The takyr

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The Takyr (Russian Такыр ) is a story by the Russian writer Andrei Platonow (1899-1951) from 1934. The term "Takyr" in the title refers to the geological technical name for salt flats in Turkmenistan.

action

The Persian Sarrin-Tadsh, along with 13 other, mostly female prisoners, was kidnapped from her homeland by a group of Turkmen horsemen and from then on ekes out her hopeless existence as a slave to a nomadic tribe in the Turkmen desert - an extremely barren, extremely barren one hostile environment, shaped by the eponymous Takyrs. Sarrin-Tadsh becomes the youngest of several wives of the 40-year-old Atach-Baba, who sleeps with her as he pleases, regardless of her condition (let alone her consent). The sexual act, which is often thematized in the narrative, is consistently circumscribed by Platonow implicitly, among other things with verbs such as “embrace” or “take”.

At the time of the transfer on foot to Turkmenistan, Sarrin-Tadsh is already two months pregnant by a Kurdish shepherd. When her daughter Dshumal is born, she becomes Sarrin-Tadsh's only consolation in the monotonous, hard nomadic life, which revolves above all on the procurement of the water, which is so rare and vital in the desert. At the age of about 12, Dshumal is raped on the surrounding Takyr of Atach-Baba on a night in which a stranger surprises the nomad people in their new settlement, a stone tower, with his visit. When the latter has already sold her as a bride to old Oda-Kara, Dshumal is left behind in the tower with her plague mother, as the men fear that they would otherwise become infected with the deadly disease. In this way the girl frees herself from her previous enslavement.

Sarrin-Tadsh soon dies, but Dshumal survives thanks to the caring help of the stranger - a fugitive Austrian prisoner of war named Stefan Katigrob. They lived together under the protection of the stone tower for six years before one night Dshumal heard gunshots in the distance and rode off on her donkey, armed with a dagger. After the donkey dies on drinking water from a poisoned well, she meets Atach-Baba and Oda-Kara again. When the latter intrudes on her at night, she stabs him with her dagger, steals all the guns from the others while they sleep, frees the horses and rides away. Soon after, she met Red Army soldiers who asked her to provide information about Atach Baba's Basmati gang.

Ten years later, Dshumal wears European clothes and the family name of her mother, Tadzhieva, graduated from the Agricultural College and lived in Ashkhabad and Tashkent. When she is sent to the Karakum desert as part of a work assignment, she decides to visit the tower and the takyr of yore. She finds the Austrian, whom she has asked in vain for all these years, already dead there. However, he left a tombstone on her mother's grave on which a rare plant grows. From this Dshumal concludes that she has reached the actual destination of her journey - a nature reserve for dying plants.

literature

German text editions

  • Andrei Platonov: The takyr . Translated by Larissa Robiné. In: Lola Debüser, Herbert Krempien (Ed.): In the beautiful and grim world. Selected prose. tape 1 . Publishing house culture and progress, Berlin 1969, p. 83-108 .
  • Andrei Platonov: The takyr . Translated by Kay Borowsky. In: Siegfried Heinrichs (ed.): The people of Dshan. The takyr. The excavation. Stories - letters - photos - documents. Oberbaum-Verlag, Berlin 1992, ISBN 978-3-926409-79-9 .

Secondary literature

  • Hans Günther: Andrej Platonow. Biography. Life - work - effect. 1st edition. Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-518-46737-4 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Spelling of proper names and quotations based on Platonov's Der Takyr in the German translation by Larissa Robiné. In: Debüser, Krempien (Ed.): In the beautiful and grim world. Selected prose. 1969, pp. 83-108.
  2. ↑ For example, "[the Turkmens] embraced the captured girls" or Atach-Baba "stayed with [Sarrin-Tadsh] behind the others to take them on the sand". See Platonov: The Takyr. In: Debüser, Krempien (Ed.): In the beautiful and grim world. Selected prose. 1969, p. 86.