The Moscow beauty

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Moscow Beauty ( Russian Русская красавица / Russkaja krasawitza ) is the first novel by the Russian writer Viktor Erofejew , which was published in 1989 by the Moscow publishing house Vsja Moskwa ( Russian Вся Москва ) under the title The Russian Beauty . The author had written the sometimes surreal text a few years before publication. Over twenty translations into other languages ​​followed - first in 1990 La Belle de Moscou with Albin Michel in Paris and in the same year with S. Fischer in Frankfurt am Main the translation into German by Beate Rausch.

Before her suicide, the young, beautiful Moscow courtesan Ira - that is the Russian Irina Vladimirovna Tarakanova from an undisclosed Central Asian provincial town - tells her lesbian partner Ksyusha about the circumstances of her unwanted pregnancy.

overview

Ira doesn't like poor people. According to her profession, she got into bed with less than ten of Moscow's wealthy gentlemen. Ira describes her conception like this: The customer WS - that was the "happy cultural functionary" Vladimir Sergeyevich - is the father. Ira calls the elderly gentleman "my Leonardik" based on Leonardo da Vinci . Ira sometimes sees herself as Joan of Arc . Unfortunately, Leonardik dies of overexertion at the height of that conception. Leonardo da Vinci and Jeanne d'Arc had loved each other for two whole years.

Leonardik had during his lifetime as a new Tjutschew fancied and Ira sung. But Ira had wanted more. She wanted to be married by Leonardik. It was too much to ask of the married man who had always kept an eye on his reputation . Ira had then aroused public nuisance: At Leonardiks page in a symphony concert, the young lady pelted the Britten directing Japanese and the English Symphony Orchestra operating with five kilos of oranges. The fruit thrower is released from her company on the following working days. Ira had worked as a model in the fashion industry . After her release from that company, the pregnant woman had the impression that she could no longer love anyone. The otherwise so generous love-giving Ira - averse to the material - had been lifted into the sky from various quarters in heyday as the "genius of love". Therefore, Ira flees from the suddenly no longer lovable world to death. Shortly before her suicide - Ira hanged herself - she was hired by the fashion company.

content

In her native Central Asia, Ira had already been married twice. At the age of twenty-three, she moved to Moscow in the early 1980s to live with her sick grandfather, the Stakhanov worker Tikhon Makarowitsch. Initially, Ira had been a model for a Moscow painter. Then she met and fell in love with Ksyusha in the aforementioned fashion company. Ksyusha, in turn, grew up with Leonardik's son Anton. Thus Ira had got access to the house of the cultural official. Grandfather Tichon remembers WS shaking his hand at a reception. That was once upon a time during the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact .

The pregnant woman knits a children's blanket and goes to one of her previous customers, the Moscow doctor Dr. Stanislaw Albertowitsch Flawitzki, in treatment. The doctor declares himself ready to provide obstetrics and suspects that the cultural functionary WS is the child's father. The doctor had read a newspaper article in which the circumstances of the death of the cultural functionary were pointed out. Ira doesn’t bind such intimacies to the curious doctor - on the other hand, Ksyusha, the addressee of Ira's writings, finds out in writing: Leonardik was not killed by the courtesan, but was “taken to delight”.

shape

The reader passes by hearing and seeing, because the first-person narrator gushes out without reservation whatever comes to mind. Viktor Erofejew tries out all sorts of formal elements to entertain the reader: The dense grandfather Tikhon doesn't know what a lesbian is. Certain parables amuse: Ksyusha and Ira sigh “like two menopausal aunts with hair loss”. Or: Ira is "sterile like the Karakum desert ". Or: Ksyusha, not a child of sadness, compares the coldness of a thinker with the temperature of the "legs of a dystrophic patient from Taimyr ". Or: If two secondary characters attack each other verbally, Ira is unaffected by their “psychological bowel movements ”. The description of the gluttony that Ira and WS had occasionally indulged in turns out to be comparatively crude: "... we ate a lot and well ... this ... plentiful food was so wonderful to shit ..."

Sometimes the narrator looks to the future. At the end of the 14th of the 24 chapters of the novel, she announced that she would soon be run over by a car. Indeed, in the 15th chapter, Ira is approached by Stepans Zaporozhez . The victim suspects that Stepan had been commissioned to rob her of her beauty.

The end of the novel turns into the surreal: Ira seeks death. Three times she walks stark naked across the Tatar field to the “musty alders ... on the little river” southeast of Moscow. Although she survived the walk "over the bones of the fallen compatriots", she disturbs Leonardik's deathly peace. He appears - no longer an aging man - and pulls Ira down with power into the realm of the dead.

reception

filming

  • Cesare Ferrario filmed the novel in 2001 under the title La bella di Mosca . Ralitza Baleva played the title role and Anna Molchanova Ira's best friend Ksyusha.

German-language editions

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Russian Русская красавица
  2. ^ French Editions Albin Michel
  3. ↑ Edition used, p. 4
  4. ↑ Edition used, p. 133, 5. Zvo
  5. ↑ Ital. La bella di Mosca
  6. ^ La bella di Mosca in the IMDb
  7. ↑ Ital. Ralitza Baleva
  8. ↑ engl. Anna Molchanova in the IMDb