A confession

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A confession ( Russian Исповедь ) is a novel by the Russian writer Maxim Gorky , the writing of which was completed in March 1908 on Capri . The Germans threw the book into the fire in 1933 .

Matwej, around 35 years old, talks about his life. The search for God leads the monk Matwej on a long journey on foot across Russia . Gorky polemicizes about godly farming ; examines "the moral conflict" of Matvej, "who feels drawn to Marxism and Christianity at the same time ".

Gorky in 1889

content

Matvej was found by the gardener Danila Vyalov in front of a chapel on the estate of the landlord Losev in the village of Sokolje in the Krasnoglinsk district. Danila later handed the now four-year-old foundling Matwej over to the sexton Larion. When Matvej was thirteen years old, Larion drowned while fishing. Before that, the old man had given the boy a lesson: "... try to keep the childlike in your soul throughout your life, because the truth lies in him."

At the age of 16, Matvej came under the thumb of the almighty steward Yegor Titov in the office of the Sokolje estate and learned how the farmers were being plundered. At the age of 18, Matvej proposed to Olga, Titov's daughter. The girl says yes, but the bride's father sets conditions. Matvej goes into it. From then on he cheats the farmers as best he can. The two-year marriage with Olga is unhappy. The young woman dies giving birth to the second child. Both children don't live long.

Matvej leaves Sokolje, goes into the city, penetrates to the protopope and expresses doubts about the mercy of God. Reverend calls his visitor a heretic who belongs in Siberia and has him thrown out. Matvej is alone in town. Only the occasional prostitute Tatiana takes him in for one night. Then Matvej went on foot to a nunnery thirty-three werts away. Matvej wants to become a monk, leaves the nuns and a week later enters the “economically oriented” Savvati monastery on the Blue Lake. On the other bank are the churches of Kudejarowo and Nikola in Tolokonzewo. The abbot takes his hundred rubles from the newcomer and lets the 22-year-old work hard in the monastery bakery. Actually Matvej wanted to recognize the sins of this world. When he wanted to talk to the abbot about some related questions of faith, the young spirit of contradiction was imposed a church penance, which also included spiritual instruction by the “holy ascetic Mardarij”. The latter has been living "in a hole in the ground in the church wall behind the chancel" for four years. He only takes food four times a week. All of his teeth have fallen out. Mardarij greedily feeds on the bread that Matwej has brought him. Before the saint falls ill and dies, he gives Matvej some advice: “They cannot take your soul away from you. Hide them. "

Matvej appears to the superiors in the monastery as quarrelsome and as punishment has to clear tree stumps in the monastery forest. In addition, the stubborn must sit in the dungeon. Then, after completing the forest work, Matwej is allowed to work as the cell servant of the rich, beautiful monk Antonij and can recover from two years of hard work in the monastery. The abbot finally lets Matvey go; allows him pro forma the “ pilgrimage to holy places”. Matvej pilgrimage six years. On the hike from Pereyaslavl to Rostov , Matvej argues with another seeker of God whether patience and humility should be exercised. Matvej is against it. On the way to Lubny he meets a Tobolsk and a Little Russian . Both have lost their loved ones. Matvej doesn't want anything from these people. All he cares about is her grief. Matvej wants to know what torments people. After visiting Kiev he met in Dnieper near against the Holy Lavra by 50-year-old pilgrim who seeks man, but only masters and servants has found.

After years of wandering, Matwej divides the pilgrims into insane people who prefer to spit in everyone's face and those who are depressed who want to hide their suffering.

And again Matvej finds shelter in a nunnery. Behind the walls of the monastery, he impregnates the underage Christina at her request. Visibly pregnant women are thrown out of the monastery. Christina had already become a mother at home when she was seventeen, was locked up in the monastery until she was of age, caused by the relatives, and thus forced to be chastity. A year and a half later - Matvej has long since moved on to Sadonje, Christina informs him in a letter that he has become the father of a son. Christina is eagerly awaiting her future husband, the monk Matwej. Nothing will come of it. The young woman marries a Rybinsk bookseller.

