Golden floor
Golden Ground ( Russian Золотое дно , Solotoje dno ) is a short story by the Russian Nobel Prize winner for literature Ivan Bunin , which was written towards the end of 1903 and in 1904 in Gorki's first Snanije anthology in Saint Petersburg together with dreams ( Russian Сны , Sny ) under the common title Black earth ( Russian Чернозём , Chernosjom ) appeared.
content
The larks whirl around on the carriage ride to Rodniki. The traveling narrator asks the local driver Kornej for news.
There is nothing new and Kornej lives worse than before. Although the soil is a real gold mine - the black earth is an arsehole (almost three quarters of a meter) deep - it was sold dirt cheap and has again fallen into the hands of the wrong owners. Urban merchants and traders will by no means move to the countryside. Only three to four large landlords remained per district.
The narrator stops at his sister's estate on the way. The front garden is overgrown and the manor house looks even more dilapidated than on the last visit. On the onward journey the narrator continues in his short travelogue, this “epic of desolation”: In the grand manorial house of Baturino, “ burdock and dead nettles have come to the threshold”. In Worgol, a forework by the narrator's deceased aunt, the desolation reaches another of its climaxes. Most of the residents there have left the Worgol bank in the direction of uncharted Siberian territory. The narrator asks worried: "... what will happen later?" To which the coachman Kornej: "Something will be fine."
reception
- 1965. The Soviet literary critic V. Titowa quotes Chekhov's praise for calling the Black Earth story “brilliant”.
- 1982. Kasper writes, “The text suggests the idea of the common fate of the nobility and the peasantry….” By nobility, Kaspar means “the little landed gentry condemned to social decline”.
German-language editions
- Used edition
- Golden floor. German by Larissa Robiné . P. 210–218 in: Iwan Bunin: Antonäpfel. Stories 1892–1911. Editing and epilogue: Karlheinz Kasper . 536 pages. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1982
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Kasper in the afterword of the edition used, p. 524, 12. Zvu
- ↑ Russian Родники
- ↑ Russian Батурино
- ↑ Russian Воргол
- ↑ Russian Worgol (river)
- ↑ Edition used, p. 218, 19. Zvo
- ↑ eng. Titova's reference to Chekhov
- ↑ Edition used, p. 525, middle