Jurij Klen

Yuri Klen ( Ukrainian Юрій Клен ; born September 22, ^jul. / 4. October  1891 ^greg. In Serbyniwka , volhynian governorate , Russian Empire ; † the thirtieth October 1947 in Augsburg , Germany ) was the pseudonym of the Ukrainian - German writer, translator, Literary scholar and editor Oswald-Eckhart Burghardt ( Освальд Федорович Бурґгардт ), who wrote works in Russian, German and Ukrainian.

Life

Oswald Burghardt came in 1891 as the son of the Prussian merchant Friedrich Burghardt and the Baltic Germans Simone Thiel in the Volhynian village Serbyniwka at Starokostiantyniv in today's Ukrainian oblast Khmelnytsky to the world. He had a younger sister named Josefine. He spent his childhood and school years mainly in the Podolia Governorate and in Volhynia . He grew up speaking four languages: German was spoken in the family, Russian in school, the rural population spoke Ukrainian and the landlords spoke Polish. In 1912 his father died, which put the family in financial distress. After graduating from the Kiev high school, he began studying German and Slavic studies at the Vladimir University in Kiev . During the First World War , he was exiled as the son of German colonists in a village in the Arkhangelsk governorate .

After the October Revolution he returned to Kiev, finished his studies and from 1920 taught at the socio-economic technical center in Baryschiwka . There he refreshed his friendship with Mykola Serov and began to write poems in the Ukrainian language, which were published from 1924. He also translated German, French and English poetry into Ukrainian. As a result of the Peace of Brest-Litovsk in 1918, Ukraine briefly became sovereign, which led to a heyday of Ukrainian national culture, in which Burghardt also participated. During this time he was, next to Mykola Serow, Pawlo Fylypowytsch , Mychajlo Draj-Chmara and Maksym Rylskyj member of the group of " Ukrainian neoclassics " (Ukrainian Неокла́сики ).

Due to his participation in the “Ukrainian Renaissance” he was imprisoned for a month in the course of a wave of arrests in 1921 by the Bolsheviks who wanted to take action against “counter-revolutionaries”. After his release he mainly taught German at the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Kiev. In 1930 he became professor of translation arts at the Linguistic Institute in Kiev and began touring Germany again.

The growing pressure of the Soviet regime on critics prompted Burghardt to leave the Ukraine in 1931 and to emigrate to Germany. He spent the first three years in Germany with his family with relatives in the Black Forest and in Munich. He worked closely with poets such as u. a. Dmytro Donzow and earned his living with occasional assignments from German and Ukrainian magazines and as a private teacher. In 1934, with the support of Dmitrij Tschižewskij , he received a position as a lecturer at the Slavic Seminar of the University of Münster for Russian and Ukrainian. From 1939 he was employed by the Wehrmacht as a language teacher and translator on the Eastern Front, from where he returned in 1942. A year later he followed the call of the Karl Ferdinand University in Prague , where he first taught Russian and later became an honorary professor. At the same time he gave lessons at the Ukrainian Free University in Prague. After the Hitler regime was crushed, the Karls-Universität was also dissolved and Burghardt fled to Tyrol, where he received a temporary teaching position in Innsbruck . From Austria he often traveled to Germany and gave lectures or organized readings. After a reading in Augsburg on October 25, 1947, he fell ill with pneumonia, which he succumbed only six days later on October 31, 1947.

Create

Shortly after his father's death in 1913, Burghardt wrote his first well-known poems, which he wrote in Russian. Two years later - already during his exile - the first scientific paper appeared in Kiev. In the 1920s he mainly published translations; one of the best known is that of the "Iron Sonnets" by the German writer Josef Winckler . He also published literary articles and continued to write poetry in Russian. After emigrating to Germany, he began to write artistic works in Ukrainian. From 1933 he used the pseudonym Jurij Klen , other pseudonyms he used were Porfyrij Horotak and Hordij Javir . In 1941 his doctoral thesis was published with the title "The Leitmotive bei Leonid Andreev ", which he wrote in German. While he lived and worked in Tyrol, he briefly published the magazine "Litavry" (Eng .: The Kesselpauke), which was published in Salzburg. He also participated in the work of many other magazines. Most of his main work “Popil imperij” (German: The Ashes of the Empires) as well as short prose stories were written in Tyrol - probably during the last two years of his life. In the year of his death, his memoirs were published in Munich.

His literary parodies, written together with Leonid Mossends ( Леонід Мосендз 1897–1948), were published in 1947 under the common pseudonym Porfyrii Horotak . His translations of William Shakespeare's Hamlet and Tempest appeared posthumously, along with most of his other Ukrainian works.

