Alja Rachmanova

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Alja Rachmanowa (born June 27, 1898 in Kasli near Yekaterinburg in the Urals as Galina Djuragina ; † February 11, 1991 in Ettenhausen , Switzerland ) was a Russian writer . Her diary entries have been translated into 21 languages. This made her one of the most famous writers of the interwar period .

life and work

Youth in Russia

Galina Djuragina, who later took on the pseudonym Alja Rachmanowa, grew up as the first of three daughters of an upper-class family in Kasli near Perm in the Urals.

Her autobiographical book Secrets of Tatars and Idols , published in 1932, describes her relatively carefree childhood in the upper class luxury of a Christian Orthodox home, in contact with the archaic way of life of the Tatars , describes adventurous excursions and experiences and the important prophecy of a hermit: “You will be very happy you will, miss, but you will also have much misery and grief ”. Galina Djuragina always saw the keeping of her diaries, from which many of her works were drawn, as an “indispensable necessity of life”.

Students, Love, Cheka and Death was published as the first volume of the trilogy My Russian Diaries in 1931. It deals with the events in Russia shortly before and after the October Revolution from the perspective of the Rachmanov / Djuragins family. What begins as a portrayal of the emotional states of a girl in the backfish age soon develops into a dramatic scenario. The tsar is overthrown, the Bolsheviks are in power, an abbot is publicly impaled as “proof” that there is no god, shootings, house searches, arrests, looting, illness, fear and horror are the order of the day as a result of the red terror . "We can no longer imagine that you can sleep undressed, speak other than in a whisper, live even a minute without fear of being shot," the student confides in her diary, which she can hardly get out of hiding dares to pull out. Her hometown is conquered by the White Army , there is a temporary détente, but then the Red Army approaches , the family flees in a train from cattle wagons to Irkutsk , where Galina Djuragina begins to study psychology.

Marriage in the Red Storm is a direct follow-up to the first volume. Galina Djuragina fell in love with an Austrian prisoner of war who, out of love for her, stayed in Soviet Russia , which had been shaken by civil war . Five months later they married in Omsk , where the family had to move, and lived there in a wagon at the freight yard. In 1922 the son Jurka was born in a Soviet “birthing house” under difficult nursing and hygienic conditions. The author's first years of marriage with her husband Arnulf von Hoyer , who came from Czernowitz and grew up in Salzburg, were overshadowed by hunger, cold and fear of liquidation by the Cheka, which was nationalized as the GPU in 1922 . The marriage became an "island of happiness" that had to be wrested from the post-revolutionary economy of scarcity on a daily basis. On the way back from Omsk they encountered entire trains full of starving people. When they arrived in their hometown, the former maid had rented all of the rooms in her house and was not allowed to give them any back on orders from the communists. Arnulf von Hoyer (whose name is Otmar in the book) found a job as an English lecturer, Galina Djuragina gave lectures on childhood psychology and children's literature. In 1925 the family of three was expelled from the Soviet Union without giving any reason.

Exile in Austria

The family tried to gain a foothold in Vienna, which was plagued by unemployment and hardship . Galina Djuragina offered an editorial office a story from Russian life, but it was rejected. The family decided to run a grocery store and lived in a small room behind the shop in the Währing district of Vienna . While Arnulf von Hoyer had to catch up on the exams taken in Russia at the university, which were not recognized in Austria , Galina Djuragina looked after the family for a year and a half as a milkwoman. The academic, who at first spoke only broken German, used every free minute to write down the stories she was told by her customers. She was homesick, her parents' letters were depressing, and she was occasionally followed up by the Soviet secret service. The murder of the Romanian tenor Traian Grozăvescu was commented on by the customers. The July revolt of 1927 worried them violently. The murder of the Soviet ambassador Pjotr ​​Voykov in Warsaw by the 18-year-old Boris Kowerda sparked fears of acts of revenge in Russia.

In 1927 the family moved to the hometown of Arnulf von Hoyers, Salzburg , where he took up a teaching position. Her living conditions improved when the Salzburg publisher Anton Pustet published Galina Djuragina's diaries in book form, translated into German by her husband. To protect her relatives who remained in Russia, she took the pseudonym Alja (Alexandra) Rachmanowa . The Milchfrau plant in Ottakring was a success. Her works have been translated into 22 languages. The Factory of the New Man (1935) received first prize from the Académie d'Education et d'Etudes Sociales for the best anti-Bolshevik novel .

