A golden cloud slept

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"Slept a golden cloud" ( Russian: Ночевала тучка золотая , transliteration Nočevala tučka zolotaja ) is a novel by the Russian writer Anatoli Pristawkin .

The book published in 1987 became a bestseller, translated into all European languages, received a state award in 1988 and later became compulsory reading in Russian schools. The novel was filmed in 1989 by Sulambek Mamilov under the title Nochevala tuchka zolotaya ... (Children of Storm) .

Pristavkin had to secretly write the novel, the title of which comes from Lermontov's poem The Rock . Publication was only possible at the time of perestroika . In this autobiographical novel, Pristavkin describes the hard life of Russian orphanage children during the Second World War and their fateful fate in Chechnya , where the children were forcibly sent during this time.

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The Kuzmin twins lived in an orphanage near Moscow in 1944 . The two are inseparable and while Saschka is the smarter head and develops ideas to survive in difficult times, Kolka is the more pragmatic and takes care of the practical part, the implementation of these ideas.

Hunger is omnipresent, as the home manager embezzles the small rations intended for the home children. So the two try to get into the bread cutting room via a tunnel they dug themselves. The tunnel is discovered shortly before completion when it collapses. You are now in trouble because Saschka's school bag is still in the tunnel. So they volunteer to travel to the Caucasus. Nobody knows what it is like there and there are only vague ideas of what to expect there, but the children are promised a carefree existence in the fertile and luscious areas of the Caucasus to relieve the homes around Moscow. Around 500 children in the home set out to live - as they do not know - in the Chechen villages whose residents were expelled because of alleged collaboration with the Germans. As it turns out later, on their journey in Kuban they encountered such a train - overcrowded cattle wagons with thirsty strangers begging for water.

The Kuzmin twins work with the other children in a canning factory and are mainly busy building supplies and dragging them from the factory to their accommodation. They are much more careful and trickier than the others and only Regina Petrovna, one of the caregivers who loved the twins, sees through them. Nevertheless, she takes care of the Kusmins. And the twins love Regina Petrovna too. Everything seems fine. But paradise soon turns into hell: Chechen rebels have hidden in the mountains and are using all cruelty to attack the uninvited intruders in order to drive them from their homes.

After one of their nicest evenings - they are celebrating their birthday in Regina Petrovna's accommodation - Saschka and Kolka get caught in such a skirmish and lose themselves on the run in a corn field. When Kolka found Saschka the next day, he was hanging dead on a fence post, his stomach slit open and stuffed full of corn on the cob. Kolka is rigid with horror and without his twin is not immediately capable of action. He now has to take over the part that Saschka used to fill out. When someone asks him about his twin brother, he answers confused: "I am both."

“You always understood faster than I did, and your head digested everything faster. I was your hands and feet in life, that's how it was divided up with us, and you were my head. Now they have cut off our heads and left only our hands and feet. But why?"

He fled first to the orphanage, which has since burned down and abandoned - Regina Petrovna has also disappeared - but turns back and takes Saschka from here to take the body away from here, stowed in the wheelhouse of a train. In the orphanage, Kolka meets the frightened Chechen boy Alchusur, who saves his life when he does not betray him to the Chechens. Kolka explains to Alchusur that he would now be Saschka. From now on they are the Kuzmin twins and when the children in the home are taken elsewhere, Alchusur goes with them as Saschka. Only from Alchusur does Kolka find out what the strangers crammed into the cattle wagons had begged for: “Hi! Hi! Hi! ", They shouted, which means" Water! Water! Water! ”Meant.

Regina Petrovna is now looking for the Kuzmins and finally meets Kolka on the train shortly before departure. When she asks him about Saschka, he evades. Kolka is unable to tell her about Sashka's death and only says that he left, far away. Regina Petrovna is relieved because she believes that Saschka is still alive.

Poem "The Rock" by Mikhail Lermontow

Saschka heard the eponymous poem for the first time in class in the orphanage and was deeply moved. He tells Kolka about the excavation work on the bread room. Kolka remembers the poem again when he lost his brother. At this point it is quoted by Pristawkin:

“I slept a golden cloud under the stars
on the rock giant's chest,
happily floated away in the early morning
across the sea, to blue distant skies.

But a shimmer of it seemed to have remained
in the rock's furrows, wet as tears,
Which the old man, lonely now, cries full of longing
for them, which the wind suddenly drove away. "

- (translation by Martin Remané)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Nochevala tuchka zolotaya ... (Children of Storm)
  2. ^ Translations of Lermontov's poem "The Rock" ( Memento from November 22, 2004 in the Internet Archive )

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