Natalia Vladimirovna Baranskaya

Natalya Baranskaya ( Russian Наталья Владимировна Баранская * January 18 ^jul. / 31 January  1908 ^greg. In St. Petersburg ; † 29. October 2004 in Moscow ) was a Soviet writer who in her stories primarily with the heavy burden of Women argued. Several books were also published in German.

Life

Natalja Baranskaja was the daughter of the doctor Vladimir Nikolayevich Rosanov and the medical assistant Lyubow Nikolajewna Radchenko, who were persecuted as Mensheviks . Her childhood and youth were therefore marked by discontinuity. In 1910 she traveled with her mother to Switzerland, where her father had fled, lived the following year after her mother's arrest with her father in Saint Petersburg and from 1912 with both parents in Berlin. Two years later, they separated and Baranskaya returned with his mother to Moscow, the city of her birth. After the October Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent famine, they went to Kiev , where they lived with Baranskaya's older sister. As a result of the outbreak of civil war, however, living conditions were poor there too. In 1922 Baranskaya and her mother moved back to Moscow. Baranskaya attended a grammar school there until 1926. Initially, because of her parents, she was not allowed to study and instead completed university courses in literature at a vocational training institution over the next three years. Only then was she able to study at the historical-ethnological faculty of the MGU . In 1930 she graduated there. She was working for a publishing company at the time, but lost the job in the same year in connection with her mother's activities.

Baranskaya was married twice. At the age of 19 she married a fellow student who was later imprisoned and exiled to Kazakhstan. They separated for personal reasons. Their daughter Tatjana (1934-2001) emerged from the marriage. In 1937 Baranskaya married her cousin Nikolai Baranski. With him she had a son of the same name in 1940. In 1941 the family moved to Saratov and later to the Altai region . Her husband fell on the Kursk Arch in August 1943 and Baranskaya had to raise her two children alone. In November of the same year she moved back to Moscow. She worked at the State Literature Museum and began an apprenticeship at the Philological Faculty of the MGU. However, she did not have the time to defend her dissertation on satirical magazines of the 18th century. In 1958 she became deputy director of the newly opened Moscow Pushkin Museum , for which she worked for eight years. Pushkin's work was one of the main focuses of her work as a literary scholar. In 1966 she asked for her early retirement. The background to this was the growing pressure exerted on them by their behavior, which did not conform to the policies of the Unity Party . Most recently, a case was brought against her in the party office after she invited Joseph Brodsky to an Akhmatova memorial evening.

In the year of her retirement, Baranskaya began to write her first stories. Two of them appeared in Nowy Mir magazine in 1968 , so Baranskaya made her debut as a writer at the age of 60. The following year she published her best-known work, the Powest, week after week . It has been translated into twelve languages. According to Gisela Reller, Baranskaya is the first SU writer to portray the physical and mental overload of average Soviet women. Above all, Baranskaya complained about the lack (or inaccessibility) of helpful community facilities. The criticism she exercised meant that her later publications were made difficult by the censorship. In 1977 her first anthology Otricatelʹnaja Žizelʹ ( The Negative Giselle ) appeared in an edition of 100,000 copies. Two years later, Baranskaja's work was recognized by being accepted into the Writers' Union.

Alexander Sergejewitsch Pushkin's widow Natalja is the subject of the novella Ein Kleid für Frau Pushkin, first published in 1977 in the magazine Sibir . It was also part of the 1982 anthology on the subject of Pushkin Portret, podarennyj drugu: očerki i rasskazy o Puškine . The volume contained further stories, partly with reference to Baranskaja's earlier scientific work (1966/67), as well as essays on the life of Pushkin, which she had published in 1970. In 1989 Baranskaya published the novel Denʹ pominovenija (translated Memorial Day ), which is her most extensive work with 316 pages and which she herself considered to be her most important. In 1999 she published her memoirs ( Stranstvie bezdomnych ), on which she had worked for eight years. In it she describes memories of her life and that of her parents up to before the Second World War. Baranskaya could not find a commercial publisher for this, as they worked in a competitive manner after perestroika and did not see the topic as profitable. Finally, through a sponsor, she was able to have the work printed in an edition of 1000 copies. For similar reasons, the number of previously published editions of her works had become increasingly smaller.

Baranskaya worked on other stories until her death in 2004. She lived in an apartment in Moscow with one of her grandchildren.

Baranskaja's oeuvre includes more than 30 stories, six powesti , a novel, her memoirs and various essays. Five books and stories in magazines were published in Russia. Her works have been published in ten western countries and Japan. Her work is best known in Germany, Denmark, Holland and France.

Works (selection)

• Nedelja kak nedelja , stories, 1969, dts. Week after week: Women in the Soviet Union , Darmstadt 1979 (Luchterhand; four editions until 1988)
• Cvet temnogo medu , novella, 1977, dts. A dress for Mrs. Puschkin , Ffm 1982 (Suhrkamp Library, translation by Wolfgang Kasack )
• The End of the World: Stories by Women , Darmstadt 1985 (Luchterhand; four editions until 1988)
• The woman with the umbrella , stories, Berlin 1987 (people and world)
• Странствие бездомных (Stranstvie bezdomnych) in German translation by Beatrix Michel-Peyer under the title Unhoused Wanderer , Books on Demand 2019 = ISBN 978-3-7431-2717-3

literature

• Soia Koester (ed.): Sovremennye russkie pisateli (Modern Russian Writers), Ismaning 1980
• Birgit Fuchs: Natalja Baranskaja as a contemporary witness of the Soviet regime , Munich 2005 (Sagner)

Web links

• Literature by and about Natalja Vladimirovna Baranskaya in the bibliographic database WorldCat

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Birgit Fuchs: Natalja Baranskaja as a contemporary witness of the Soviet regime. Sagner, Munich 2005, p. 11.
2. ↑ Birgit Fuchs: Natalja Baranskaja as a contemporary witness of the Soviet regime. Sagner, Munich 2005, p. 12.
3. ↑ See reller-reviews Filter , accessed on 20 January 2010
4. ↑ Birgit Fuchs: Natalja Baranskaja as a contemporary witness of the Soviet regime. Sagner, Munich 2005, p. 13.
5. ↑ Birgit Fuchs: Natalja Baranskaja as a contemporary witness of the Soviet regime. Sagner, Munich 2005, p. 14.
6. ↑ Birgit Fuchs: Natalja Baranskaja as a contemporary witness of the Soviet regime. Sagner, Munich 2005, p. 15.