My time is the night

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My time is the night ( Russian Время ночь / Wremja notsch ) is a story by the Russian writer Lyudmila Petruschewskaja from 1990, in which the psychology of writing is thematized in a satirical way. It shows how individual and social self-deception, based on personal and political narratives , serves to reproduce existing power structures in unexpected ways. In stark contrast to the traditionally romanticizing depiction of the babushka , a grandmother is portrayed with bitter irony as the grotesque and self-pitying narrator Anna Andrianovna, one of Petrushevskaya's most remarkable creations. Despite her often invoked love for her children - and especially for her grandchild Tima - the narrator Anna writes consistently in such a way that she involuntarily convicts herself as crazy and sadistic . The implicit question asked is how such a situation came about . A translation into German by Antje Leetz was published in 1991 by Rowohlt in Berlin.

Petrushevskaya refused to accept the Booker Prize , for which Vremya was shortlisted in 1993, on the grounds that she did not want the award ceremony and opulent hospitality to be televised at a time when many of her normal compatriots in Russia are starving to have.

content

The poet and former university lecturer Anna Adrianowna is around 55 years old and describes the decline of her beloved family. In the diary-like notes, contributions by the poetic daughter Aljona are inserted. Anna loves hers without exception and, according to her own opinion, forgives them everything - for example, when her son Andrej forbids her to say: “ Shut up , you old pig!” Or when he demands: “... fuck your mother,” she says indulgently that is technically impossible. Andrej, a convicted criminal and two years older than Aljona, turns out to be completely unfit for marriage. The narrator does not tell the reader what crime Andrei had to go to the labor camp for, but it is important to her that she picked up the son from Butyrka prison after serving his sentence . Apparently Andrei has also taken the blame of other law breakers on himself, which suggests gang crime. The poet tells how these crooks harassed her and how she gives in and the gang at the savings bank hands over the last credit to her mother Sima. Andrej, who repeatedly asks or begs money from his mother Anna, finally slips on his knees in front of her. Anna and the family suffer from hunger and it is said that Anna and her grandson Tima really eat their fill after occasional readings in front of Young Pioneers and that she also takes sandwiches home from that reading . The poet also says that a philanthropic editor made her earn a few kopecks for replying to letters to the editor . Of Aljona's three children Tima (actually Timofej), Katja and Nikolai, the eldest grandson is Tima Anna's favorite and foster child. The fathers of Aljona's children ran away. Little Katja got Aljona from her deputy director, a married woman 15 years her senior. Aljona, a student and mother, browses through the night, sleeps through the morning lectures and then occasionally fails exams. Anna's mother Sima - more precisely Serafima Georgievna Golubewa - has been in hospital for seven years. The old woman had previously "disgusted Anna's husband". Now the schizophrenic is said to have been transferred from the Moscow hospital to the psychiatric ward. The horse's foot: In this case Sima's pension will be collected by the state. Anna wants to bring her mother home, who has a serious need for care. In doing so, she takes on the fight against all possible adversities - such as the Russian winter and the domestic bureaucracy. The text ends with a subject-laden list: "Aljona, Tima, Katja, Nikolai, Andrej, Serafima, Anna."

interpretation

Anna would like to see herself as a Marina Tsvetaeva or a second Anna Akhmatova . She got her first name based on Akhmatova and at readings Anna is always announced as the poet Anna. With a parodic false quotation from Akhmatova's Requiem, Petrushevskaya subverts and trivializes the image of Akhmatova as the muse of lamentation and the all-mother of Russia, which was propagated by Tsvetaeva. With her characterization of the narrator and poet Anna, Petrushevskaya rebels against Akhmatova's self-stylization as a martyr and satirizes the poetic heroine cult of Russian modernism. This can be illustrated by an example: While she mourns her politically persecuted son, Vremja notsch is a criminal son, and his mother also needs consolation. In this way Petrushevskaya tries to build a bridge between so-called high and low culture by ironicizing both.

Even if Petrushevskaya portrays the narrator as crazy and sadistic, this should be seen as part of the author's intention to draw attention to the situation in which many grandmothers in Russia actually find themselves, especially in view of the mythicization of their role. The author is by no means disagreeable in solidarity here, but rather drastically thematizes the violent nature of the influence of stories that generally circulate about grandmothers.

