Maxim Harezki

Maxim Harezki (1937)

Maxim Harezki (also Maksim Harezki , Belarusian Максім Іванавіч Гарэцкі , born February 18, 1893 in Malaja Bahazkauka, Russian Empire , † February 10, 1938 in Vyazma , Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (RSFSR), Soviet Union ) was a Belarusian writer.

Life

Maxim Harezki came from a farming family in the village of Malaja Bahazkauka, northeast of Mahiljoŭ . He attended the agricultural college in Horki , where he passed his survey as a surveyor in 1913. From 1912 he worked for the newspaper Nascha Niwa (Our Acker), where he came into contact with leading figures of the Belarusian rebirth movement.

In 1913 he published his first short stories. When the First World War broke out, Harezki was drafted, sent to the East Prussian front and seriously wounded on October 25, 1914 near Stallupönen . In 1917 he was demobilized due to illness. Shortly afterwards he started studying at the Archaeological Institute in Smolensk .

In 1919 Harezki joined the editorial team of the Zvezda (Stern) magazine in Minsk , with which he moved to Vilna a short time later . The Polish occupation of the city kept him there for four years, during which he made his way as a teacher. He wrote a Belarusian-Russian dictionary and in 1921 published the first literary history of his homeland in Belarusian. In 1922 a reading book of Belarusian literature followed , which was reprinted in numerous editions. The Poles disliked him twice: politically, as a supposed "Bolshevik agent", and nationally, as the publisher of Belarusian magazines. So he was arrested in 1922 and imprisoned in Vilnius. Eventually he was able to return to Minsk, where he initially worked as a lecturer and teacher and later took a position at the Belarusian Cultural Institute.

Harezki was an ardent patriot. "The Polish and Russian occupiers of his country persecuted him until the end of his days."

"Maxim Harezki recognized the cruelty of the regime, which confiscated the harvests of the Belarusian peasants, earlier than others, while the advocates of the Belarusian rebirth were branded as" reactionaries "in the context of ruthless Russification." In July 1930, Stalin Harezki left in the course of the " Elimination “of the Belarusian intelligentsia . In 1931 he was sentenced to five years' exile in Vyatka , where he worked as a construction technician.

On November 4, 1937, Maxim Harezki was arrested again under false accusations in the course of the Great Stalinist Terror and shot the following year.

Fiction work

Belarusian commemorative stamp (1993)

Maxim Harezki wrote numerous short stories and short stories. His main work is the novel, Two Souls , which was published in 1919 in Vilna, Poland, initially in sequels in a newspaper and then as a book . It tells the story of the young landlord's son and half-orphan Ihnat Abdsiralowitsch, who went to the First World War and then fell into the turmoil of the February Revolution , the October Revolution and the Civil War . “The proverbial“ two souls ”live in his chest. ... Unlike his milk brother Wassil, who quickly takes the side of the Bolsheviks, Ihnat remains torn between aristocratic birth and closeness to the people, “reds” and “whites”, the “fatherland” Russia and the Belarusian rebirth. ”Harezki's“ epochal novel ” (Judith Leister) describes (also) the world of Belarusian peasant life, which only a decade later, in the terror of " deculakization ", perished forever.

Maxim Harezki's work is honored in Belarus to this day.

Fonts

The German translation has been published:

• Native roots (story, 1913; German by Wladimir Tschepego and Norbert Randow. Printed in: Die Junge Eiche. Classic Belarusian stories . Reclam-Verlag, Leipzig 1987)
• Birkenteer (story, 1915; German by Norbert Randow. Printed in: Störche über den Sümpfen. Belorussische Erzähler . Verlag Volk und Welt, Berlin 1971)
• The Lithuanian homestead (story, 1915; German by Norbert Randow. Printed in: Storks over the marshes , as above)
• Das Nönnlein (story, 1915; German by Iris Lorenz. Printed in: Die Junge Eiche , as above)
• A Russian (story 1915; German by Igor Tschepego and Norbert Randow. Printed in: Die Junge Eiche , as above)
• Der Russe (Erzählung 1915; German by Thomas Weiler. Printed in: Literature and Criticism , 481/482, March 2014)
• Two souls (novel, 1919; German by Norbert Randow , Gundula and Wladimir Tschepego, Guggolz Verlag , Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-945370-01-8 )
• Morgendämmerungen (story 1926; German by Ferdinand Neureiter. Printed in: Weissrussische Anthologie . Sagner, Munich 1983)
• The Oath (story, 1926; German by Norbert Randow. Printed in: Störche über den Sümpfen , as above)

Footnotes

1. ↑ Sachar Schybeka: The Northwest Provinces in the Russian Empire (1795-1917) . In: Dietrich Beyrau , Rainer Lindner (Hrsg.): Handbook of the history of Belarus . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001. ISBN 3-525-36255-2 . Pp. 119-134, here p. 131.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Erwin Koschmieder : The Belarusian literature . In: Kindlers Literatur Lexikon , Vol. 2, pp. 386–389, here p. 389.
3. ↑ Lerke von Saalfeld: "Two Souls". Key work of Belarusian literature . Review in the program “Büchermarkt”, Deutschlandfunk, November 21, 2014.
4. ↑ ^{a b c} Judith Leister: Two souls, at least. A novel by Belarusian Maxim Harezki from 1919 tells of world war and revolution, civil war and the pursuit of freedom . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung of December 6, 2014, international edition, p. 58.
5. ↑ Norbert Randow: The young oak. Classic Belarusian stories . Reclam-Verlag, Leipzig 1987. ISBN 3-379-00133-3 . Pp. 466-468.
6. ↑ cf. the bibliography of German translations from Belarusian at literabel.de ( memento of the original from January 23, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 

Web links

Commons : Maxim Harezki  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files