Orsinia

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Ursula K. Le Guin 2008

Orsinia is a fictional Central European country in which several stories and the 1979 novel Malfrena by Ursula K. Le Guin are set. Most of the stories appeared in the Orsinian Tales collection in 1976.

overview

The form follows the conventions of the historical novel or historical narrative, with the difference that they are not set in a fictional world like the stories of Walter Scott in medieval England or Tolstoy's War and Peace in Russia during the Napoleonic Wars , which, however, is repeatedly linked to historical events. Plays Malafrena in the 19th century, the stories Orsinien ranging from the 12th to the 20th century.

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Orsinian Tales

The eleven stories in the 1976 collection are narrated chronologically, but they are not in chronological order.Instead, the stories jump back and forth in time and cover a period from the middle of the 12th century to the time of the Cold war is enough. The year in question is given at the end of every story, the resulting sequence of years is 1960, 1150, 1920, 1956, 1910, 1962, 1938, 1965, 1640, 1935. With the exception of Fountain , the first story, all are Stories located in Orsinia. The name Orsinia does not appear once in the stories themselves, only in the title, but repeated names of places - such as the capital Krasnoy - and landscapes imply a coherent geography. The position of Orsinia remains vague, it is only clear that it is a Central European country, landlocked, some details are reminiscent of Czechoslovakia , some of Hungary , others suggest one of the Balkan states .

Unless otherwise noted, all stories first appeared in an anthology in 1976.

The Fountains - 1960

Fountains in the Park of Versailles

Kereth is a renowned cell biologist who has been allowed by his government to attend an international specialist congress in Paris. During a guided tour through the grounds of Versailles , he suddenly finds himself alone in the spacious park with its fountain. Without his first noticing it and without it being his intention, he escaped the guards and spies, from whom the Eastern European governments had such tour groups accompany such tour groups during the Iron Curtain era . For Kereth, the question now arises as to whether he should take the chance to visit an embassy and apply for political asylum there - or whether he should return to his hotel and finally to his country, his homeland, without a fuss.

Kereth is initially confused. He is used to surveillance: “In his small country you could only escape view if you kept calm, when your voice, body and thoughts were completely silent. He was always a restless man, always in view. ”Kereth wandered on along the park paths, under the old trees, through the“ secret and conspiratorial darkness of all those forests where refugees hide ”, and he wonders if he is is now or should be a refugee.

He leaves the park, the bus of his tour group has left, he drinks a vermouth in a café, then drives back to Paris and finally stands at night on the Passerelle Solférino above the Seine . In the park of Versailles with its fountains and water features , with its old trees and finally the equestrian statue of Louis XIV , he found an image of aristocratic, royal freedom and claimed it for himself - or took freedom for himself. It is of course a lost freedom: “There are no more hiding places. No thrones, no wolves, no boars; the lions in Africa are also dying out. The only safe place is the zoo. ”Yet it is free, nothing keeps it - except for a kind of attachment, not love of home, but loyalty to home. So he returns to the hotel with his newly found - or stolen - freedom and walks past the secret policeman sitting in the lobby, the stolen goods hidden under his coat, the inexhaustible wells.

The Barrow - 1150

Count Freyga is young, only 23 years old, for 3 years when his father was killed by an arrow from the pagan mountain tribes, he has been lord of Vermare Castle. It is winter, he is sitting by the fire with his men in the hall below, while his wife has been in labor upstairs for days. A foreign priest is the guest, a stern, haughty man who shows nothing but contempt for the life and faith of the common people in the border region and smells Arian heretics everywhere . It gets dark and quiet and above Freyga hears his wife whimpering in labor. The foreign priest seems to him more and more like a fat spider that sits hour after hour in its corner and spins a web of darkness. In the middle of the night Freyga gets up and forces the priest with a bare sword out in front of the gate, in front of the village, where there is an old burial mound, a megalithic grave from the distant past. Freyga forces the priest up to the stones, where he cuts his throat and distributes his blood and innards on the altar stones. Then the earth shakes and sways, and behind him wild voices sound in the darkness. When Freyga returns to the castle, it is just getting light, the air is milder and more humid, an announcement of the end of the frost, and his wife and a son have fallen in the castle. She lives and the child lives and Freyga sinks to her knees by her bed and prays to Christ.

The chronicles praise Freyga as a pious man who built the Benedictine abbey at Lake Malafrena, where his father once found death by the pagans, gave her lands and protected them with his sword. As for the priest, the Bishop of Solariy never found out what became of him. It is believed that in his zeal for faith he ventured too far into the mountains and suffered martyrdom there by pagan hands .

The Ile Forest (Ile Forest) - 1920

A young doctor and an elderly doctor discuss crime. The young doctor thinks that some acts, for example murder, must be unforgivable, the older one contradicts. There are people for whom there is no forgiveness, but when it comes to actions, it always depends on the circumstances. And then the older doctor begins to tell about the time when he himself was a young doctor in Valone and lived there with his sister who ran his household for him. The area was a wide valley with beet fields, boring and treeless, only at the edge of the valley, in Valone Alte, did it get mountainous. On his first trip there, he notices a dilapidated house, almost hidden in a stand of old trees, the forest of Ile, the remainder of a once much larger forest, owned by the Ileskar family, shrunk to a small residue over the generations, just enough, Galven Ileskar, the last of the once wealthy and respected family, and his factotum to offer Martin a meager livelihood.

