Pavel Jakowlewitsch Salzman

Pawel Jakowlewitsch Salzman (Russian Павел Яковлевич Зальцман, scientific transliteration Pavel Jakovlevič Zal'cman; born January 2, 1912 in Kishinev , Russian Empire ; † December 20, 1985 in Alma-Ata , Kazakhstan ) was a Russian artist and writer.

Life

Pawel Salzman was born as the child of the officer Jakow Jakowlewitsch Salzman (1868–1941) and Marija Nikolajewna Salzman, nee. Marija Samuilowna Ornstejn (1873–1942) was born. His father was German, his mother of Jewish origin. The family soon moved to Odessa ; After 1917 she changed her place of residence frequently as a result of the revolution and civil war. In 1925 the Salzmans settled in Leningrad .

After attending school, Salzman worked as an illustrator, as an intern in the “Belgoskino” film studio and as an assistant to the set designer, and later as a production designer at Lenfilm . He has worked on films by directors such as Georgi and Sergej Wassiljew, Ilja Trauberg and Eduard Ioganson and traveled to the Urals and Pamirs , Karelia , Transbaikalia , Central Asia and the Crimea for filming .

In 1935, Salzman married his former classmate Rosa Salmanowna Magid, and their daughter Jelena (Lotta) was born in 1940. Both of his parents starved to death during the Leningrad blockade . He himself and his family were evacuated in July 1942 and have lived in Alma-Ata ever since . There he worked for the Central United Film Studio; When the Lenfilm and Mosfilm staff returned from the evacuation in 1944 , his father was unable to do so because of his German nationality. He continued to work as a set designer at Kazachfilm , but was not employed there from 1948 to 1952 during Stalin's anti-Semitic campaign . During this time (and later) he taught art history at various educational institutions, including the University of Alma-Ata. From 1955 until his death in 1985 he was the first production designer at Kazachfilm.

plant

Artistic activity

Pawel Salzman did not receive any artistic training, but he became interested in art at an early age, drawing and painting. In 1929 he met Pavel Filonov , became his pupil and joined the group “Masters of Analytical Art”. In 1933 he became a member of the Leningrad Artists' Union and took part in group exhibitions. Among other things, he made illustrations for the Finnish epic Kalewala with other Filonov students . In Leningrad , Salzman created graphic works, watercolors and oil paintings: cityscapes, multi-figure compositions, portraits. In Alma-Ata he continued his artistic activity, initially with great difficulty (housing, finances, work materials, etc.); The focus of his work was depictions of Jewish settlements in eastern Ukraine and portrait and group studies based on Kazakh motifs. At the time of the "thaw" it was officially recognized; the Russian Museum, the Tretyakov Gallery , the Museum of Art of the Orient Peoples buy works. In the late seventies and early eighties, Salzman also created murals for Kazachfilm buildings .

During his lifetime, the artist's works were shown primarily in Alma-Ata ; individual works were shown in Moscow , Leningrad and Kiev . In the 1990s and 2000s, solo exhibitions took place in Moscow ( Tretyakov Gallery , Jewish Cultural Center, GOST Gallery, etc.), St. Petersburg (Dostoyevsky Museum, etc.) and Jerusalem (House of Art, etc.), and in 1998 there was a small exhibition in Blankenheim (Eifel) . In 2012 a large retrospective in Alma-Ata commemorated the artist's 100th birthday.

Literary activity

Pawel Salzman began to write regularly in the 1930s, he wrote poetry, short stories, two novels and a drama and kept a diary for years. The group OBERIU (“Vereinigung realer Kunst”), whose readings he attended, was of great importance for his development as a writer . Salzman was in contact with Daniil Charms , Alexander Vvedensky and Nikolai Olejnikow. He also knew and loved the Polish classics and German romanticism; He translated Heinrich von Kleist's " Käthchen von Heilbronn " from German.

Salzman's poetry addresses, among other things, the time of the Leningrad blockade , hunger, fear and death. Beyond all literary traditions, the author tries to banish the horror in drastic, sometimes blasphemous, sonorous verses with strong images.

The novel The Puppies was written in the 1930s to 1950s and revised in the early 1980s. In dynamic language and with the inclusion of cinematic means, the experiences of violence, hunger, cold, terror and lack of housing that people were exposed to in the civil war are discussed. Pawel Salzman uses strategies of Russian and European modernism ( Velimir Chlebnikow , Daniil Charms ; Alfred Döblin , Franz Kafka ) and combines them into a text structure of great urgency.

In his second novel, " Middle Asia in the Middle Ages ", Salzman processes his travels through Tajikistan , Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan into an adventure novel that is as fairy-tale as it is brutal, relentless in the depiction of human greed and violence, which despite its alleged exoticism emerges as the moral image of the Soviet 1930s and 1940s reads.

Pawel Salzman never thought of publishing his texts in his life. His daughter Jelena Salzman and her family take care of his literary estate. Since 2003, three volumes with short prose, the novel The Puppies and Poetry have been published in Russia . The publication of the diaries as well as the novel Middle Ages in the Middle Ages and the Oriental stories is in preparation .

Translated works

• The puppies . Novel. Translated from the Russian by Christiane Körner . With epilogues by Oleg Jurjew and Christiane Körner. Matthes & Seitz Berlin, 2016. ISBN 978-3-95757-330-8
• Written in the Dark. Five Poets in the Siege of Leningrad. Gennady Gor, Dmitry Maksimov, Sergey Rudakov, Vladimir Sterlingov, Pavel Zaltsman. Ed. by Polina Barskova. Translated from the Russian by Anand Dibble, Eugene Ostashevsky et al. Ugly Duckling Press, 2016. ISBN 978-1-937027-57-5

Catalog in German

• Pawel Zaltsman. Catalog of the exhibition in the “Maison des Vaches”, Blankenheim. January 1998, text by A. Zienicke. [Design IZBA-Verlag 1998]

Web links

• Homepage Pawel Salzman
• Oleg Jurjew: In the vortex of frozen time
• Olga Martynowa: Newly edited masterpieces
• Review of "The Puppies" by Manfred Roth
• Review »The Puppies« by Kerstin Holm

Individual evidence

1. ↑ On the biography of Pawel Salzman: Lotta Zal'cman: Vospominanija ob otce. Materialy k biografii P. Yes. Zal'cmana. (Russian) Archived copy ( memento of the original from January 17, 2017 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. 
2. ↑ Uli Hufen on WDR 3: Like here, fear, powerlessness and forlornness are only rarely felt. And something else becomes noticeable: that literature can be free and wild and at the same time enormously thought out and impetuous and completely different ... http://www1.wdr.de/radio/wdr3/programm/sendung/wdr3-gutenbergs-welt/tier -and-meat-100.html