Lotus (anatoly kim)
Lotus ( Russian Лотос ) is a story of the Russian writer Anatoly Kim , the 1977 in the literary magazine People's Friendship ( Russian Дружба народов / Druzhba Narodow ) has been pre-printed, and a year later in the collection The Nephritgürtel ( Russian Нефритовый пояс / Nefritowy pojas ) in Moscow Publishing The young guard appeared. Hartmut Herboth's translation into German was published in 1986 by Volk und Welt in Berlin .
The Soviet Union after 1971 : The Moscow painter Lochow is twice late with his mother on Sakhalin on the “thundering ocean coast”; once, when she - lying dying - can no longer speak and then at the funeral.
title
As soon as the capitalized WE appears in the text, the reader believes that Anatoly Kim gave the floor to God or one of his messengers. Towards the end of the text it is explained - "The blurred image of general immortality, the symbol of which Lochow referred to with the term WE, came before his eyes." And a little later it says: "The forest ... that's WE. The air - that is our breath. ”The immortality mentioned is guaranteed through the transformation. Will be announced in the imagery such transformation at death of a man Anatoly Kim. A living person - sent by US - steps to the deathbed and hands the - or here the - dying person a lotus of the sun .
content
His wife wants to talk the painter out of the long, expensive flight. And maybe the mother will get well again. Lochow, however, leaves his wife and son alone for a few days and flies off with a bag of oranges as a present for the mother. Arrived on his deathbed after a 24-hour journey, Lochow just experienced the very last utterance of his dear mother. When he has turned one of the oranges with a pocket knife into something like a bursting lotus bud and puts the little work of art in his mother's left hand, the latter grabs the orange flower. But - so the reader is informed - the dying woman has long since stopped eating. Lochow recognizes that too. He feels guilty because for years he only cared about his painting and not his mother and asks her forgiveness with his gift. The exercise of the self-chosen profession was torture for Lochow, but he has become an internationally renowned painter. He became an artist because he recognized the law by which beauty is created.
Shortly before the war , the then very young mother had married Lieutenant Yegor Lochow. This had taken her to the western border of Belarus and had been shot in an attack. The mother and her baby had fled from the advancing Germans south-east to their home steppe in the Kuma-Manytsch lowlands . On the way the mother has visions. The dead Yegor blocks her way once. On the banks of the Manych , the young woman had spent the winter with her youngest child in the yurt of the aging nomad Shakijar. In the spring the mother had continued her escape with the child eastwards through the whole country to Sakhalin, because she no longer wanted to share Shakijar's bed as his concubine. She was also raped by police harlots.
The mother marries Blinzow. He dies after a few years. The widow works 24 hours a day in a boiler house and always gets two days off after such a shift. It has become gray and clumsy. The son left years ago and has not heard from him. When the mother felt the approach of her illness, she married Pak, the decrepit caretaker of the school, and moved with him directly to the sea.
Now Lochow is sitting on his deathbed and cannot help it - he has to draw his mother. The attending doctor comes. Lochow wants to drive the medic out in vain. After the mother's third stroke, medical skills seem to have failed.
Lochows states: The mother was good, pure, "but unhappy and lost". And Lochow wants to admire every moment he experiences.
Quote
- "Words ... have ... a life of their own if you utter them at the right time and in the right amount."
shape
The narrator disrupts the flow of reading with additional speeches, but occasionally sets a time marker: He locates Shakijar's yurt not far from “the ruins of the former Tsaritsyn and future Volgograd ”. As is well known, the Wehrmacht ruined Stalingrad in autumn 1942.
The narrator jumps wildly between at least three points of view. There is the WE, the mother and the Lochow standpoint. Thus the reader becomes almost omniscient. For example, on her mother's deathbed, Lochow cannot know how difficult it is for her mother to die: nothing had come of dying quickly. Before that lay “unspeakable torments and humiliations”. In addition to the confused change of point of view, there is the logically difficult to digest mixed situation: At the beginning of the second of the six chapters, the narrating mother has already died and hence from now on tells of the realm of the dead. To make matters worse, the description of dying is resumed at the end of the fifth chapter in a concrete and vivid way - with a visit to the doctor.
Lochow, who is more than thirty, suddenly has three grown children and a couple of grandchildren. Almost twenty pages later it turns out that there is a work of fantasy - the "aged" Lochow returns after decades, i.e. in the future (his mother dies in the early 1970s and the text was published in 1977) to the grave in Sakhalin.
German-language editions
- Anatoli Kim: Lotos , pp. 211–336 in: The nephrite belt - nightingale echo - lotus. Three little novels. Translated from the Russian by Hartmut Herboth and Irene Strobel. With an afterword by Lola Debüser. Volk und Welt, Berlin 1986. 343 pages DNB 870114786 (used edition)
Web links
- Bibliographic entry in fantlab.ru (Russian)
- The text online in Russian in the Litmir Electronic Library
- The text online in Russian at e-reading
- The text online in Russian at royallib.com
Remarks
- ↑ Not only in this story, but in Anatoly Kim's poetic prose cosmos in general, WE and metamorphosis are central “philosophical” terms.
- ↑ In addition to the WE and the transformation , the sun is generally the third central narrative term for Anatoli Kim. The author is probably alluding to the Japanese reformer Nichiren with the lotus of the sun .
- ↑ The mother survived Yegor by more than thirty years (edition used, p. 224, 7th Zvo). So she died after 1971.
- ↑ Strictly speaking, the later narrative husbands of the mother would have to be taken into account in the count (edition used, p. 244, 15. Zvo).
Individual evidence
- ↑ Edition used, p. 336
- ↑ Russian Дружба народов , 1980, issue 10, pp. 8–73
- ↑ Russian Нефритовый пояс
- ↑ Russian Molodaja Gwardija
- ↑ Edition used, p. 308, 11. Zvu
- ↑ Edition used, p. 332, 2nd Zvu
- ↑ Edition used, p. 309 above
- ↑ Edition used, p. 320, 11. Zvo
- ↑ Edition used, p. 282, 11. Zvo
- ↑ Edition used, p. 298, 1st Zvu
- ↑ Edition used, p. 217, 11. Zvo
- ↑ Edition used, p. 258 above
- ↑ Edition used, p. 281, 17th Zvu