Works (selection)

Skovoroda

“Skovoroda” is the first sonnet that Burghardt wrote and published in the Ukrainian language. It was created in 1928, before Burghardt's emigration. The title refers to the Ukrainian wandering philosopher and poet Hryhorij Skoworoda , whose philosophy Burghardt admired. The poem deals with hiking and the associated closeness to nature and indicates in the last stanza that this could be the only way of knowing the world and one's own soul.

Kortes

"Kortes" (German: Cortés) is a bisonet and was the first Ukrainian poem that Burghardt published under the pseudonym Jurij Klen while emigrating. It was created in 1933 and first appeared in the magazine "Vistnyk" (German: Bote) in Lemberg. The title refers to the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés , who conquered the Aztec Empire in the 16th century. This event is also addressed in the poem, with Cortés being clearly condemned. One can draw a parallel here from the conquered Aztec empire to the Ukraine and from the conquering Spaniards to the Soviet Union, whereby the poem is a criticism of the Soviet regime and colonial policy in general.

Popil imperij

“Popil imperij” (German: the ashes of empires) is considered to be the central work of Burghardt; on the one hand because it is the longest and on the other hand because it is the most watched. "Popil imperij" is an epic poem, also called Epopoe . Burghardt's goal was to create a Ukrainian national epic, although it remains unclear whether he has achieved this in his own opinion (among other things because he died before the work was completed). This is also an important reason why he wrote “Popil imperij” in Ukrainian; National epics (the Nibelungenlied and the Igorlied ) already existed in both German and Russian . Burghardt very often refers here to other writers, poets and philosophers, especially to Dante and his " Divine Comedy ". In addition, many special hints are made that make it difficult to fully understand. In interpretations, however, there is agreement that Burghardt's main work strongly criticized the two dictatorships in which he lived and created a manifesto of humanism.

Works (incomplete list)

• The Cursed Years (ukr .: Проклятi року; 1943), book of poems
• Caravels (ukr .: Каравели; 1943), book of poems
• Works (ukr .: Твори; Vol. 1–4, 1957–1992), volume of poems
• Selection (ukr .: Вибране; 1960), collection of poems
• Skoworoda (ukr .: Сковорода, 1928), sonnet
• Cortés (ukr .: Кортес; 1933), bisonet
• The ashes of empires (ukr .: Попiл iмперiй; only complete edition in the 2nd volume of the works 1957), Epopoe
• The leitmotifs in Leonid Andreev (1941), doctoral thesis

literature

• Jutta Lindekugel: Diversity of poetry in the work of Oswald Burghardt (Jurij Klen) , Kassel University Press, Kassel, 2003
• Josefine Burghardt: Oswald Burghardt. Life and Works , Verlag Ukraine, Munich, 1962

Web links

• Biography Oswald-Eckhart Burghardt in Reisen Kiev (German)
• Article on Oswald-Eckhart Burghardt in the Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine (Ukrainian)
• Article on the life and work of Jurij Klen (Ukrainian)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Jutta Lindekugel: Diversity of poetry in the work of Oswald Burghardt (Jurij Klen) , Kassel University Press, Kassel, 2003, pp. 28–37
2. ↑ ^{a b} Article on Klen, Yurii in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine ; accessed on July 7, 2016
3. ↑ Jutta Lindekugel: Diversity of poetry in the work of Oswald Burghardt (Jurij Klen) , Kassel University Press, Kassel, 2003, pp. 28–37
4. ↑ Jutta Lindekugel: Diversity of poetry in the work of Oswald Burghardt (Jurij Klen) , Kassel University Press, Kassel, 2003, pp. 280–296
5. ↑ Jutta Lindekugel: Diversity of poetry in the work of Oswald Burghardt (Jurij Klen) , Kassel University Press, Kassel, 2003, p. 517
6. ↑ Jutta Lindekugel: Diversity of poetry in the work of Oswald Burghardt (Jurij Klen) , Kassel University Press, Kassel, 2003, p. 517
7. ↑ Jutta Lindekugel: Diversity of poetry in the work of Oswald Burghardt (Jurij Klen) , Kassel University Press, Kassel, 2003, p. 517
8. ↑ Jutta Lindekugel: Diversity of poetry in the work of Oswald Burghardt (Jurij Klen) , Kassel University Press, Kassel, 2003, p. 517
9. ↑ Jutta Lindekugel: Diversity of poetry in the work of Oswald Burghardt (Jurij Klen) , Kassel University Press, Kassel, 2003, p. 517
10. ↑ Jutta Lindekugel: Diversity of poetry in the work of Oswald Burghardt (Jurij Klen) , Kassel University Press, Kassel, 2003, p. 517
11. ↑ Jutta Lindekugel: Diversity of poetry in the work of Oswald Burghardt (Jurij Klen) , Kassel University Press, Kassel, 2003, p. 517