style

Lyudmila Petruschewskaja pulls out all possible stops in her masterpiece of absurd black humor and there is no lack of subtle fun. The tone is usually overwhelmed and nine scandals are lined up, all of which, with the exception of one, take place in a domestic idyll . Petrushevskaya works out the familiarity of family hell in a grotesque parody , which can be read parallel to scandalous scenes by Dostoyevsky . However, she manages without the involvement of strangers and the scandals usually take their course in front of an invisible audience. When describing the scandals, the narrator strings together episodes, remarks, digressions, remembered memories and anecdotes that seem interrupting, so that the reader wonders when the real thing will continue. Two styles alternate: With a bitter and malicious voice, she describes her late Soviet life in Moscow as dirty and miserable and characterized by poverty, while her other voice describes her beloved grandson Tima in an exuberant tone. The subjects for scandals in daughter Aljona’s diary are the description of her massive defloration , during which Tima was conceived, or Anna recognizes that in the mental hospitals normal people were shielded from the crazy who meanwhile live outside in freedom. Or at home it is found that the man-like Aljona comes home in the warmer season in the morning with her light coat, which has turned all green on her back overnight. And Anna made her experiences with the police: "By the way, the militia are happy to come if the perpetrator is still there ..."

reception

In her review in the Spiegel , Annette Meyhöfer wrote in 1992 that Petruschewskaja describes the naked struggle for survival with literary existentialism, which is not philosophically embellished as with Kundera or Szczypiorski , but rather “raw, repulsive and repulsive”, but, according to her summary: “Am The end is also just a fiction. ”Here, a reality that has been concealed for too long threatens to displace that which goes beyond the description of reality“ the ordinary schizophrenia of a society that is struggling to maintain its facades ”. Accordingly, the result of the nocturnal writing of the monologizing, confessing and self-justifying first-person narrator Anna Andrianowna represents "a web of lies and lyricism, half-admitted cruelty and open malice," said Meyhöfer.

expenditure

German language edition

  • Lyudmila Petrushevskaya: My time is the night. Records on the edge of the table . Translated from the Russian by Antje Leetz. Rowohlt, Berlin 1991, ISBN 3-87134-021-9 ; as paperback: rororo 13528, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1994, ISBN 3-499-13528-0 .

literature

  • Alexandra Smith: “In Populist Clothes: Anarchy and Subversion in Petrushevskaya's Latest Fiction”, in: New Zealand Slavonic Journal , 31 (1997), pp. 107-126.
  • Josephine Woll: "Kitchen Scandals: A Quasi-Bakhtinian Reading of Liudmila Petrushevskaya's The Time: Night", in: Against the Grain: Parody, Satire, and Intertextuality in Russian Literature . Edited by Janet G. Tucker. Table of Contents Slavica, Bloomington, Indiana 2002, pp. 185-196.
  • Angelika Döpper-Henrich: "Grandmother or also great mother", in: The way of the old woman in literature . Table of contents Verlag Pro Business, 2008, 539 pages, ISBN 978-3-86805-217-6 , pp. 138-141.
  • Connor Doak: "Babushka Writes Back: Grandmothers and Grandchildren in Liudmila Petruschevskaia's Time: Night", in: Forum for Modern Language Studies 47, 2 (2011), pp. 170-181.
  • Johanna Renate Döring-Smirnov: “Lyudmila Petruschewskaja (born 1938). Poet, Dramatist, Chansonniere ”, in: From Pushkin to Sorokin. Portrait of twenty Russian authors . Table of contents Böhlau, Cologne 2013, 360 pages, ISBN 978-3-412-22138-6 , pp. 270–283.
  • Jenny Offillnow, New Novellas About Family by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya , The New York Times , November 26, 2014

annotation

  1. ↑ In the story time Alena is twenty-four (used edition, p 88 below). Anna was thirty-one when Aljonas was born (Edition used, p. 63, 9. Zvo).

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c d Connor Doak: "Babushka Writes Back: Grandmothers and Grandchildren in Liudmila Petruschevskaia's Time: Night", in: Forum for Modern Language Studies 47, 2 (2011), p. 170-181.
  2. ↑ Edition used, pp. 3–4
  3. ↑ a b Alexandra Smith: "In Populist Clothes: Anarchy and Subversion in Petrushevskaya's Latest Fiction", in: New Zealand Slavonic Journal , 31 (1997), pp. 107-126.
  4. ↑ Döring-Smirnov, p. 279, 14. Zvo
  5. ↑ Edition used, p. 59, 9. Zvo
  6. ↑ Edition used, p. 90, 1. Zvo
  7. ↑ Edition used, p. 155, 3rd Zvu
  8. ↑ Josephine Woll: "Kitchen Scandals: A Quasi-Bakhtinian Reading of Liudmila Petrushevskaya's The Time: Night", in: Against the Grain: Parody, Satire, and Intertextuality in Russian Literature . Edited by Janet G. Tucker. Table of Contents Slavica, Bloomington, Indiana 2002, p. 185-196.
  9. ↑ Edition used, p. 22 below - p. 29 above and pp. 30–32
  10. ↑ Edition used, p. 105, 6. Zvo
  11. ↑ Annette Meyhöfer: From my blood and brain. SPIEGEL editor Annette Meyhöfer on the Moscow author Lyudmila Petruschewskaja , Der Spiegel , January 27, 1992