The river with the raging current

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The river with the rapid current ( Russian Река с быстрым течением / Reka s bystrym tetschenijem ) is a story by the Russian writer Vladimir Makanin from 1979. The translation into German by Harry Burck brought Volk und Welt out in 1987.

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The Moscow office worker Serjosha Ignatjew seeks out the 35-year-old unmarried Marina and complains about his suffering: Presumably his wife - that is Marina's old friend Sima - is cheating. Marina, who was once abandoned by the navy student Kolja, ventes her anger. If only fifteen years ago she had not given it to Ignatiev, but held it! Ignatiev, who had hoped for understanding from his old friend, can soon no longer hear the nagging and fled.

Ignatiev and Sima's attending doctor hide Sima's disease: cancer in the last stage. The doctor predicts that the patient will die in four weeks at the latest. Marina observes her friend and tells Ignatiev that Sima is apparently sleeping with Krassikov. A certain Novoshilov, who is a bachelor, also tries very hard to get Sima, who is suddenly extremely fun-loving. Ignatiev wants to get a divorce. He quietly initiates the required procedure. The husband does not understand Sima's complaints about her current state of health. Ignatjew beats Sima, who is only dressed in her nightgown, out the apartment door in the Russian winter, but brings her back into the warmth right away. The landlord drinks, stays away from the office for eight working days without excuse and will probably not get around a written complaint.

Sima begs Ignatiev whining for forgiveness. After working in the restaurants, she only joked with colleagues and drank coffee. She just wanted to live. She has had nothing more from her previous life. Sima encourages Ignatiev: Everything will be fine. The father of the family growls and goes to the office the next morning - the couple has a small son, the “cuddly” schoolboy Vitka.

The pink and maudlin end of the story hoped for by the reader does not want to come. In contrast to Ignatiev's secretly pursued divorce, Sima tells her husband to the face that she no longer wants to be married to a drinker. In addition, Ignatjew is an unreasonable role model for the boy: "Drunkenness at home can traumatize children ..."

The sturdy Marina enters the Ignatiev's apartment and helps her now spindly friend Sima around the house. Sima tells her husband that she has got the divorce date. It will be in four weeks.

Both women laugh at the drinker. It looks as if Marina wants to succeed Simas without delay.

shape

The eponymous raging river as a symbol of life, to which life devouring death belongs, is referred to in several places in the text. When Sima comes home drunk in the middle of the night, she warls in the bathroom - matching the running bath water - "The river rushes, bare stones all around ..." At the end of the story, Ignatiev finds fourteen photos from the fifteen years of their marriage. The "snappy" drinker arranges the fourteen images of Sima with difficulty and clumsily in the right time sequence, which reminds him of "flowing water" on which "the life of his wife" drifts away, but he keeps Sima with the photos completely and forever themselves. Suddenly that makes him forgiving.

Sometimes the narrator appears to be omniscient. For example, when Ignatiev hoped Sima would still get through health, the comment follows: "But there was no more hope."

The reader has to think to "understand" the beating scene mentioned above. Despite all the thought work, this seems psychologically difficult to explain. If the word "apologetic" is allowed for Ignatiev's reckless behavior, then at most it concerns the apologetic argument: Ignatiev really doesn't know whether Sima broke off her marriage in the face of her imminent death.

Spoken theater

On January 25, 2006, Vladimir Makanin's play of the same name directed by Marina Brusnikina at the Chekhov Art Theater in Moscow with Valeri Troschin as Ignatjew, Julija Tschebakowa (Russian Юлия Чебакова) as Sima and Darja Jurskaja and Alena Chowanskaja (Russian Халена Marina premiere.

German-language editions

Web links

In Russian language

Remarks

  1. ↑ Marina lives (Engl., Near the metro station Kropotkinskaya Kropotkinskaya ).
  2. ↑ Sima does not say a word about such succession after her inevitable imminent death, just as she never speaks of her imminent death. But the reader suspects that Sima knows her "future" well. Marina behaves in the Ignatiev's four walls as the future housewife - for example, she is energetically renovating the desolate apartment - and Sima is the name of the unbelievable turn of the family, apparently smiling to warmly laughing good.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Edition used, p. 4
  2. ↑ Edition used, p. 103
  3. ↑ Edition used, p. 103
  4. ↑ Edition used, p. 120, 6. Zvo
  5. ↑ Edition used, p. 123, 7th Zvu
  6. ↑ Russian Марина Брусникина
  7. ↑ Russian Валерий Трошин
  8. ↑ Russian Дарья Юрская
  9. ↑ Russian play Река с быстрым течением