Sasha Sokolov

Sasha Sokolov ( Russian Саша Соколов , officially Александр Всеволодович Соколов / Alexander Vsevolodovich Sokolow , scientific. Transliteration Aleksandr (Saša) Vsevolodovič Sokolov , sometimes in the transcription Sascha Sokolow ; * 6. November 1943 in Ottawa , Canada ) is a Russian writer .

He became world famous in the mid-1970s with the publication of his novel The School of Fools, written in 1974, and is considered one of the most important Russian authors of the 20th century.

Life

Sokolov was born the son of an attaché at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, Canada , and lives and works in North America.

His family left Canada in 1946 after Sokolov's father was exposed as a member of a military espionage ring. In 1962, Sokolov began studying at the Military Institute of Foreign Languages, but was dismissed in 1965. The background for this event was apparently a failed attempt by Sokolov to leave the Soviet Union illegally. In 1966 he began studying journalism at Moscow University after, according to his own statements, he had belonged to an underground literary group. From 1967 on he published journalistic articles and short stories and got married in the same year. In 1971 he completed his studies. In 1974 his first daughter was born and the marriage ended in divorce.

Sokolov first made friends in Moscow in 1975 and then married the Austrian Johanna Steindl, who taught German at Moscow University and subsequently supported his departure, some of which were spectacular. She went on a hunger strike in St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna and won over well-known personalities for her cause (e.g. the then Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky and the Vienna Cardinal Franz König ). After the success of these efforts the author, whose manuscript of Die Schule der Stupid von Steindl had been smuggled out of the former Soviet Union , received a visa to travel to Austria. There he married Johanna Steindl again, as a civil marriage in the Soviet Union was not possible. After his first novel was published in the USA , Sokolov emigrated to the United States in late 1976, leaving his pregnant wife behind in Vienna. His son was born in March 1977 and later became a journalist.

The novel The School of Dumbs received a partly enthusiastic response, u. a. with Vladimir Nabokov . This novel, first published in Russia in 1989 (Germany 1993), which was written without taking censorship into account , is the report of a schizophrenic student who was critical and naive about the conditions prevailing at the time in a dialogue with himself or his other self in the USSR . Sokolov strikes a tone here that on the one hand reminds us of the monologues of Buck Mulligan in Joyce's Ulysses , on the other hand it opens up a very own private universe in which he constantly crosses the boundaries between fantasy and reality. The virtuoso written work can be understood as a spiral or circle in which the question of identity and transcendence is constantly discussed. In the Russian original, beyond the structure of the novel, its tonal composition and the possible associations play a special role. In the TIME wrote Radisch : "There is nothing to pick. No late socialist epoch diagram, no panorama of the Soviet endgame. Just the happiness of stupidity that is contagious. Only the rampant language, the wild, trusting tone of conversation that sticks in the ear like a piece of music never heard before. Just the heartbeat of a galloping, ruthless, anarchic literature that makes you happy and sad and dizzy and that you never forget. "

After the publication of the novel School of the Fool, Sokolov was unable to build on its success. His second novel, Between Dog and Wolf , lives even more from the peculiarities of the Russian language and is therefore considered to be untranslatable (only a Polish translation and an English translation derived from it exist). His third book was published in 1985. The finished manuscript of his fourth novel is said to have been destroyed in a fire in Greece. Allegedly Sokolov continues to write, but does not want to be published again.

Trivia

Sokolov's sister Ludmilla Sokolova works as a poet. Her first volume of poetry was published in 2010 in Vienna in Russian.

Works (selection)

• Школа для дураков / Schkola dlja durakow . Ann Arbor 1976.
  • German: The school of the stupid. translated by Wolfgang Kasack , epilogue by Iris Radisch . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1977, ISBN 3-518-39755-9 . (Anniversary edition: Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-518-24008-3 )
• Между собакой и волком / Meschdu sobakoi i wolkom . Ann Arbor 1980. ( Between Dog and Wolf , not published in German)
• Палисандрия / Palisandrija . Ann Arbor 1985. (not published in German, English under the title Astrophobia )
• In the House of the Hanged - Essays and Vers Libres . University of Toronto Press 2012 (English translation by Alexander Boguslawski)

Awards (selection)

• 1996 Pushkin Prize from the Alfred Toepfer Foundation F.V.S., Hamburg

Two awards from Russian underground magazines in the 1980s

literature

• Cynthia Simmons: Their father's voice. Vassily Aksyonov , Venedikt Erofeev , Eduard Limonov , and Sasha Sokolov. Lang, New York et al. a. 1993, ISBN 0-8204-2160-X .

• Laura Beraha: The last rogue of history: picaresque elements in Sasha Sokolov's “Palesandriia”. In: Canadian slavonic papers / Revue canadienne des slavistes. Vol. 35, N. 3-4, 1993, pp. 201-220, ISSN  0008-5006

Web links

• ELKOST Intl. literary agency
• Literature by and about Sasha Sokolov in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from September 21, 2016 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.