Mary (Isaac Babel)

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Maria ( Russian Мария ) is a play in eight scenes by Isaac Babel . It appeared in 1935, but could not be performed in the Soviet Union. The first performance took place in Florence in 1964. A special feature in terms of content is that the title character Maria does not appear in the entire piece.

content

The play is set in St. Petersburg at the time of the Russian Civil War . The Russian class system fell apart after the October Revolution . The focus of the plot is the family of Tsarist General Mukownin, who are trying to come to terms with the new situation and the hardships of war communism .

Old Mukownin now writes books on Russian military history. His younger daughter, Lyudmila, is hoping for an advantageous marriage with Isaak Dymschitz, who is the head of a gang of thugs. Her cousin Katja, not very happy about the new regime, has an affair with an officer of the Red Army. The general's older daughter, Maria, was an idealistic communist and was employed as a political commissar in the Soviet army. Since it is at the front, it does not appear in the play itself. She is only present in her letters and in the conversations of others.

Lyudmila initially rejects Dymschitz's advances because she wants to persuade him to marry, but Dymschitz is already married and sees Lyudmila as just a potential mistress. At the next rendezvous he does not appear and leaves the field to the former guard Wiskowskij, who makes Lyudmila drunk and rapes. Then a dispute breaks out between Wiskowskij and the Red Army soldier Kravchenko, who accuses Lyudmila of having infected Lyudmila with gonorrhea . In the argument, both shoot each other. The police rush to arrest Lyudmila as the only survivor. At the police station she is mistaken for a prostitute who works for the gang. Your request to see a doctor will not be granted.

Her father, Mukownin, is now trying to get in touch with his other daughter Maria in order to ask her advice and persuade her to return from the front. This seems to work at first and he is not worried, but shortly afterwards suffers a stroke. Hiring a doctor is out of the question at night. When a soldier from Maria's division arrives and reports that Maria cannot come because of the ongoing military operations, it gives him the rest and he dies.

In the final scene, two workers polish the parquet in the Mukownins' former apartment and prepare it for the new tenants. When Katja shows up with the antique dealer Sushkin to sell him a cupboard at Maria's behest, they are brusquely rejected by the caretaker Agascha, because the new tenants have been promised a fully furnished apartment. She withstood the ensuing outburst of anger and the threats of Sushkin. After he left, the two workers comment that Agasha was not so brave at the time of the general. Still, both remember the general as a nice person, loved by the common people. Finally the new tenants arrive, a worker and his pregnant wife.

Performances

In 2012 the play was directed by Andrea Breth at the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus (premiere: January 7, 2012).

German-language editions

  • Maria. Acting in eight pictures. In: Isaak Babel: Maria. Sunset. Two pieces. Translated from the Russian by Heddy Pross-Weerth . Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag 1967. S. 5–61 (originally in Sunset. Stories and Dramas , Walter Verlag, Olten and Freiburg i. Br. 1962)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Harenberg Schauspielführer. The whole world of the theater. 265 authors with more than 750 works in words and pictures. Dortmund: Harenberg 1997, p. 64.
  2. ↑ Review of the Düsseldorf production (Kulturraumverdichtung.de)