On the way from Perm to Verkhoturye, Matvej meets the 53-year-old priest Jona, who has been dismissed from his office and introduces himself by his nickname Jegudiil. The former man of God postulates: "The God Creator - that is the people!" The spirit of contradiction Matwej cannot bear such a thesis with the best will in the world. Cowardly, petty, malicious, stammering, superstitious, lousy, drunk, beaten up "god-builders in bast shoes" are unthinkable to him. According to Matvej, man must not even be placed in line with God, let alone be his creator. Jegudiil, however, sticks to his theorem of “God as a creature of the people's spirit” and adds: Man created God when he said on the day of Christ's birth that all people are equal. The people created Russia much later in the Suzdal state . The princes, on the other hand, only fought each other and plundered the people together. Jegudiil asks Matvej to work in one of the Russian factories; sends him to his good friends - the locksmith Pyotr Jagich and his nephew, the teacher Michaila - in the Issetsky factory .

The discussion on God continues there. Man originally wanted to illuminate the "darkness of existence" with his God construct. But with the separation of man into master and servant, the image of God was destroyed. Matvey admires his devout hosts who deny God. While the guest lives in the household of Pyotr and Mikhaila, his god-seeking urge is displaced over time by two other questions: "Who am I and why am I?" Matvej registered that Pyotr and Mikhaila's debates do not revolve around God, but around "the Humiliation of the workers ”and“ the greed of the employers ”.

Matvej carts slag and bricks in the ironworks for forty kopecks a day in "excruciating heat" . The narrator Matwej calls the workers in the ironworks "all rough, cheeky fellows" and "a free, fearless people" at the same time. Although the workers quarrel and even beat each other, they have Matvej's sympathy: "They [the workers] had nothing in common with the pilgrims and slaves of the soil".

Matwej has questions about questions: "What laws is God subject to, why does he humiliate me, whom he has created in his own image ...?" The monk, constantly questioning, cannot stay in the ironworks. Because, for example, he says in front of a crowd in this factory: “I ... did not ... go to the monks to have my fill, but because my soul was hungry. I ... saw everywhere ... deception and robbery, ... cruelty and all darkness of the soul. Who just set it up like that? Where is our just and wise God? ”The priest reports the popular speaker to Verkhoturye. Gendarmes search the factory. Matvej fled to Omsk .

Enjoyed

After Gorky away avoided the word comrades over long text lines, he puts it towards the end of the novel the young founders Gavrila Kostin, a friend Michailas, in the mouth, "Why, comrades, it excites this man [speaking of the monk Matvey]? Isn't he just as much a worker as all of us? "

In front of the restlessly investigating state power on the run, the monk Matwej receives help from the comrades and is addressed by them as comrade. But the villagers, to whom Matwej speaks on the way, also hide him from the authorities. The Slatousters also hide him from the police after a popular speech. Matvej is sent by one of these escape helpers to the next and finally exclaims enthusiastically: "The Russian people are great and life is indescribably beautiful!"

At the very end, Gorky offers a happy ending that doesn't quite fit: In Kazan Governorate, during a procession to the monastery to the seven lakes with the miraculous icon of Our Lady as a beacon, a lame man rises and walks healed.

Self-testimony

  • In his essay “Ten Years” in 1927, Gorky straightened the ideologically skewed image that Lenin criticized in 1908 (see below under Reception ): in 1907 he erroneously called the “builder of contemporary Russian life” a god-builder . "But through his work man is convinced that there is no miracle power outside of his mind and his will, apart from the unrestrained power of nature ..."

reception

  • Gorky wanted to write an edifying text - for example with the title A Holy Life or something like that - and the result was A Confession . The strict atheist Lenin was furious about such a departure from Marxism - "this mixture of mysticism and socialism ". Gorky was caught in the waters of Solovyov , Bogdanov , Lunacharsky , Bazarov and Pokrovsky . Finally, Lenin forgave the artist Gorky for the political derailment.
  • Gorky illustrates Otzovism in addition to the god farming mentioned above.

