The chase
The chase ( Russian Погоня / Pogonja ) is a grotesque story by the Russian writer Vladimir Makanin from 1979. The translation into German by Aljonna Möckel brought Volk und Welt out in 1987.
content
The impoverished writer Igor Petrovich has published two volumes of short stories. The 36-year-old family man has to do something about his writer's block. So he joins the 26-year-old cutter Swetik - actually Swetlana - from the Urals . Igor leaves his wife and child with the alleged destination Siberia . Meanwhile at home in Moscow he is hunting an icon worth about twenty thousand rubles with Swetik . This precious 14th-century image of the Mother of God was Swetik of a dying old man in a remote hut on the bank of an unnamed tributary of the Uralsbeen bequeathed. Kostka, called the wretched man, had passed that hut, stole the treasure from the young woman, and ran away. Swetik, who had probably been in a correctional colony twenty kilometers from the hut, had finally made it to the next little village called Chesnokovo.
Swetik finds the wretch in Moscow. He hawked the icon at the flea market for fifty rubles to the young couple Wilja and Valya Tonkostrunow (Russian: the faint-hearted). Swetik puts Igor on Valya and she takes on the husband. Wilja Tonkostrunow is a historian. The single Swetik longs for a man like that who goes to work every weekday with a briefcase. She wants two children from her future husband - a girl and a boy. In any case, Igor and Swetik break up the couple. But they can't get close to the icon. Wilja sold them to the pushy historian Ussolzew. Ussolzew lives in Shiwzy and sells the icon to the monks. Three frail old women - Markovna, Fedotjewna and Fedosjewna - buy the work of art from the monks.
When the icon is finally in the possession of Mr. Stepan Rasin, the disaster takes its course. Swetik visits the 30-year-old unmarried man in his apartment on Profsojusnaja, falls in love with the quiet, humble man, marries him, comes into possession of the icon and sells the beautiful painting to a songwriter for fifteen thousand rubles. Igor has done his job, had been selling clothing et cetera for a smuggler for weeks under the nickname Shorik (Russian Жорик for Георгий (Georg)) and is relieved to return to his family's lap as an "innocent citizen". The mother-in-law shields the scribe from the world. On the phone she repeats that Igor is still in Siberia. The mother-in-law brings the manuscripts with the brand new crook stories to the post office in person.
Swetik's marriage to Stepan Razin only lasted until the suddenly pleasure-seeking and apparently unfaithful husband has almost cleared the savings account. The angry Swetik is getting a divorce, quitting the tailoring profession and profiling herself as a housing broker. The talented woman operates in a swap exchange - specializing in ring-shaped home swaps - throughout Russia. She does not mourn her twenty thousand rubles, but the dream of a husband with a briefcase and two small children has annoyingly broken. Revenge follows immediately.
Stepan wants to move from Moscow to Kiev . He falls for such a ring-shaped swap, managed by his former wife. The exchange from Moscow to Kiev via Taganrog , Pensa and Alëutowo (Russian Алеутово) ends in the aforementioned remote hut on the Urals. There the chain breaks off. Wladimir Makanin writes about the breaking of the chain during the swap: “That's what they say when people after you don't want to swap anymore ... and that's that.” Stepan is stuck in the wilderness and becomes quite tame again over time - as in Moscow before his acquaintance with Swetik.
Quote
- "There is no God, there is only nature!"
reception
Oksana Bulgakowa (Russian Оксана Булгакова) sees the Twelve Chairs by Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov as models for this grotesque in her brief study “Literature as Adventure” .
German-language editions
- Vladimir Makanin: The Chase. German by Aljonna Möckel . With the afterword Literature as an Adventure by Oksana Bulgakowa from August 1986. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1987, 156 pages, ISBN 3-351-00633-0 (edition used)
Web links
The text in Russian