardoned in the course of an amnesty granted at the birth of the heir to the throne, was able to escape from forced labor in Siberia and in 1905, after breaking up with the party's terrorist faction, took part in the revolution . From 1903 to 1917, however, he spent most of the time in prison or in exile, so that he was only back in Russia shortly before the October Revolution .

Work at the Cheka from 1917-1919 Léon M. is party commissioner and entrusted with a job at the Cheka, which he regards as a " terrible task ", for which " a strong and personal hatred would be necessary " but which he lacks (p . 29). In doing so, he has to state for himself that it is easy " to kill strangers, human beings like those who passed by in front of me on those nights of 1919 " (p. 156). At the same time he understands for a brief moment those whom he sends to death “ like brothers, like my own soul ” (p. 157). In contrast to some of his conspicuously violent comrades, he considers himself an ordinary person, “ a sad, coughing little man with a pince-nez on a blunt nose and delicate hands ” (p. 30). When the politics of the top management changes, he is sent into exile and lives with the identity of a certain Jacques Lourié in his house in Nice; Lourié, " who, convicted of revolutionary conspiracy, died of typhus in the casemates of Peter and Paul, [was] a Jew from Latvia who had acquired French citizenship " (p. 30 f.).

people

Léon M. apparently cannot reveal his identity because he has changed it too often: from little Lonja for his mother and his Swiss environment to Marcel Legrand in Saint Petersburg, then another change before the assassination, from 1917 Léon M. as Commissioner and finally Jacques Lourié. He was never particularly interested in his life (p. 39). In what keeps him alive, the party that gave him his ultimate identity plays a leading role. But she gave him the documents of a dead man. In Nice he lives from writing: “ from the small income from my books and articles in the newspapers and magazines of the party ” (p. 30). When he thinks of “ that room in which we slept fifteen and twenty, in 1917, when we seized power ”, he longs for the fact that he would like to return to Russia (p. 32). In Nice, too, with a view to the people of the big city, he says that he loves the “ crowd, the people ”. Because he has no family because, as he ironically says, he “ still maintains the old, healthy revolutionary traditions ” (p. 13). He is interested in the further fate of the Kurilovs, so he learns that the wife was shot in the revolution, but their two children are alive. Haunted by ever new attacks of his tuberculosis and spitting blood, it is “ this immutable loneliness ” that he loves (p. 158). It also keeps him doubting what he should do for the party, and puts a question mark behind what it calls “justice”: “ Destroying the unjust for the happiness of the majority? "(P. 157). Since he is most likely to see himself as a role-player who in the last sentence of his writing says “ Fortunately, for me at least, the piece will soon be over ” (p. 201), others can quickly call him “ jumping jacks ” or “ clowns "Appear (p. 157 f.), However seriously they take themselves and how seriously he has to take them, so that at the moment when he sees himself exposed by Kurilov, he" happily fired a revolver bullet right in the face " would have (p. 194). He goes the furthest with his fatalistic judgment when he says: “ What a slaughterhouse, a revolution! Is it all worth the effort ...? Basically nothing is worthwhile, not even life ”(p. 153). He can respond to the addictive use of power with increasing indifference (pp. 26, 27, 30, 32, 39). When Kurilov dies, he has the feeling of being lost in the roaring crowd: " I felt a feeling of relief " (p. 200).

Valerian Alexandrowitsch Kurilow is finally marked by death, which his family doctor Marcel Legrand alias Lonja alias Léon M. withholds from him for a long time. Although Kurilov suspects it, the office is his life for him, because he likes to " walk between two rows of deeply bowing people " (p. 144). His corset, uniform and medals give bearing to his fatally scarred body. This corresponds to his conviction: " Russia will forget my enemies, but it will remember me ... " (p. 136). Once he helped a Jewish widow with money through his wife, who indirectly blames him for the fact that her eldest son was suspected of being a revolutionary through an agent provocateur of the interior minister, whereupon he killed himself. For Marcel Legrand, Kurilov's help is an impressive occasion to “ think with horror of the murder of this pompous fool ” (p. 125). What made him admire Kurilov and made his project even more difficult is his attitude not to give in to the tsar's urge to part with his improper wife, an ex-operetta singer from Paris. On the other hand, Legrand sees how Kurilov risks being shot at protesting students in order to get revenge on his competitor (pp. 180–184). In addition, Kurilov has dealings with people who express themselves in his society about Russian conditions: “ One would have to create a secret society whose task it would be to exterminate these damned socialists, revolutionaries, communists, free thinkers and all Jews, of course (.. .) These people, this revolutionary rascal, deserve no more pity than mad dogs ... ”(p. 102 f.). Kurilow, who also always felt his office to be a burden, justifies himself by saying that every creation means destruction, whereby he sees himself justified by his obedience to " higher motives " (p. 193).

Victoria Saltykov is the mother of Léon M. alias Lonja. She is “ the type of intellectuals of the eighties [1880s] ” with a slender, feeble figure and light, smooth hair (p. 18). She is clumsy in the household and with her children. She once expected to be executed after shooting a gendarmerie captain who had tortured an old, sick political prisoner. As she tells her son, she would have felt her " death as a sublime protest against a world of tears and blood " (p. 19). She refuses to treat her fatal pulmonary tuberculosis by pointing out the helpless and defenseless female workers in the factories. She rarely strokes her children with an outstretched hand. In Switzerland, she is involved by supplying terrorists in France with explosives and brochures via Lake Geneva.

