The gentleman from San Francisco

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Ivan Bunin in 1901 in a photo of Maxim Dmitriev

The gentleman from San Francisco ( Russian Господин из Сан-Франциско , Gospodin is San Francisco ) is a short story by the Russian Nobel Prize winner for literature Ivan Bunin , written in 1915 and published in October of the same year in the 5th volume of the Slovo anthology in Moscow .

overview

On the Mediterranean and in southern Italy shortly before the First World War : The 58-year-old man from San Francisco has amassed such a fortune through years of relentless work - more precisely, he let thousands of Chinese toil for himself in California - that he now has two Would like to rest for years on a trip around the world . Together with his wife and their grown up, a little sick daughter, he will travel to the storm-lashed Mediterranean on the comfortable Atlantis at the end of November . After landing in Naples , Capri will be the first stop on the tour of Europe. On the journey home, it is planned to go ashore in Egypt , India and Japan . It doesn't come to that. The gentleman from San Francisco dies in a hotel on Capri. His remains are transferred to the States in a coffin in the belly of Atlantis . The two grieving relatives accompany the deceased on his last journey.

Adaptations

Drama
  • 2011, Zurich : The gentleman from San Francisco with Venus Madrid and Christian Hostettler.

reception

  • 1983. Kasper thinks about death in Venice while reading it . But Bunin did not read Thomas Mann until autumn 1915 - that is, after his text had been written. In the symbolic story, the author oriented himself to Tolstoy's death of Ivan Ilyich and also to Dostoyevsky's world model in the Karamazov brothers . Bunin's symbolism had given contemporary reviewers scope for three interpretations: First, the Atlantis could be taken as an image of our entire culture. Second, this large ship with its people on it symbolizes life in general; Bunin draws passengers who turn away from the terrifyingly high waves of the stormy, late autumn ocean and blindly trust the captain on their nutshell. Third, those Italian hotel staff and those servants in Naples and on Capri who had read the smallest wish in the eyes of the gentleman from San Francisco during his lifetime resembled Bunin's humble Russian peasants from his early stories.
  • 1995. Borowsky writes that Bunin remembered: Once he stayed in a hotel on Capri. An American died in it after eating. Bunin invented the rest.

German-language editions

  • The gentleman from San Francisco. P. 42–73 in: Iwan Bunin: Der Sonnenstich. Stories. Translated and edited by Kay Borowsky . 150 pages. Reclam, Stuttgart 1995 (RUB No. 9343). ISBN 3-15-009343-0
Output used:
  • The gentleman from San Francisco. German by Georg Schwarz . P. 488-515 in: Iwan Bunin: The cup of life. Stories 1911–1919. Editing and epilogue: Karlheinz Kasper . 640 pages. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1983 (1st edition)

Web links

annotation

  1. ↑ The gentleman from San Francisco reads on Capri from the newspaper (edition used, p. 506, 4th Zvo): The Balkan War continues. So the story could take place at the end of 1913.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Russian Слово - The word
  2. ↑ eng. The Gentleman from San Francisco
  3. ↑ 4 min video on YouTube
  4. ↑ Kasper in the afterword of the edition used, p. 631, middle
  5. ↑ Borowsky in the afterword of the 1995 edition, p. 141 below