The family moved into a villa on Giselakai, and Arnulf von Hoyer got a job as a high school teacher. “Rank and name meant little to her. Rather (...) the purely human was in the foreground. ”After the annexation of Austria to the German Reich, she was excluded from the Reichsschrifttumskammer , her books were banned because they did not fit into the period of the Hitler-Stalin Pact - after During the attack on Russia, they were translated into Russian and used as anti-Bolshevik propaganda on the Eastern Front. When her 23-year-old son Jurka was shot by the Russians in the last fighting for Vienna in April 1945 and her life was threatened again in view of the advancing Soviet army , she and her husband fled to Switzerland .

Exile in Switzerland

The book One of Many dedicated Rachmanova to Jurka's memory. In it she described the events from the move to Salzburg in 1927 to the death of her son. Arnulf von Hoyer wrote in 1946 in a letter to friends in Salzburg: “It is of course very sad for us that we always have to start over and we are, frankly, already very tired. It is very difficult for us to be alone without our only child, and homesickness does not make our life any easier ”.

The Hoyers moved into their last residence on January 27, 1948 in Ettenhausen in the canton of Thurgau . Galina wrote novel biographies of Russian writers, which were translated into German by Arnulf Hoyer. After his death in 1971, Alja Rachmanova was dependent on the care of a neighbor. She died during the foreseeable collapse of the Soviet Union and was buried in the Salzburg municipal cemetery.

Her books reached a total circulation of over two million.

Sources

Alja Rachmanova's life has been portrayed by herself in the “documentary novels” ( secrets of Tatars and idols , students, love, Cheka and death , marriages in the red storm , milkwoman in Ottakring , one of many ). Only the names of the protagonists were recognizable from her changed (Galina Djuragina became Alja Rachmanowa, Arnulf von Hoyer became Otmar Wagner, all other personal names were definitely changed) and the Vienna district in which her dairy business was located (Währing became Ottakring ) .

A critical review of your autobiographical information has not yet been determined and is probably still pending - u. a. because the author's clear anti-Bolshevik attitude discredited her for Russian research until 1990. In addition, her manuscripts were, as it were, "absorbed" by Arnulf von Hoyer's translation and do not exist or only to a limited extent in the original Russian version.

H. Riggenbach puts it this way: “Basically, Alja Rachmanova's estate is a family estate: the literary legacy of the writer exists to this day only as a symbiosis between her literary work and the translation work of her husband Arnulf von Hoyer.” The surviving Russian typescripts were written on a typewriter with Latin letters as it were in phonetic transcription. Rachmanova apparently never had a Cyrillic typewriter .

Alja Rachmanowa bequeathed her estate to the Canton of Thurgau in a will . It was initially kept in the Thurgau Cantonal Library and inventoried there (inventory published in 1998, amended in 2010). In 2013, the holdings were taken over by the Thurgau State Archives , to which the copyrights and exploitation rights for Rachmanova's work have since been transferred. Between 2015 and 2017, the inventory was re-recorded and partly reorganized.

Works

  • Students, love, Cheka and death. Diary of a Russian student. Translated by Arnulf von Hoyer. Anton Pustet, Salzburg 1931; New edition Gustav Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach 1979, ISBN 3-404-10134-0
  • Marriages in the red storm. Verlag Anton Pustet, Salzburg, 1932, new edition Gustav Lübbe Verlag, Bergisch Gladbach 1981, ISBN 3-404-10136-7
  • Milk woman in Ottakring. Anton Pustet, Salzburg 1933; New edition with a foreword by Dietmar Grieser  : Amalthea Signum Verlag, Vienna 1997, ISBN 978-3-85002-923-0 .
  • Tartar and idol secrets. Publisher Anton Pustet, Salzburg 1933.
  • The factory of the new man. Salzburg 1935.
  • Ssonja Tolstoj, Tragedy of a Love. Berlin 1938.
  • Vera Fedorovna. Graz 1939.
  • One of many. Zurich, 1947.
  • The life of a great sinner. (Dostoevsky). Zurich 1947.
  • Sonja Kowalewski. Zurich 1950.
  • Jurka experiences Vienna. Zurich 1951.
  • The love of a life (Turgenev). Frauenfeld 1952.
  • The false tsarina. Frauenfeld 1954.
  • In the shadow of the Tsar's court (Pushkin). Frauenfeld 1957.
  • A short day (Chekhov). Frauenfeld 1961.
  • Animals accompany my life. Frauenfeld 1963.
  • The exiles. Frauenfeld 1964.
  • Tchaikovsky. 1972.
  • Salzburg is also beautiful in snow and fog. Diaries 1942 to 1945. Translated and edited by Heinrich Riggenbach. Salzburg 2015, ISBN 978-3-7013-1230-6

