Lara's daughter

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Lara's daughter ( English original title: Lara's Child ) is a novel that the English lawyer and writer Jim Williams published in 1994 under the pseudonym Alexander Mollin . The adventure and romance novel , a sequel to Boris Pasternak's world success Doctor Schiwago (1957), was revived after disputes with the Feltrinelli publishing house, which holds the exploitation rights for Pasternak's novel, and two court rulings that did not recognize the work as being sufficiently creative taken off the market.

action

The main characters in Lara's daughter

Book 1 . The action begins where Section 12 of Chapter 14 ended in Pasternak, i.e. in the winter of 1921/22. From Warykino, where Dr. Zhivago is left alone, Komarowski travels with Lara and her daughter Katja, detouring Moscow to Chita , where they live together for four years. When Lara gives birth to Schiwago's daughter Tanja there, Komarowski is jealous and gives the child away. Katja will feel irrationally guilty for life because she often wished her little sister the devil because of her disappearance.

Lara, Katja and their governess, Fräulein Bürli, go back to Yuriatin, where Lara establishes a love affair with the young speculator Kolja Chalyapin. She also helps her old friend Galiullin, who was forced to go into hiding as a former leader of the White Army . That gets her into trouble, and once again Komarowski shows up just in time to get her, Katja and the governess to safety. They share a flat in Vladivostok .

Years go by, and since Katja has developed a talent for singing, Lara travels to Moscow to get her daughter a place at the local music conservatory. The year is 1929, and after her arrival Lara learns by chance that Yuri Zhivago has just passed away. She attends the funeral and arranges the estate together with Yevgraf Schiwago. Before she can return to Vladivostok, Lara is arrested by GPU agents and sentenced to forced labor. It disappears in the camp and does not appear again later.

Soon after, Komarowski dies in Vladivostok as a result of a stroke. Katja and her governess are now on their own. Kolja Chaliapin is now also being politically persecuted and wants to get to safety in France. He offers Katja to take her with him. For that they have to get married.

Book 2 . Prof. Gromeko, Tonja (Doctor Schiwago's wife) and their two children Sascha and Mascha settle in Paris, where a relative, Aristide Krüger, supports them. Sascha becomes friends with a Russian exile, the Fiaker driver Gromov. Not knowing that this is a communist, he gives him inside information about the important Russian general in exile Menshikov, which allows Gromov to assassinate the general. From then on, he carries around with him the innocent guilt that Sascha incurs.

Tanja and Kolja now live in Nice . Since her departure from Russia, Tonja has been surrounded by a whole circle of acquaintances of Russian exiles and goes with some of them and their children on a vacation trip to Nice. So it happens that Sascha and Katja meet. They fall in love with each other and their inner voices tell them that they are meant for each other. Katja in particular, who is a very headstrong young woman, defends herself against her feelings. As Lara's daughter, she too often had to watch a woman lose her self-determination through love. Her motto is therefore that love is nothing but chemistry and external circumstances. A friend of Tonja's, Max, offers her husband Kolja a job in Paris.

Sascha is a disoriented young man who doesn't know where his place is in life. That is why he is initially enrolling at the Sorbonne as a philosophy student. His new friend Constantine gives him sympathy for the political right. Although his best friend Daniel Coën was Jewish and communist, Sascha and Constantine are committed to the cause of Action française .

Book 3 . Since his guilty conscience about the assassination attempt on General Menshikov still does not leave him in peace, Sascha breaks off his studies and goes to Salamanca in 1936 to fight on the side of the nationalists in the Spanish Civil War .

Katja has left Kolja and in turn goes to Barcelona to work as an ambulance driver and car mechanic for the Republican cause . As luck would have it, shortly before the Battle of Teruel she ended up near Teruel , where Sascha has just been taken prisoner. The re-encounter triggers Sascha to realize that he only ever loved Katja. She still doesn't want to know anything about love, but flees with Sascha before the nationalists can take the city.

