Leonid Saweljewitsch Lipawski

Leonid Saweljewitsch Lipawski ( Russian Леонид Савельевич Липавский , scientific. Transliteration Leonid Savel'evič Lipavskij; February 2 * ^{. Jul} / 15. February  1904 ^greg. In St. Petersburg , Russian Empire , † November 1941 near Peterhof , Soviet Union) was a Russian writer . He is considered one of the last representatives of the Russian avant-garde and is counted among the so-called Russian absurdities . In the 1920s and 1930s he was a member of the unofficial group of writers Tschinari , which included Daniil Charms among others . The philosophical worldview of this group was very similar to that of existentialism, which later became particularly influential in France .

Life

Childhood and youth

Lipawski was born in St. Petersburg in 1904 in the family of the doctor Saveli Michailowitsch (Saul Menachimowitsch) Lipawski, a medical doctor and specialist in skin and venereal diseases. The mother was Rosa (Brocha Rosa) Samsonovna Lipavskaya. The family's house with the father's practice was on the Petersburg side , Bolshoi prospekt 39, corner of Gatchinskaya uliza. 1917–1920 Lipawski attended Lentovskaya High School. He learned French and German and did well in history and Russian. The Russian teacher Leonid W. Georg recognized his ability to create literature. According to his assessment, Lipawski was the best student of the grammar school in the school year 1917/18.

Georg apparently had a great influence on the future Tschinari. He led a literary circle attended by teachers and students and organized an amateur theater. Two other future Lipawski members of the group were also Georg's students - Jakow Druskin and Alexander Vwedenski . Lipawski was friends with Vladimir Losski , the son of the philosopher Nikolai Losski and later well-known Orthodox theologian.

In 1917 or 1918 a school of poets was founded , including Lipawski, Vwedensky and Vladimir Alexejew . Alexeev was the son of the philosopher Sergei A. Alexejew-Askoldov , who teaches psychology at the school . Together they wrote the poem Byk Buddy, which has not survived and whose title may contain an allusion to the Russian futurists, who also called themselves budetljane in Russian . It is a friendly parody of the Futurism have been. In 1920 or 1921 the only surviving joint poem was written with the title We walk with you through the avenues… ( Мы с тобой по аллеям гуляем… ). In January 1921 they wrote a letter to Alexander Blok asking them to evaluate the poems they had enclosed. Blok noted on the letter that he hadn't liked any of it, the most interesting was Alexeyev.

The 1920s and 1930s

In 1920, Lipawski began studying at the philosophical department of the social science faculty of Petrograd University , where shortly afterwards Druskin also began to study. They studied with Nikolai O. Losski, who was expelled from the country in November 1922. At the same time, Lipawski attended Sanskrit courses at the Institute for Living Oriental Languages ​​and was self-taught in mathematics and the theory of relativity . In September 1921 the Dialogic Poem ( Диалогическая поэма ) appeared, in 1922 the two poems The Sun fell in foreign lands ( Солнце запало в чужие страны ) and Hear the train, yes! ( Слушай тягу, да! ) In the Almanac of the Poets' Workshop published by Nikolai Gumiljow ( Альманах Цеха поэтов ).

From 1922 to 1923 Druskin, Vvedensky and Lipawski met almost every day. In 1923 Lipawski had to leave the university because he refused to convict his former university professor Losski. According to Druskin's statements, Lipawski stopped writing “adult” poetry in 1923.

For several years Lipawski worked as a social studies teacher at various Leningrad schools and as an educator at a school for the difficult to educate. Then (around 1928-1932) he was an editor in the Leningrad department of the state publishing house, from which he was probably dismissed during a purge. In the 1930s he came to Samuil Marschak in the children's book publisher .

In 1925 Daniil I. Charms and Nikolai Oleinikow joined the three poets' meetings. At the end of the 1920s, the name Tschinari appeared for the unofficial group, with which Vwedensky and Charms first signed their texts.

In 1926 Lipawski's first children's book Statute of Pioneers ( Пионерский устав ) was published. In the same year Charms founded his theater Radix , for which he planned an anthology in 1927, in which Lipawski should also publish. The volume never appeared. From 1928, Lipawski published stories for children under the pseudonym L. Saweljew in the journal Igel ( Ёж ) published by Oleinikow . They are about war and revolution and appeared in German translation until 1970 in the GDR . Shortly before the start of the Great Patriotic War, he began a book on physiology , from 1945-1946 excerpts are published in the magazine Campfire ( Кост ) р ).

In 1931 Lipawski married Tamara Alexandrovna Meier, with whom he had attended school. She had been in the same class as Vvedensky and had been his wife since 1921.

In the 1930s, the philosophical writings, which are still preserved today as manuscripts or typescripts, as well as the recordings of the conversations of the Tschinari were created. How much of Lipawski's work was lost is not known.