Fanny Zart is a medical student and Léon Ms supervisor in Russia. In order not to be recognized in his vicinity, she disguises herself as a farmer. She is the antithesis of his mother: young, robust and with black hair " that grew into her cheeks like a whiskers " (p. 42). Her brother, a " little Jewish banker with a round tummy " in Petersburg, pays for her studies, but avoids dealing with her. Thus “ the hatred of the possessing classes takes on the concrete form for them ” of their brother and makes them a passionate supporter of the revolution. When Léon hesitates for a moment, she throws the bomb that kills Kurilov in his place. While sobbing, she realizes what she has just done, but after a few years and her escape from lifelong deportation, she carries out a second successful assassination attempt and hangs herself in the cell after her arrest.

“The memories of a terrorist” by Boris Savinkov as Némirovsky's source

In 1931, the French translation of Boris Savinkov's “ Memories of a Terrorist ” published in 1909 and supplemented in 1917 was published by Payot in Paris . Némirovsky changed a lot from this book, which was fundamental to Albert Camus and his drama “ The Righteous ” from 1949, without Camus knowing anything about Némirovsky. For the portrayal of Fanny Zart and Léon Ms, Némirovsky borrowed from the discussions that Savinkov had the terrorists have before and after their attacks, in which they consider what is allowed and when there are limits to the bombing. Léon M's statement that he would also drop the bomb on Kurilov in the company of his family with his wife and children (p. 197) finds its counterpart in the arguments reproduced in Savinkov on pages 116 ff. And 258 ff. The last identity of Léon Ms - Jacques Lourié - has a counterpart in Savinkov, namely in Rachel Vladimirovna Lourié, who came from a wealthy Jewish merchant family, joined the party of the Social Revolutionaries and shot herself in Paris in 1908 (Savinkov, p. 452).

The panorama of the revolutionary activities in Russia, as a result of which Némirovsky's family had to flee Moscow, designed by Némirovsky in their characters, corresponds to the insight formulated by Enzo Traverso in 2007 that the history of Europe in the 20th century until 1945 was that of a continent torn by civil war is in which good and bad coexisted like the poles of a magnetic field. This shows that human nature, in the face of the extreme, always consists of a mixture of both. This is what makes Kurilow, but also the people around Léon M. and himself with his constantly changing identities in his eyes " jumping jacks " and " clowns ", as if the same piece would continue with the revolution.

In “ The Kurilov Case ”, Némirovsky shows the inner ambiguity of the actors, already depicted in Savinkov. Her biographers Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt summarize this in a statement on the dispute that broke out in the USA in 2008 about how anti-Semitic the author was: “ Némirovsky refused to sympathize with anyone. Some Jews in their novels are villains, but so are some French politicians; as well as some Russians who supported the pogroms, as in their first book from 1926 'L'enfant génial' and in their last before the war ' The Dogs and the Wolves '. Némirovsky wanted to be free from all constraints. That was undoubtedly dangerous - and she's still paying for it. "

Remarks

  1. ↑ It is quoted from the 1995 edition, which was published as the 121st volume in the series “The Other Library” edited by Hans Magnus Enzensberger .
  2. ↑ Boris Savinkov, Memories of a Terrorist . Translated from Russian by Arkady Maslow. Revised and supplemented by Barbara Conrad. With a preliminary and follow-up report by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Nördlingen (Franz Greno) 1985.
  3. ↑ While Némirovsky lets Fanny break out into sobs after the assassination attempt and say “ 'Dead! Dead! He is dead ...!' 'But who?' I asked blankly. ,Dead! Dead! Kurilov is dead! And it was me, I killed him ...! ' (...),Dead! And it was we who killed him ...! ' ”(P. 200 f.), Savinkov says:“ At the same moment Dora leaned over to me and began to sob (...): 'We killed him ... I killed him ... me. ' 'Who?' I asked, thinking that she was talking about Kaljaev. 'The Grand Duke' ”(Savinkov, p. 124).
  4. ↑ Albert Camus' borrowings from Savinkov are more direct than those from Némirovsky and are primarily aimed at what Enzensberger wrote in 1966 under the heading " The beautiful souls of terror " about the " tender-feeling murderers " (Camus, L'homme révolté , 1951) wrote. See Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Politische Kolportagen , Frankfurt a. M. (Fischer) 1966, p. 196.
  5. ^ Enzo Traverso, A feu et à sang. De la guerre civile européenne 1914-1945 , Paris (Stock) 2007, p. 111.
  6. ↑ See Olivier Philipponnat, Patrick Lienhardt, La vie d'Irène Némirovsky , Paris (Grasset-Denoël) 2007, ISBN 2246687217 .
  7. ↑ Cf. on the duration, scope and severity of the dispute: Jonathan Weiss, “La réception des œuvres d'Irène Némirovsky aux États-Unis”, Roman 20-50, 2012/2 (n ° 54), p. 125-135.

literature

  • The Kurilov and David Golder case . Two novels. Translated from the French by Dora Winkler, Frankfurt a. M. (Eichborn) 1995. ISBN 3-8218-4121-4 .
  • The Kurilov case . From the French by Dora Winkler, Munich (btb) 2006. ISBN 3442736145 .

Secondary literature

  • Boris Savinkov, memories of a terrorist . Translated from Russian by Arkady Maslow. Revised and supplemented by Barbara Conrad. With a preliminary and a follow-up report by Hans Magnus Enzensberger , Nördlingen (Franz Greno) 1985. ISBN 3921568277 .
  • Olivier Philipponnat, Patrick Lienhardt, La vie d'Irène Némirovsky , Paris (Grasset-Denoël) 2007, ISBN 2246687217 .