They move into an abandoned finca near Tarragona and stay there for several months. Katja is expecting a child from Sascha and finally gives birth to this child, Alessi. As the fascists advance, they continue their escape and in the end arrive happily in Paris. She only realizes how much Katja cares about Sascha when Kolja unexpectedly appears and tries to win her back.

1940 German troops occupy Paris. Because he is Russian, Sascha is deported to a channel island as a slave laborer . He won't return from there. Katja is arrested too and taken to the Ruhr as a forced laborer. When the Allies liberated the Ruhr area in 1945, she was able to return to Paris and found her child safe with Tonja. She takes a job as a teacher and marries her colleague Pierre Mollin.

Trying to continue Pasternak's novel

As in the novel Doctor Zhivago , which is largely written against the background of the Russian Civil War , Lara's daughter also has a civil war, namely the Spanish one. In his novel, Williams has endeavored in many ways not only to tie in with the plot, but also with the form and style of Pasternak's novel. In Lara's daughter , too, there is a very large number of minor characters who unexpectedly reappear in different places. Another characteristic that Williams copied from Pasternak is extensive philosophical reflections in which the main characters indulge themselves.

Lara's daughter , however, shows a number of mistakes that follow Pasternak's work, such as characterizing the characters. It is reported about Tonja that she was a luxury creature who could not do business in an emergency (p. 263; with Pasternak it was she who organized the survival of the family in the hungry winter of 1917/18); she is completely ignorant of legal and monetary matters (p. 433; Tonja studied law with Pasternak). Her father, Prof. Gromeko, is called a biologist (p. 388f; at Pasternak he is professor of agriculture and chemistry). Sima Tuntzewa, whose popular religiosity in Pasternak Lara gives deep spiritual peace, is portrayed in Williams as an unpopular bigotry (p. 79).

The connection to the plot was not always successful either. On p. 93, for example, it says that the manager Mikulitsyn is still living in Warykino more than four years after Lara's departure from Zhivago. At Pasternak's, however, Mikulitsyn had left the estate before Lara and Zhivago even got there.

Publication and Prohibition

The English original edition of the novel was published in 1994 by Doubleday . In the same year, a German translation by Sabine Schulte was available, and the Bertelsmann publishing house in Gütersloh took over the marketing . Now the exploitation rights for Doctor Zhivago , which have been with the Italian Feltrinelli publishing house since 1970, include the right to block all adaptations and continuations of this work, and all attempts to circumvent this veto right with money have so far failed. Already in mid-June 1994 procured Ferinelli against Bertelsmann to prevent the book release, the Mannheim Regional Court an injunction ; At this point in time, however, 140,000 copies had already been delivered to the book trade.

Bertelsmann later argued that Williams' novel was not a continuation of Pasternak's novel, but David Lean's film Doctor Zhivago (1965). On the other hand, u. a. object that many of the characters - such as Galiullin, Samdewjatow, Mikulitsyn, the Tuntzewa sisters and Yuri Schiwago's partner Marina - appear in Pasternak's novel, but not in the film.

Despite Bertelsmann's arguments, the Federal Court of Justice declared the Feltrinelli publishing house's veto in 1999 to be legal . He thus joined a previous judgment of the Higher Regional Court in Karlsruhe , which had prohibited the marketing of Williams' novel on the grounds that it was not a self-creative achievement. Williams would either have had to acquire the sequel rights or create an entirely new work, compared to which the original "fades".

criticism

The literary critic Annette Meyhöfer described the book as the “desecration of a veritable Nobel Prize winner”.

expenditure

literature

  • Hans-Jürgen Homann: Praxishandbuch Filmrecht: A guide for film, television and media professionals . Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg 2001, ISBN 978-3-662-09431-0 , pp. 43 f . ( limited preview in Google Book search).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Annette Meyhöfer: To be continued ... In: Focus Magazin No. 11, 1994. Retrieved on January 21, 2020 .
  2. ↑ What would Pasternak say? In: New Germany. June 16, 1994, accessed January 22, 2020 .
  3. ↑ Judgments: To be continued. In: Der Spiegel 18/1999, p. 193. Retrieved on January 21, 2020 .