German-language editions

  • A confession . Novel. Only authorized translation by August Scholz . J. Ladyschnikow , Berlin 1909. 336 pages (German first edition)
  • A confession. Pp. 7–279 in: A confession. A summer . Two novels. The only authorized translation from Russian by August Scholz . 468 pages. Vol. 7 from: Maxim Gorki: Collected Works in Individual Editions. Malik-Verlag, Berlin 1926
  • Foma Gordeyev . A confession . The work of Artamonovs. Novels. Translated from Russian by Erich Boehme. Edited by Harry Burck. With an afterword by Helene Imendörffer. Winkler, Munich 1976, ISBN 3-538-05258-1

Used edition

  • A confession. German by Dieter Pommerenke. With an afterword by Günter Warm. P. 241–448 in: Maxim Gorki: Der Spitzel. A confession. A summer . 637 pages. Vol. 6 from: Eva Kosing (ed.), Edel Mirowa-Florin (ed.): Maxim Gorki: Collected works in individual volumes. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1971

Secondary literature

  • Nina Gourfinkel: Maxim Gorki. With testimonials and photo documents. Translated from the French by Rolf-Dietrich Keil . Rowohlt, Hamburg 1958 (1986 edition), ISBN 3-499-50009-4 .
  • Nadeshda Ludwig: Maxim Gorki. Life and work. Series of Contemporary Writers. People and Knowledge, Berlin 1984.
  • Henri Troyat : Gorky. Petrel of the Revolution. German adaptation by Antoinette Gittinger. Casimir Katz Verlag, Gernsbach 1987, ISBN 3-925825-08-8 .
  • Raimund Sesterhenn: The Bogostroitel'stvo at Gor'kij and Lunačarskij until 1909. On the ideological and literary prehistory of the party school in Capri (= Slavic contributions , volume 158). Sagner, Munich 1982, ISBN 3-87690-240-1 ( dissertation University of Freiburg im Breisgau 1981). Available online

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Matwej married when he was around 19, lost his wife after two years and looked back a little later in the narrative 13 years (edition used, p. 299, 8th Zvu).
  2. ↑ The narrator Matvej admits gaps in his memory: "I don't remember what I said then ... ..." (Edition used, p. 354, 10th issue)
  3. ↑ Perhaps there is a relationship with the current Krasnoglinsky Rajon (Russian Красноглинский район ).
  4. ↑ Of the two Lavra monasteries in Ukraine , the Holy Ascension Monastery is located on a tributary of the Dnepr.
  5. ↑ See also Warm in the afterword of the edition used, pp. 610–611.
  6. ↑ After the Russian Revolution in 1905 , a group of radical Bolsheviks within the SDAPR was called Otsovists (Russian Отзовизм (Otsowism)).

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Warm, p. 598, 4th Zvu
  2. ^ Troyat, p. 112, 10th Zvu
  3. ↑ Russian Соколье
  4. ↑ Ujesd
  5. ↑ Protopope: Archpriest
  6. ↑ Russian Савватий
  7. ↑ Russian Кудеярово
  8. ↑ Russian Николa в Толоконцеве
  9. ↑ Duden: holy
  10. ↑ probably Russian. Задонье в Ростове-На-Дону
  11. ↑ Russian Седмиозерная пустынь (Sedmiosernaja pustyn)
  12. ^ Gorki, quoted in Ludwig, p. 159, 1. Zvo
  13. ↑ Gourfinkel, p. 54, 4th Zvu
  14. ↑ Troyat, p. 113, 11. Zvo
  15. ^ Troyat, p. 113, 10. Zvo
  16. ↑ Gourfinkel, p. 56, 18. Zvo
  17. ↑ Gourfinkel, p. 52, 17th Zvu
  18. ↑ Gourfinkel, p. 52, 6th Zvu
  19. ↑ Troyat, p. 113 middle
  20. ^ Warm in the afterword of the edition used, p. 623, 6. Zvo