literature

  • Alja Rachmanowa: Milkwoman in Ottakring. Preface by Dietmar Grieser . Amalthea, Vienna 1997, ISBN 3-85002-396-6 (A copy of the memorial plaque is also taken from the back of the cover (photo Votava)).
  • Alja Rachmanowa: Ettenhausen, seen with my eyes. In: Thurgauer Jahrbuch , Vol. 29, 1954, pp. 13-21 ( e-periodica.ch )
  • Alja Rachmanowa: In: Thurgauer Jahrbuch . Volume 38, 1963, pp. 39–54 ( e-periodica.ch )
  • Johanna Schuchter: It was like that in Salzburg. Verlag der Salzburger Druckerei, Salzburg 1976, ISBN 3-85338-118-9 .
  • Lieselotte von Eltz-Hoffmann: Salzburg women, life and work from 13 centuries. Kulturgut der Heimat, Stadtverein Salzburg, Colorama, Salzburg 1997, DNB 951703161 (The large portrait photo with a headscarf, which is archived in the MCA, comes from this book).
  • Marianne Luginbühl: Alja Rachmanowa. In: Thurgauer Jahrbuch , Vol. 74, 1997, pp. 71-78. ( e-periodica.ch )
  • Eva Maria Schalk, Ilse Stahr (Ed.): The Salzburg Calendar 1995. Unipress Verlag. (Family photo.)
  • Alja Rachmanowa , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 33/1993 from August 9, 1993, in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely available)
  • Johann Ulrich Schlegel, Alja Rachmanowa: Russian writer between the fronts. In: Civitas, monthly for politics and culture, edition 7/8 1998, Brig, pp. 157-160.
  • Ilse Stahr: The milk woman's secret in Ottakring. Alja Rachmanova. One life. Amalthea, Vienna 2012, ISBN 978-3-85002-800-4
  • Franz Stadler: The hidden secrets of the “milk woman in Ottakring”. In: Zwischenwelt, Zs. Der Theodor Kramer Gesellschaft , 35, 3, Vienna, November 2018, pp. 8–12.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Tenor career with a fatal end 110th birthday of Trajan Grosavescu on oe1. orf .at of November 26, 2005, accessed on October 20, 2016.
  2. ^ Thurgauer Jahrbuch : portrait photo. Alja Rachmanowa and Arnulf von Hoyer in Salzburg. Retrieved April 16, 2020 .
  3. ^ Lieselotte von Eltz-Hoffmann: Salzburg women, life and work from 13 centuries. Cultural property of the homeland, Salzburg City Association, Colorama, Salzburg 1997, DNB 951703161
  4. ^ Thurgauer Jahrbuch: Nekrolog für Alja Rachmanowa 1992. Retrieved on April 7, 2020 .
  5. ↑ Alja Rachmanowa in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)
  6. ^ A b Heinrich Riggenbach: The estate of Alja Rachmanowa (Galina von Hoyer) in the Thurgau Cantonal Library (PDF) Thurgau Cantonal Library. 2010. Retrieved November 21, 2018.
  7. ↑ 9'43 Rachmanowa Alja (1898-1991), writer, 1774 (approx.) - 2015 (department) . State Archives of the Canton of Thurgau. Retrieved November 21, 2018.
  8. ↑ Stadler uses documents and quotations to show how close Rachmanova was to National Socialism and that Stahr's book is an uncritical hagiography. He values ​​v. a. the diaries in Riggenbach's translation.
personal data
SURNAME Rachmanova, Alja
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Djuragina, Galina (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian writer
DATE OF BIRTH June 27, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Kasli , near Yekaterinburg in the Urals
DATE OF DEATH February 11, 1991
Place of death Ettenhausen TG