Gaito Gasdanov

Gaito Gasdanov 1934

Gaito Gazdanov ( Russian Гайто Газданов , scientific transliteration. Gajto Gazdanov ; actually: Georgi Ivanovich Gasdanow ; born November 23 ^{. Jul} / 6. December  1903 ^greg. In Saint Petersburg , † 5. December 1971 in Munich ) was a Russian writer and journalist .

Life

Gasdanov's father was a state forest officer of Ossetian descent. When the son was four years old, the father was transferred from the capital to the province; the family lived for several years in Siberia , near Tver , and in what is now Ukraine, in Kharkov and Poltava , where Gasdanov attended a cadet school.

With almost 16 years he joined in 1919 at the Russian civil war a federation in the White Army at. As a simple soldier, he served on an armored train. After the defeat of the whites, he was one of the troops that translated from the Crimean peninsula to Turkey and were initially interned not far from Istanbul . From there he was able to move to Bulgaria. In a high school set up especially for Russian refugees in the eastern Bulgarian city of Shumen , he passed his school leaving examination.

In 1923 he came to Paris in the stream of Russian emigrants. There he worked first as a load carrier and locomotive washer, then as a mechanic at Citroën , and finally for many years as a driver of a night taxi. He also attended lectures in literary history, sociology and economics at the Sorbonne .

From the end of the twenties he published regularly in newspapers and magazines of Russian emigration. Some of his prose texts received very positive reviews. a. Nobel laureate Iwan Bunin praised him , but the fees were very low. In view of his great material need, but also because of the news of a serious illness of his mother, who had stayed behind at home, he tried to return to the Soviet Union in the mid-1930s. He even wrote a petition to the chairman of the Soviet Writers' Union Maxim Gorky , but received no answer.

In Paris he joined a Masonic Lodge . Together with his wife from Odessa , he joined the Resistance during World War II . He was assigned to an armed unit underground. The couple also helped hide Jewish children. After the war, he wrote a book about it in French, which for the first time found a bigger response as an author.

He also resumed his work as a night taxi driver, while also publishing literary and journalistic texts. In 1952 he was offered the opportunity to work as a freelancer on the Russian program of the US Congress- funded Radio Liberation (later Radio Liberty ) to report on Parisian cultural life. For his journalistic work he took on the pseudonym "Georgij Cherkassov". In 1954 he got a permanent job in the broadcasting center in Munich. After five years in the Bavarian capital, he returned to Paris in 1959 as a correspondent for the station. After another seven years on the Seine, in 1966 he took over the management of the Russian program at the headquarters, which was located in Schwabing on the edge of the English Garden . Until his death from lung cancer , he lived in an official apartment at Osterwaldstrasse 55.

Grave in Paris

He was buried in the Russian cemetery of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois near Paris. The Ossetian parish of Paris donated a new tombstone in 2003 on the initiative of the conductor Valery Gergiev .

plant

Between 1922 and 1968, Gasdanov published numerous journalistic texts, a total of nine novels and 37 stories, which appeared in small editions in Russian émigré publishers, first in Paris and later in New York. He is assigned to the Russki Montparnasse , a group of young Russian emigrants in Paris in the 1930s who consciously turned away from the Russian prose tradition of the 19th century, instead oriented themselves towards Proust , Kafka , Gide and Joyce and worshiped Freud . Along with Boris Poplawski, he is the only author of the “lost generation”, the younger generation of the First Russian Emigration , whose work also received a lot of attention in post-Soviet Russia.

In Gasdanov's prose, reflections and associations of a first-person narrator and his characters mix with the description of situations and events. The fable can only be inferred from many fragments. Since his prose repeatedly touches on questions about the meaning of human existence, some critics called him the "Russian Camus ".

The following novels received the strongest response:

• An evening with Claire (Вечер у Клэр, 1929): Against the background of the Russian Civil War and the hardship in exile in Paris, the narrator describes his long-term efforts to support the young Frenchwoman Claire. War crimes of the Red and White Armies are described without distinction , which provoked protests from literary criticism in exile. However, the protagonist is not interested in any ideology, but rather wants to get to know war as a basic human experience on the border between life and death. The novel also notes the stagnation of Russian exile literature in the European context (with the exception of the works of Vladimir Nabokov, who was valued by Gasdanov ).

