The trail is still visible
The trace is still visible ( Russian Ещё заметен след / Jeschtscho sameten sled ) is a novella by the Russian writer Daniil Granin , which was published in 1984 in issue 1 of the Moscow literary magazine " Nowy Mir ". The translation into German by Charlotte Kossuth came out in Berlin in 1986.
Around 1967, the Leningrad - born first-person narrator Anton Maximowitsch Dudarew remembers the blockade of his hometown during World War II . Together with Shanna Nisheradze he commemorates the late combatant Sergei Volkov.
content
Shanna examined the limping widower Dudarev - in war lieutenant and train leaders of the infantry and was now group leader with 190 rubles salary - for a pack of old letters, especially from Georgia anreisend on in Leningrad. Dudarew has never seen the beautiful, stately, almost 50-year-old woman and does not want to remember the bad years of 1942 and 1943. Shanna doesn't give up; says she was born in 1918, had at that time worked during the war as a medic in the hospital and with Dudarews battalion posted mates Lieutenant Boris Lukyanov. In the correspondence, Shanna had asked Lukyanov about a Sergei Volkov from the same battalion. Volkov had begged Shanna's address from a certain Appolon Gogoberidze. In two letters to Shanna, Lukyanov, who wanted to marry the girl, had said unflattering statements about his rival Volkov. At that time the girl had exchanged letters with both officers in parallel. Shanna wants to know everything about his former battalion comrade Volkov from Dudarew. That's why she made the long journey by train. Actually surprising, because Shanna has never seen Volkov.
Dudarew reluctantly takes the old letters from Shanna and promises to see them by the next day. The woman wants to return to Tbilisi immediately. Dudarew withdraws to his abandoned dacha and spreads Lukyanov's and Volkov's “love stammering” letters and postcards to Shanna on the table, some of which were marked with a red felt pen by the recipient especially for the Leningrad reader. Dudarew's daughter and her husband drop by. The children have no desire for the old stories and say goodbye.
What was that like? The 35-year-old, broad-shouldered, athletic Leningrad Volkov, the son of a washerwoman and a weigh-in-chief, appeared to be old to the officers, who were around 20 years old. The deeper Dudarew penetrates the letter duel for the favor of the woman, the more sadly he has to register that Lukyanov, who is sympathetic to him, repeats himself, cannot talk about himself, writes of O. Henry's "Pancake of Pimienta" and is subject to the much older, more experienced Volkov. The latter writes that his mother died of dystrophy in Leningrad and discusses verses by Olga Bergholz . Dudarew remembers how he stood up for Lukyanov in the distant past and washed the head of the "typical villain" Volkov, who wanted to relax his comrade's bride. Now Dudarew can read in his dacha Volkov's reaction to the headwash of the time. His memory gets going while reading. He speaks of an "unforgettable story".
The paths of the war comrades had diverged. Volkov had been given a punishment for his criticism of the military leadership, and Dudarew, assigned to a tank brigade, roared westward to Königsberg in East Prussia . There the war had ended for him.
Dudarew packs up the letters to Shanna - Volkov's last extensive letter is dated 1949 and comes from the Khabarovsk area. Volkov writes in it
- The trail is still visible
- memory still lives ...
Lukyanov's last letter - a telegram to Tbilisi - is from November 1945.
When Dudarew accompanied his visit to the train station the next day, he learned from Shanna's life story that Volkov had looked for her in Leningrad in 1946 in vain. Lukyanov, who had traveled to Tbilisi, had received a basket from Shanna. Finally, for reasons of reason, she married a certain Sura. From then on, the family had been provided for in starving Tbilisi. After the death of her husband, Shanna wanted to become a doctor. She had divorced her second husband after he had forced her to have an abortion out of jealousy.
Finally, Shanna tells the first-person narrator that Volkov died four years ago. Daniil Granin does not offer a happy ending, but he gives the reader hope: maybe Dudarew and Shanna will get on with each other. At least she understands his parting word on the Nevsky before the train to Tbilisi leaves as a motion. Dudarew has to admit: "In front of me was the only woman on earth who connected me to the war, to my youth, to that lieutenant life when we fell in love after photos."
background
During the war, unmarried officers wrote to unmarried women they did not even know. The portrayal of officers Lukyanov and Volkov's struggle for the same woman, i.e. for Shanna, is in the foreground in this context. The contemporary history in all its hardness fades into the background. History is always interspersed once, but more in subordinate constructions. The reader has to look carefully if he wants to hear the life-threatening of the war and post-war era. For example, when Volkov was punished for his criticism of the leadership style of the Soviet generals, the punished man only briefly pointed this out in a letter much later. When mentioning the second sentence, imposed after the war on Laboratory Director Volkov for an explosion in a Moscow research facility, the word Magadan is also mentioned . What is meant is the exile in a forced labor camp - keyword Gulag .
Despite all the reluctance of the narrator, the text can be read as a document of the atrocities of war during the period of the above-mentioned blockade - from autumn 1941 to early 1944. For example, the many young fallen soldiers on the Soviet side are mentioned by Sinyavino . At the time, Dudarev had unhesitatingly sided with Lukyanov in matters of Lukyanov's dispute with Volkov, also because the lieutenant had dragged the frozen first-person narrator out of no man's land.
Only in the second half of the text does the reader suspect that Shanna's love story, which is hidden behind the correspondence with the two officers, merely provides the framework for Daniil Granin's actual writing request. What is meant is the skeptical view of the first-person narrator Dudarew - more than two decades in retrospect - of the Soviet warfare in the expulsion of the Wehrmacht to Berlin: the lives of their own soldiers were inadequately spared during the hasty advance. While Dudarew had at that time during the award of the medal on the railway line near the Estonian Tartu, he had no sympathy for Volkov's words to the general giving the medal, but now - sitting broodingly at the table in his dacha in front of the letters - he fully understands Volkov's thoughtful words which at the time had seemed to him an inappropriate, highly confused disruption of the deserved award ceremony.
German-language editions
- Daniil Granin: The trail is still visible. Novella. Translated from the Russian by Charlotte Kossuth . Volk und Welt (Spektrum 209), Berlin 1986, 127 pages (used edition)
Web links
in Russian
- The full text online
- Entry at LiveLib
Remarks
- ↑ On the date "around 1967": Shanna was born in 1918 and is almost fifty.
- ↑ Dudarew on “his instinctive protective reaction”: “This is how you forget what you want to get rid of.” (Edition used, p. 86, 8th Zvu) Because two pages later he turns to the address of those who “keep coming back from Would you like to hear exploits and victories? Should I tell you how my platoon was slaughtered? How we looked for cover behind corpses in the open field? "(Edition used, p. 88, 11. Zvo)
- ↑ Volkov's house is no longer there. It stood near the Simeon Church (Russian Церковь Симеона и Анны , edition used, p. 107, 15th Zvu).
- ↑ O. Henry: "The Pimienta Pancakes", short story.
- ↑ There are several places in the text where Daniil Granin says this. Years after the war, Dudarev's regimental commander criticized the constant “Forward, forward!” In Estonia at that time (edition used, p. 95, middle). And Dudarew concludes his story with the insight that when Volkov denounced the losses at the time, he wanted to encourage his comrades and the general to think “about the disproportionately high price” of “success” (edition used, p. 120 below).