Revenge (Anatoly Kim)
Revenge ( Russian Месть / Mestj ) is a story by the Russian writer Anatoli Kim , which appeared in 1974 in issue 6 of the literary magazine Москва (Moscow) on pages 172-180.
content
The thick Teacher Jang, a young hot-tempered drinker, pulls in a village school in North Korea in the classroom, the only daughter of the farmer Tschä by the hair and hits her with a sharpened sickle head off.
After the crime, it was said that Jang fled up the Tumangang into Manchuria on a junk . After eleven years of unsuccessful searching, Tschä returns and takes a deaf and mute concubine who gives birth to the strong boy Sungu. On Tscha’s deathbed, nine-year-old Sungu has to promise his father that he will only begin his own life after having taken vengeance. Twenty-five years after the crime, Jang, the schoolgirl's murderer, has the forehead to return from China and settle in the neighboring village - his birthplace. Over time, Jang's wife was valued by people in the area as a healer and fortune teller. Ten years go by. Sungu Tschä doesn't think about blood revenge, but he doesn't get married either.
Although his wife prophesies that he will not die by revenge, Jang cannot calm down and moves to Sakhalin . Sungu follows him with his mother. But both land on the Kuril Islands . Sungu later worked in a Sakhalin sawmill .
Time flies. Ten years later, almost half a century after the murder, Jang lives with his wife in the mining town of Naichoro-Tanzan. When Sungu followed the murderer with his mother, he was surprised: "It was because of these villains that I was born ... and perhaps it is because he is something of a second father to me."
The child murderer dies the death of a drinker. When Jang sleeps off his intoxication next to a horse stable, the back of his head is very much in the sun in the Sakhalin summer.
Sungu is overtaken by his father's fatal illness. Jang's wife, the half-blind “healing artist”, was able to heal him in her “pure goodness”, but was subsequently killed in a traffic accident. She once prophesied that iron would kill her. The prophecy is fulfilled. The half-blind runs against a steel cable in the street and is half beheaded - similar to Sungu's unhappy sister. Sungu is heartbroken. Has his vengeance still taken. According to Sungu, the murder was not atoned for by another murder, but by the same kindness of the old fortune-teller who was so valued by Sungu.
After describing so many misery, Anatoly Kim still holds out the prospect of a happy ending. Sungu had met and fell in love with Elsa, a Romanian from Gomel , the kitchen woman at work . Elsa had loved to have a child with him. Remembering the oath on his father's deathbed, the man had refused to have a child and fled from Elsa, who smelled lovely in bed. Now Sungu remembers a custom. The suitor wants to bring a wedding goose to his not quite young, but not yet old bride Elsa.
shape
The story runs - as I said - for over half a century. It begins at the beginning of the 20th century and towards the end of history the Japanese retreat to their islands after the lost war .
The language for the adequate treatment of the archaic topic has been copied from life. For example, when Sungu is already thirty-two years old and he has still not avenged his sister, he was hit by "a silent shot from the canal of the sun" from the cloudy Sakhalin sky. He has to close his eyes and the deceased father appears. The unworthy Sungu hurries to beg his father's forgiveness for the revenge that has not yet been accomplished. Sungu keeps his eyes closed so that the father's image doesn't fade during the apology.
Sungu is not the narrator, but "came into this world as a poet".
filming
The author wrote the scenario for the film of the same name in 1989 .
reception
- Bodo Zelinsky briefly reviews the text.
German-language editions
- Anatoli Kim: Die Rache , p. 24–41 in: White mourning. Stories. Edited by Peter Rollberg. German by Erich Ahrndt (still contains The Georgian Surab. Tramp on Sakhalin. The bride of the sea. The son's court. The woodcutters. Tall grass. The twelfth. The huntress. The forgotten train station. Every day past Daschaberg. A double star. The diagnosis . Brother and sister. Be gentle like children. Tsunami. Lightning in the city ). Reclam (RUB 1310), Leipzig 1989. 278 pages, ISBN 3-379-00467-7
- Anatolij Kim: Die Rache , translator Alfred Frank, pp. 138–156 in: Russian stories of the present. Edited by Bodo Zelinsky , Reclam, Stuttgart 1992, RUB 8829. ISBN 3-15-008829-1 (edition used)
Web links
in Russian language
- Bibliographic entry in fantlab.ru
- August 27, 2013 Interview about the film