In 1940 Lipawski was recruited into the air defense department of the Baltic Fleet and died on the frontline near Peterhof in November 1941.

plant

Existential philosophy

Leonid Lipawski is considered one of the two Tschinari philosophers (alongside Jakow Druskin) and one of the group's theorists. His work is closely related to that of the other writers in the group. In all of his writings, the topics with which the Tschinari deal and which are discussed in the conversations recorded by him from 1933 to 1934 can be found. Lipawski is a driving force behind the group's work in many ways. Together with her, he worked out a concept of existential philosophy that had a strong impact on the production of literature and the literary theoretical view of the members.

After some of his writings were first made public in the early 1990s as part of academic work and an anthology (“... A collection of friends, abandoned by fate”), a monograph in Russian has been available since 2006 in which contains all texts (investigation into horror).

The phenomenon of time is one of the main themes of Lipawski and the Tschinari. This is reflected in the title of several texts. From the question of the existence or non-existence of time, a central problem arises in the worldview of the Tschinari, namely that of the existence or non-existence of objects and individuality.

Language as the origin of the world

Lipawski developed an original theory of the origin of human language, which he presented in the theory of words ( Теория слов ). He sets out to find the origin of language, which for him is also the origin of things. He imagines the original state of the world as a homogeneous mass in which there are no differences, no individuality. Only with the help of language is it possible to arbitrarily divide the world into individual things and perceive them. So the world is subordinated to consciousness.

According to Lipawski's view, the world is given in a basic structure that every living being interprets for itself according to its individual physical requirements and on which it then builds its own world. Each person creates their own individual world. However, the differences to other worlds are not so great that one cannot communicate. The language is the common means for individual and collective world interpretation and construction. The neighboring worlds of humans are similar, but not the same. The link between them is language.

Children's books

Lipawski emerged as a children's author under the pseudonym Leonid Saweljew. Years after his death, his stories about the revolution and the war achieved high editions, so that he is mentioned in a few encyclopedias and reviews . He would have preferred it if nobody had known about this activity. The children's books are obviously not related to the poetic-philosophical work and only served to earn a living.

Works

Poems

• Диалогическая поэма (Dialogic Poem), 1921
• ‹Солнце запало в чужие страны ...› (The sun fell in foreign lands ...), 1922
• ‹Слушай тягу, да!› (Hear the train, yes!), 1922

prose

• Трактат о воде (Treatise on Water), early 1930s
• Исследование ужаса (Inquiry into Horror), early 1930s
• Объяснение времени (definition of time)
• Время (time), 1930s
• ‹О преобразованиях› (On the Transformations), mid-1930s?
• Последовательности (Sequences), mid-1930s
• ‹Определённое (качество, характер изменения, постоянство или изменяемость)…› (The definite (property, the nature of the change, the immutability) years…
• Строение качеств (The Structure of Properties), 1930s
• Созерцание движения (Perception of Movement), 1930s
• О телесном сочетании (On physical union), first half of the 1930s
• Головокружение (vertigo), early 1930s
• Сны (Dreams), 1932
• Теория слов (Theory of Words), 1935
• Разговоры (Conversations), 1933–1934

expenditure

• Леонид Липавский: Исследование ужаса (Inquiry into horror). М .: Ad Marginem, 2005, ISBN 5-93321-103-6 .

Translations

• Leonid Lipavsky: Conversations . In: Schreibheft 39 (1992), pp. 110-118. ISSN  0174-2132 , ISSN  0172-343X
• Leonid Lipavskij: Treatise on horror , novel essay. In: Schreibheft 40 (1992), p. 12. ISSN  0174-2132 , ISSN  0172-343X
• Leonid Lipavsky: Conversations . Part II. In: Schreibheft 40 (1992), pp. 51-57. ISSN  0174-2132 , ISSN  0172-343X
• Leonid Lipavskij: On the trail of horror (Исследование ужаса), treatise on water (Трактат о воде). In: Leonid Lipavskij, Jakov Druskin: On the trail of horror. Ed., Transl., With an afterword and comments by Anja Dagmar Schloßberger. MATTHES & SEITZ BERLIN, 2017, ISBN 978-3-95757-361-2

literature

• Жан-Филипп Жаккар: Леонид Липавский. In: Жан-Филипп Жаккар: Даниил Хармс и конец русского авангарда. Санкт-Петербург: Гуманитарное агентство "Академический проект", 1995, ISBN 5-7331-0050-8 , pp. 155-184. (First: Jean-Philippe Jaccard: Daniil Harms et la fin de l'avant-garde russe . Lang, Bern / Berlin 1991, ISBN 3-261-04400-4 )
• «… Сборище друзей, оставленных судьбою". Л. Липавский, А. Введенский, Я. Друскин, Д. Хармс, Н. Олейников: «чинари» в текстах, документах и ​​исследованиях ("... A gathering of friends, forsaken by fate". L. Lipavsky, A. Vvedensky: in the "Tex, Yes. Druskin, D. Charminikov" , Documents and studies). Сост. В. Н. Сажин. В 2-х томах. М .: Ладомир 22000, ISBN 5-86218-265-9
• Bertram Müller: Absurd literature in Russia. Origin and development . Sagner, Munich 1978. ISBN 3-37690-146-4

Web links

• Conversations in Russian
• Treatise on horror in Russian