The place for the monument

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The place for the memorial ( Russian Место для памятника / Mesto dlja pamjatnika ) is a science fiction story by the Russian writer Daniil Granin , which was published in 1966 in issue 9 of the Moscow magazine Изобретатель изобретатель изобретатель изобретатель инараретель изобретатель. In 1970 Volk und Welt published the German translation by Marlene Milack in Berlin.

There is order in the Soviet Union . Even a physicist like Lidenzow - a scientist of the caliber of Mendeleev - does not get a one-room apartment from the bureaucrat Matvej Evsejewitsch Ossokin.

content

1

At the beginning of the 1950s, Lidenzow, around 45 years old, asked the official responsible in vain for modest living space. Ossokin does not recognize any of the reasons put forward - neither eczema , the suffering from the passage of time, nor research into superconductivity at room temperature. In addition, the supplicant fails because of the formalities. The proponent of the apartment application, a well-known physics professor, died a long time ago and Lidenzow's personal documents have become invalid over time.

2

One week after the above request, the opponents meet by chance in a wine cellar. Lidenzow presented three papers to Ossokin. The letterhead from the Lidenzow Institute for Superconductivity can be admired on the first sheet . The second is an excerpt from an anniversary article in which the work of the outstanding scholar is honored and which is provided with a photo of the anniversary. The article writer reports on the unveiling of the Lidenzow monument - a solution without a base. The figure of the scholar hovers in the air. The artistic solution embodies the idea of ​​Lidenzow's invention. Thirdly, Lidenzow presented a stamp issued on the occasion of his 100th birthday.

Ossokin is not so easily chased into the fenugreek. The only question is: how does the bureaucrat get out of the dangerous story without scandal?

3.4

Forty years later, “Comrade Pensioner” Ossokin successfully rummages for an old photo one sleepless night. The Lidenzow monument is photographed on paper “under a kind of shell” with a niche behind it. The next day, the old man inspects the location: there on the “Platz des Meeres” (Sea Square), the house directly behind the monument is being torn down. A new building was designed. Ossokin looks at the drawings and inserts the niche into the modern, smooth front of the house.

5

Ossokin goes to the physics institute. None of the physicists can do anything with the name Lidenzow. The retiree, who continues to insist, allows physicists to wash his brain electronically. The scientists have become curious. In spite of the most serious efforts, they have not yet succeeded in developing a superconducting material at room temperature. After Ossokin's brainwashing, the low-temperature research physicists suddenly understand Lidenzow's life's work and want to leave the impasse they have all run into straight away because they want to follow Lidenzow's trail. The above-mentioned Lidenzow's “suffering in the course of time” is not a great obstacle for the enthusiastic theoretical physicists . Perhaps in Lidenzow's research the time axis was inverted or simply shifted .

In spite of everything, the physicists do not understand why Ossokin had not given Lidenzov an apartment at the time. The director of the physical institute thanks the pensioner anyway for his help. The view of a new, promising research direction was opened. Ossokin rejects the hymn of praise and snubs the physicists: The old man tears up and burns the "photo evidence" with the Lidenzow memorial.

The scaffolding is falling. In the sleek, modern facade of the new house, the niche that Ossokin created arouses contradiction. Finally, a coffee machine is installed in it. Chairs and tables in front of it for the coffee drinkers in the green area complete the emergency solution.

German-language editions

First edition

  • Daniil Granin: The place for the monument. P. 87–146 In: Our battalion commander . The place for the monument. Two novels. People and world. Spectrum series 27. Berlin 1970, 146 pages (used edition)

expenditure

Web links

In Russian language

The text
Spending ( WorldCat Search)

annotation

  1. ↑ Daniil Granin blends fantasy and reality in a science fiction author's style. The floating described in the story can be found, for example, in the article Superconductor illustrated on the picture with the signature "A magnet hovers over a high-temperature superconductor (approx. −197 ° C) cooled with liquid nitrogen". Of course, Lidenzow's room temperature is still quite a long way from the "high temperature" of −197 ° C.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Russian Изобретатель и рационализатор
  2. ↑ Russian note on the first edition Изобретатель и рационализатор , anno 1966, issue 9, pp. 24–33
  3. ↑ Edition used, p. 4