Step by step
Step by step ( Russian Ступени / Stupeni ) is a short story by the Russian writer Lasar Karelin , which was published in 1971 by the Moscow publishing house Soviet Russia . The translation into German by Eva and Alexander Grossmann was brought out by Volk und Welt in 1976 in the collection So silent twilight hours in Berlin.
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At the beginning of January 1944, the screenwriter Leonid, born in Moscow in 1920 - a university graduate at the State Union Film Institute Alma-Ata - went to the front as a simple soldier.
It tells episodes from the time after he was called up in December 1943. Leonid's battalion , part of the Reverse Services , is only four hours by train from Moscow in the snow-covered Russian field. Against the cold in the dugout , Leonid and his bed neighbor Georgi Georgievich Semjonow crawl under a blanket during the night. Semyonov, an elderly fruit grower from Alma-Ata and a member of the Semiretschensk Cossacks , has fought on the front since the summer of 1941 and was wounded twice; harder the last time. The chest wound is bleeding. The wounded man wants to go back to the front. He deliberately did not allow himself to be transferred to the hospital, but only to this convalescent battalion, in which Leonid also serves.
When the opportunity arises, Leonid takes a two-day short vacation to Moscow. There he has to find out - in the few days of his absence his girlfriend and correspondent Tanja has already laughed at a new friend, Lieutenant Kolja. Before Leonid secretly, quietly and quietly leaves the middle-class home of Tanjas, he gets hold of one of the two lovely smelling apples from Alma-Ata from the strict housekeeper. When Leonid wants to give the precious fruit to Semyonov after his return to the battalion, the old soldier has already succumbed to his wound. Leonid takes the place of the deceased at the front. Leonid found a new correspondent on New Year's Eve at Reverse Services - young Nina from the construction battalion.
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Some - for example the son of Leonid's Moscow neighbor Yelena Ivanovna - fell right at the beginning of the war. But this is not the norm. Front soldier is said to Leonid step by step or with the title, level by level. When Leonid asks the rector of the Moscow Film School in Ostankino for a favor during the above-mentioned short vacation , this elderly gentleman grants the young slacker's wish. The reader gets exactly the same impression - Leonid wants to avoid the front line by all means. But it turns out differently. Due to the events at home in Moscow and especially in the field with his battalion, Leonid realizes in the course of the action that he must take Semyonov's place.
German-language editions
- Lasar Karelin: Step by step. Pp. 117–184 in: At dawn it is still quiet. Three stories. Military publishing house , Berlin 1988 (3rd edition, in the German first edition 1976 under the title So silent twilight hours ), ISBN 3-327-00596-6
Web links
in Russian language
- Entry 1983 edition at ozon.ru
Individual evidence
- ↑ Russian Советская Россия
- ↑ Edition used, p. 4, 1. Zvo