The puppies

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The Puppies ( Russian Щенки ) is the only novel by the Russian writer Pawel Salzman . Salzman, who otherwise worked as a visual artist , had worked on the work for more than 50 years, which was only published posthumously by a Moscow publisher. A translation into German was published in 2016 . The plot of the novel is set in Russia during the civil war between the end of the First World War and the interwar period. This time was marked by want, privation and inhuman cruelty. This is shown from the point of view of two young dogs, the pups that give the title . The work is unique in the series of war novels and is considered a “unique monument of the Russian avant-garde ”.

Emergence

The novel is to be understood in the context of the author's further artistic work and in the context of the avant-garde objects of this time. As the son of a German who served as an officer for the Russians in Odessa , he was caught up in the armed forces at an early age . The father's work involved frequent changes of residence. From 1925 the family was in Leningrad , where he also lived through the Second World War and its blockade . His parents died there of exhaustion. At the end of the war, Pawel was evacuated to Kazakhstan .

Back in Leningrad, through his teacher and mentor Pavel Filonov, he came into contact with the avant-garde artists' association OBERIU , which had been founded in 1927 and which had already been declared hostile to the state in 1930. At the OBERIU, the current currents of the various art directions of literature, visual arts, theater and film converged and thus represented what the Russian avant-garde was all about . With this in mind, the puppies have been a sensation since they were released in 2012. With a single novel "[Salzman] changes the whole history of Russian prose in the 20th century and all the hierarchies of literary history for that time."

After starting his work as a production designer in the film industry , he got to know many places in the provinces of the Soviet Union, which inspired him to choose the different locations in his book. While filming, he was already working on prose and poetry without his surroundings registering it. Nor did he ever intend to publish his literary work, knowing that under the prevailing circumstances there was nowhere to present it. Even so, he seemed to have hopes that the work would outlast his life. Both in the posthumous diaries and in the novel, he addresses the reader directly with sentences such as “And how do you like it, dear reader?” Or “Reader, a question: have you been to Lyutov? If not, sit back and listen. ”He turned down an offer from Georgian-French film director Otar Ioseliani to publish the work abroad for fear of future reprisals.

According to Salzman's life, different, very different places appear in the plot. Salzman started the novel in Leningrad in 1932 and continued it in Kazakhstan. From the summer of 1942 he worked with Lenfilm in Alma-Ata . Until 1952 he wrote the story of The Puppies . In 1982 he revised the work without finishing it or hoping for publication. Analogous to the title page of the Russian original edition, the three creative periods in the 1930s, 50s and 80s can be identified.

After Salzman's death, daughter Elena and her husband Alexej first saved the manuscript, which, like all other works, was written in pencil. She later transcribed the text into readable form. Unlike other works that Pawel had dictated to her in later years, he had written The Puppies without her knowledge. She described Pavel's emotional state in an interview with “Robinson on a desert island”.

action

The text is divided into six parts in pairs. These three action complexes each culminate in excesses of violence or in sexuality in the last double section. Again and again, storylines get lost and the author apologizes to the reader when he writes “Sonja, where is Sonja? Unfortunately, the answer is - I don't know. I don't know myself. I would like to know something about Sonja myself. ”His entire text is a literary game. A game with the reader whose expectations he repeatedly undermines.

An essential design element of Salzman is nature. But the endless expanses of Russia are not decorated as an idyll, rather they are something archaic with fog, rain, cold and flooding, and thus hostile to life for people who seem completely filled with themselves and their antagonists or overwhelmed. In addition to the complex network of relationships, a recurring motive for action is the profane search for the beloved, for food, power or money and for eros, thus the existential needs of humans and animals.

The novel is extremely demanding for the reader because the author understands how to promote identification and how to throw him into the world just like his characters in the novel. The collage-like narrative style, broken up into fragmentary pieces, with repeated, sometimes loops of looking forward and backward, confuses the characters in the plot and the readers alike.

Locations

Part 1 takes place in Buryatia . The river Uda and "the sea" are mentioned, meaning Lake Baikal , which is perceived as the sea. Salzman worked there in the summer of 1932 on a film about the civil war in Transbaikalia . Another place is the Shchukin Market on St. Petersburg's Chernyshev Alley. This market is repeatedly the scene in the 5th and 6th part. Other places are Solsan near Baikalsk , Tanchoi and Wachmistrowo, all south of Lake Baikal. In the second part, Rasjessaja Street in the center of St. Petersburg is named. The meaning of the street name can be understood symptomatically, as it is called “the street from which you can drive everywhere.” Salzman lived on this street until spring 1942.