• Nocturnal ways (Ночные дороги, 1941): The storyline of the episode novel, influenced by French existentialism and the literature of the absurd, as well as by Louis-Ferdinand Celine's “ Journey to the End of the Night ”, are the experiences of a night taxi driver in the half- and underworld of Paris. The rapidly changing impressionistic perspective of the driver, who explored his trips between brothels, bars and restaurants of the city, here takes the place of the leisurely, but aimlessly wandering flaneur , like him for. B. Walter Benjamin described. From many chance contacts the encounters with three prostitutes stand out, who represent different stages and forms of physical and mental decline and the attempts to revolt against this decline. Overall, the life of the boulevardiers reflects a cultural decline in France in the interwar period.

• The Phantom of Alexander Wolf (Призрак Александра Вольфа, 1948): The plot revolves around the experiences of a former White Guard who killed a man in the Russian Civil War. Years later, while in emigration, he reads a story by a certain Alexander Wolf, in which the exact circumstances of this killing are described in a way that only the victim could know. The emigrant tries to meet Wolf, which he initially fails. Later, however, the paths of the two of them cross again by chance because Wolf followed a woman who has left him and has meanwhile had a relationship with the narrator. The last encounter between the two ends fatally for Wolf.

reception

Besides Nina Berberova and Vladimir Nabokov , Gasdanov is the only writer of the younger generation of Russian emigration of the 1920s whose works have been published beyond the narrow circle of exiled compatriots and have also been translated into several languages. Like Boris Poplavski's prose and poems , they received strong attention in post-Soviet Russia as attempts to overcome forms of traditional Russian literature.

His novel The Phantom of Alexander Wolf appeared soon after it was published by a Russian émigré publisher in New York in 1948 in English, French and Spanish. Only after the collapse of the Soviet Union could his works be released in his homeland. Gasdanow was there as the most important new discovery of the 1990s. In addition to numerous individual editions of his novels and stories, two multi-volume editions were published. A biography of Gasdanov was included in the renowned and popular Moscow book series The Lives of Eminent People ( ЖЗЛ - Жизнь замечательных людей ), which was founded in 1890 and temporarily published by Gorky. A "Society of Friends of Gaito Gasdanov" was founded in Moscow.

After the rediscovery of his work in Russia, translations of individual works appeared in English, French, Spanish, Italian, Serbian and Polish. In contrast, it initially remained largely unknown in the German-speaking world, and only two stories were published by 2011. The broad reception began in 2012 with the German edition of the novel The Phantom of Alexander Wolf .

Works in German translation

• The nocturnal travel companion . In: Russian narrators of the XX. Century , E. Gagarin, J & S Ferdermann Verlag, 1948, Munich.
• The mistake . In: The error. Russian stories , dtv, 1999, Munich. ISBN 978-3-423-09390-3 .
• The Phantom of Alexander Wolf (Prizrak Aleksandra Vol'fa). German and with an afterword by Rosemarie Tietze . Munich: Hanser, 2012. ISBN 978-3-446-23853-4 .
• The change . In: Akzente , Zeitschrift für Literatur, 3/2013 (translated by Rosemarie Tietze), ISBN 978-3-446-24359-0 .
• Black swans . In: Sinn und Form 6/2013, pp. 773–787 (story, translated by Rosemarie Tietze). ISBN 978-3-943-29714-0 .
• An evening with Claire. Novel. Translated from the Russian by Rosemarie Tietze. Munich: Hanser, 2014. ISBN 978-3-446-24471-9 .
• Luck . Edition 5 PLUS, Leck, 2014 (short story, translated by Rosemarie Tietze). Exclusive edition (no ISBN).
• The Return of the Buddha (Возвращение Будды). German and with an afterword by Rosemarie Tietze . Munich: Hanser, 2016. ISBN 978-3-446-25047-5 .
• Nocturnal paths . Novel. German and with an afterword by Christiane Körner. Munich: Hanser, 2018. ISBN 978-3-446-25811-2 .
• The pilgrims . Novel. German and with an afterword by Jürgen Barck. BoD, 2019. ISBN 978-3-7504-2186-8

