Purgatory (Sofi Oksanen, drama)
Purgatory is the first play by the Finnish-Estonian author Sofi Oksanen . It premiered at the Finnish National Theater in Helsinki in 2007 and became the theater event of the year in Finland. After the worldwide success of her novel of the same name (the original edition was published in 2008 and has already been translated into 38 languages), the international breakthrough of her play is underway in 2011 with premieres in Sweden, the USA, Portugal, Iceland and Germany. The drama shows how the short, unusual encounter between two very unequal women not only reveals common family roots, but also very similar individual victim / perpetrator experiences against the background of the checkered history of Estonia in the 20th century.
action
On a late summer day in 1992 - one year after Estonia regained independence - the widowed farmer Aliide Truu found an unknown young woman in need on her farm. Although she lies and could be a thief or a decoy, Aliide gives her shelter. When her pursuers, two Russian mafiosi, ask about her shortly afterwards, it turns out that the girl - Zara Pekk - did not come here by accident. She is the granddaughter of Aliide's sister Ingel. Until then, Aliide had denied even having a sister. Now a long-gone, repressed guilt is quickly revealed. Ingel was deported to Siberia with her daughter Linda (later Zara's mother) at the beginning of the 1950s , for which Aliide was as much to blame as her husband, the party functionary Martin, whom she had lured herself to protect herself from further interrogations by the Soviet secret service in the basement of the parish hall and the torture, humiliation and shame associated with it. It was the same fear that drove Aliide to betray her sister, but at the same time a hardly less important, selfish motive: She hoped to win over her husband, the Estonian resistance fighter Hans Pekk. The sisters had kept it hidden in a secret cellar of the house; After the deportation of his wife and child, Aliide stopped him from tracking them down and later got him a forged passport with the intention of following him to Tallinn ; but when Hans instead went back into the woods and returned from there injured, she let him perish in his cellar hiding place.
In contrast to Alide's culpable history, that of Zara was only a short time ago. She is confronted when her two persecutors and ex-pimps reappear and put Alide under pressure with the claim that Zara is wanted as a murderer, which they also prove with photos. When confronted by Aliide, Zara denies the act itself, the killing of the pimp boss, as well as her past as a prostitute. Growing tension between the two, which is also discharged in physical violence, alternates with mutual understanding and acts of solidarity. Aliide opens Hans' former hiding place to protect Zara, but is also tempted to do the same with her as he did with him. The fact that there is neither an escalation nor a solution (or even reconciliation) is due not least to the third and final appearance of the pimp duo, which creates facts and leads to a kind of showdown: the younger, more ruthless mafioso is shot by the other, and Aliide delivers Zara to them, but gives her a tool for possible liberation on the way to Tallinn (a strong sleeping pill that she had already successfully tried on Hans and Martin). For herself, she makes the decision to end her life by setting the house on fire, but first writes a letter to her sister asking her to come back and take over the land that belongs to her.
layout
The drama is divided into two acts or 17 scenes. In terms of time, they are either in the present (1992) or around 40 years earlier (between 1951 and '53). The place of action is almost exclusively Aliide's house.
The flashbacks are not aimed at the dramatic dialogue partner, but at the viewer; only to him do certain parts of the prehistory fully reveal themselves. The only direct link between the two time levels are occasional brief disputes between the older and younger aliens. A scene in which present-day action and flashback mix is when Aliide Zara describes how the interrogating soldiers raped her mother - Linda, who was only 10 years old - and how they made Aliide an accomplice.
The first scene occupies a certain special position in terms of the place and time of the action (underlined in the premiere by the fact that it was shown as a video projection): It takes place in a basement room and shows a woman, faceless through a sackcloth, through two Russian-speaking soldiers is tormented and degraded. The scene can later be assigned to Aliide without losing any of its generality. The parallelism of Aliides and Zara's fate is formally supported by the requirement that the anonymous soldiers be played by the same actors as the mafiosi.
Purgatory fulfills the most important criteria of both tragedy and analytical drama .
symbolism
In Aliide's big final monologue, which she addressed to the dying Hans who was already unconscious from her sleeping pills, the author put the following words in her mouth: I had and have only one option. Namely to become one with what invaded Estonia and made it his own, what came and violated the Estonian women and thus took possession of what came and shot the wrong people, the potential Estonian fathers, and instead his red ones , veined tail and his boots to kick. - The occupation of a country and the rape of women are thus merged into one image by Oksanen. She had already used this metaphor in her first novel, Stalinin Lehmät .
The most symbolic places of the drama are the basement and the house.
For Aliide, the cellar is on the one hand the place of her powerlessness and on the other hand the place of her little private omnipotence, it is her place of horror and hope. She only gets to know one of them once and survives him (together with her sister and niece) in the hope of keeping Hans in the other and thus saving his life and the chance of being loved. Since the latter is not fulfilled, she sees no other way than to lock this door and literally bury her hope under it. She only opens this cellar again - in the original as well as in the figurative sense - when the past returns in the form of Hans' granddaughter. For Zara, the place means the same thing as for her grandfather: a chance of survival, but also a trap. Something has changed for Aliide: the temptation to abuse their power has increased. She could “do” her past - in the form of a potential accuser, if not an avenger - without further ado. That she resists this is an important act of her “purification” (as the literal translation of the original title Puhdistus ). The author leaves it up to the reader / viewer to decide whether this can be considered to have been carried out with her suicide.
The house that Aliide took over from her (also deported) parents and has lived and managed her whole life is for her one thing above all else: a refuge, a protective and stronghold. She has every reason to defend herself. Against their house flying stones at her door is Russki . Aliide is considered a collaborator, and she knows that an arrangement with the new power - the power of money - will not succeed. Therefore, she isolates herself and seems to only communicate with her daughter Talvi, who, however, moved to Finland in the 80s and lives a life that is alien to Aliide. When Zara shows up, she has practically ended her life - and has basically been since Hans' death. As long as he was still alive, she was ready to leave and leave her "snail shell" - for her love. For her love, however, she also "polluted" the house through betrayal and crime. Whether the fire planned by her means a “purification” of it is left to the judgment of the reader / viewer.
literature
- Sofi Oksanen: Purgatory . schaefersphilippen, Cologne 2011.
Individual evidence
- ^ Quote on Schaefersphilippen: after Helsingin Sanomat
- ↑ Schaefersphilippen: Publishing house that owns the rights to "Purgatory", the German-language edition of "Puhdistus".