Part 3 and 4 take place in Transnistria and Moldova . The places Rezina and Voronkowo are mentioned , while the last two parts are again placed in Leningrad. An example is the Grand Palace and the Splendid Palace , two well-known movie theaters, the speech, the delicatessen Solovyov and Leschtukow Bridge , which burned down in 1931 and rebuilt in 1934 again was. Also noteworthy is the address Sagorodny-Prospect No. 14, a house next to the residential address of the Salzman family. Gut Pella on the left bank of the Neva near the town of Rybazkoe , a former country estate of Catherine II , is also mentioned.

rating

In the genesis of the text , the various creative periods of the author, some of which are far apart, must be taken into account, which change along with his language in the course of events. According to Oleg Jurjew , “The language of time” changed in the Soviet Union - he means the language of the street every seven to ten years. The translator Christiane Körner writes in her epilogue that Salzman had created a new language, because “the old language was unable to name the new horror…” Then there are the spatial distances. Crossing a bridge in the novel can cover a distance of several hundred or even a thousand kilometers and the action continues as if one had just crossed a narrow canal. Elena judges this work that the animals are the real bearers of human qualities. The cruelty and universal brutality caused by the civil war and the revolution, which unleash the primal instincts, are personified in this novel because the human appearance disappears in the images of people. In the end, when a person comes to himself, he can only die, although he first tries to embrace the fateful world. The animals, on the other hand, usually see what is going to happen. They populate the multi-layered storylines with hints and reminiscences, are present for a long time and independent of location and thus connect the course of time. Pawel Salzman describes the event as an irrevocable, naturally given law that becomes completely absurd in the repetition, but nevertheless has an immanent logic, the logic of the will (to survive).

This stringency is shown by the search for teleology , the constant attempt to gain an expediency and an understanding from this hell in which man turns and lives, but it always shows only the lack of this expediency. "There are endless arguments with God, lamentations, abuse and at the same time demands and beliefs that there might be something." The action of the protagonists - both humans and animals - is driven by unconscious, instinct-guided feelings, the Salzman occasionally embedded as a stream of consciousness and often used abrupt words and surprisingly realistic. This means that the actions are not abstract, but rather immediate and tangible. “However, when you read it in this seemingly deceptive stream of the subconscious, you find, strangely enough, that it is very appropriate, very close, very high-pitched, conveys hunger and extreme physical suffering, as well as the horror of inevitable death and the monstrous effects of cruelty. ... These realities sometimes lead to such absurdity, such fiction, such impossibility that this combination is astonishing. ”The literary critic Ilya Kukui names the novel in the afterword of the book

"Одним из важнейших произведений о гражданской войне, ярким примером антропологишесйкой катастрофраз. "В этом случае оппозиция" красного и белого "Зальцмана не заинтересована, война, о которой он пишет, - это борьба всех против всех, борьба за выживание," природа вечного роя "

“One of the most important works on the civil war, a vivid example of an anthropological catastrophe that struck Russia. In this case, the fight between the reds and whites is not of interest to Saltzman. The war he writes about is the struggle of all against all, the struggle for survival, the nature of the eternal swarm. "

- Ilya Kukui : Целесообразность ада Радио Свобода-Online, August 15, 2012

The animals that appear in the novel are all embodied - two-dimensionally - also by a human character. This duality shows the ambivalence of archaic forms of life that are united in the will to survive. "This duality of characters is one of the most interesting elements of this novel," says the Russian poet, translator, literary critic and historian Igorevich Shubinsky (* 1965). Two camels, who, like the owl, have a certain “overview”, come to the conclusion that they should be really happy that “they have neither a house nor a wife that can be set on fire or violated.”

In 1936 the author wrote a five-stanza poem of the same name.

Christiane Körner received the Paul Celan Prize in 2017 for her complete work of translations from Russian . Her translation of the puppies was particularly appreciated.

Editions

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Oleg Jurjew : Cover text for the first edition of the novel Die Puppies , Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2016.
  2. ↑ a b c d Dmitry Volchek: Radio Freedom
  3. ^ Pawel Salzman: The Puppies, p. 397
  4. ↑ Oleg Jurjew : Afterword to the first edition of the novel The Puppies , Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2016
  5. ↑ a b Christiane Körner : Epilogue to the first edition of the novel The Puppies , Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2016
  6. ↑ Kerstin Holm : The puppies. FAZ from April 15, 2017
  7. ↑ Paul Celan Prize 2017 to Christiane Körner .