literature

• Laslo Dienes: Russian Literature in Exile. The Life and Work of Gaito Gazdanov. Sagner, Munich 1982 (Slavic Articles, Volume 154). ISBN 978-3876902234
• Gajto Gazdanov i “niezamečennoe” pokolenie. Pisatel 'na peresečenii tradicij i kul'tur. So. Tat'jana Krasavčenko, Marija Vasel'eva. INION RAN, Moscow 2005, ISBN 978-5-248-00230-6
• Arthur Luther : Spiritual Life. In: Eastern Europe. 5th year, 1929/30, pp. 740–744.
• Thomas Urban : Gajto Gasdanow - a writer of the "Russkij Montparnasse". In: The Russian Munich. Mir eV, Center of Russian Culture in Munich, Munich 2010, pp. 185–193, ISBN 978-3-98-05300-9-5 .
• Larissa Beham: A Russian from Schwabing. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , 1./2. February 2014, p. 14.

Web links

Commons : Gaito Gazdanov  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Gaito Gasdanow in the catalog of the German National Library
• Photo album of the "Society of Friends of Gaito Gasdanov" [4]
• Tilman Spreckelsen: Gaito Gasdanow: The Phantom of Alexander Wolf - Who Owns the Memory? , FAZ , August 24, 2012
• Illustration of the plot of "The Phantom of Alexander Wolf": The sequence of events

Individual evidence

1. ↑ biogr. Information according to: Russkoe Zarubež'e. Zolotaja kniga emigracii. Pervaja step 'XX veka. Moskva 1997, pp. 164-165.
2. ↑ cf. Gleb Struve: Russkaja literatura v izgnanii. New York 1956, p. 233.
3. ↑ Laslo Dienes: An Unpublished Letter by Maksim Gor'kij, Or Who is Gajto Gazdanov? In: The world of the Slaves. Volume 1, 1979, pp. 39-54.
4. ↑ Larissa Beham: A Russian from Schwabing. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , 1./2. February 2014, p. 14.
5. ↑ Aleksandr Bachrach: Partizany vo Francii. In: Russkie novosti [Paris], November 8, 1946.
6. ↑ Gaito Gazdanov: The m'engage à défendre. Ombres et lumières. Paris 1946.
7. ↑ TN Krasavčenko: Gazdanov na Radio Svoboda, in: Gajto Gazdanov i "niezamečennoe" pokolenie. Pisatel 'na peresečenii tradicij i kul'tur. So. Tat'jana Krasavčenko, Marija Vasel'eva. Moscow 2005, pp. 232-241.
8. ↑ Slowo. Russkoye Pole, 2003. [1]
9. ↑ Mikhail Osorgin : O "molodych pisateljach". In: Poslednie novosti (Paris), March 19, 1936.
10. ↑ George Adamovič: Pamjati Gazdanova. In: Novoe Russkoe Slovo (New York), December 11, 1971.
11. ↑ E. Menegal'do, Proza Borisa Poplavskogo ili novel in: Gajto Gazdanov i "niezamečennoe" pokolenie. Pisatel 'na peresečenii tradicij i kul'tur. So. Tat'jana Krasavčenko, Marija Vasel'eva. Moscow 2005, p. 148.
12. ^ The Spector of Alexander Wolf. New York 1950; Le specter d'Alexandre Wolf. Paris 1951; El espectro de Alejandro Wolf. Madrid 1955.
13. ↑ Gajto Gazdanov: Sobranie sočinenij w trech tomach. Moskva 1996; Sočinenij w pjati tomach. Moskva 2009.
14. ↑ Ol'ga Orlova: Gazdanov. Moskva 2003.
15. ↑ Общество друзей Гайто Газданова [2]
16. ↑ cf. Pearl divers [3]