The doctor is called to this Galven Ileskar when he is suffering from pneumonia and is fighting death. Galven gets well again and he and the doctor become friends. After a while he gets to know Pomona, the doctor's sister, and they both get to love each other. The doctor was fascinated by Galven from the start, but he also has the feeling that there is a dark point in his soul. When he asks the servant Martin urgently, he finally confesses that Galven is a murderer. His first wife did not disappear with her lover at the time, as everyone believes, but rather Galven met her in the forest of Ile in flagranti and shot his wife and killed the lover. He, Martin, then buried the bodies in the forest. Galven was then out of his mind for weeks, then apparently became more or less normal again, but he had completely forgotten his act: "He only became himself again when he forgot that he had forgotten." Sister, but she decides to believe in Galven anyway. Galven and Pomona get married, they have two children. At the age of 50, Galven died of another pneumonia. The doctor's sister lives on in the Ile forest.

Both The Barrow and The Ile Forest are about unpunished murder. The megalithic tomb essentially tells the prehistory, the forest of Ile the consequences, and while in the story from the dark Middle Ages the outcome, if not downright confirmed, then compensates and suspends the deed, the forest of Ile is about the irrevocable and unacknowledged Guilt, ultimately canceled by a kind of act of faith, namely Pomonas' belief in Galven. Faith or loyalty (English fidelity ) plays a central role in the first three stories in different forms: Kereth's loyalty to home, Freyga's actions, which combine old and new beliefs, and finally Pomonas' belief, which is revealed in a murderer.

Conversations at Night - 1920

Sanzo is a war blind man who lives with his old father with his uncle Albrekt and his wife Sara in the industrial town of Rákava. Conditions are cramped, funds scarce and the future uncertain. At night in bed, Sara and Albrekt talk about what should become of Sanzo, and Sara has the idea of ​​asking Alitsia (called Lisha), the laundress's daughter, to occasionally read something to Sanzo. The idea is that reading aloud could become more. So it happens, and when Alisha's mother notices the growing tendency between the two, she tries to dissuade Alitsia and tells her that it has always been her only wish that Alitsia could one day escape the cramped conditions. With a blind husband that is probably not possible, so she should think about it. At times it looks like it's over, especially after an incident in which Sanzo pressed Alitsia and she rejected him. She gets to know the dyer Givan, who asks her to become his wife, but she cannot make up her mind to do so. When spring comes again, they meet again in the courtyard. Sanzo and Alitsia talk to each other, they go up again together to the hill above the city, to the garden of the old, dilapidated villa where they had been the previous year. Sanzo does not believe in a common future, Alitsia sees no future in Rákava, she wants to go to Krasnoy, the capital, with Sanzo, and try it there: "She knew that it was her, that it was her determination, her presence, who freed him; but she had to go to freedom with him, and that was a place where she had never been before. "

The Road East - 1956

The young architect painter Eray works in a planning office in the capital Krasnoy. It is a time of social unrest in the eastern country, the date of October 1956 brings to mind the uprising in Hungary . Painter finds himself between two poles, two loyalties, between that to his mother on the one hand, who excludes the world or only perceives it through the window, from this perspective cannot find anything bad in the world and urges painter to do the same, on the other his peers, represented by his colleague Provin, to the dissidents working underground, constantly threatened by arrest and from worse. The appeals to painters are almost identical. At one point Provin says: “We have nothing left, only each other.” And Maler's mother: “After all, we have no one, only us.”

Painter flees from both demands into a fantasy world, into a dreamy journey to the east, on the road from Krasnoy to the old city of Sorg, his home, where he has never been. One day on his way home, he meets a gypsy woman who asks him for directions. Your destination is his street and there the house in which he lives. But she doesn't want to go to him, but to a neighbor, a friend. As it turns out, it comes from worry. The road to the east, which he follows in his dreams and mind games, is for them a road to the west. Maler never thought that there was another direction.

A few days later he meets the supposed gypsy again, maybe just a country woman. In the meantime the situation has escalated, there are roadblocks everywhere, she asks him to accompany her, she has to go to the train station on the other side of the river, she has to go back to Sorg, to her children, but a soldier turned her away, maybe they would let her they pass in his company with his ID. The two try, but they are sent back. When he comes home, he tells his mother that he will go out again, take a sunbath, the sun is shining for everyone. The mother protests that it is not safe and finally: “I will be alone!” And Maler confirms: “Yes, that's right, that's how it is,” and goes out into the bright October light to join the army of the unarmed and with them to walk the long road west, down to but not across the river.

Brothers and Sisters - 1910

Sfaroy Kampe is a town that lies in a wide, treeless karst plain . Limestone is mined here. The 23-year-old Stefan Fabbre works as an accountant in a mining company, his older brother is a foreman in the quarry and is the victim of an accident there when he saves the deaf father of Ekata and Martin Sachik from a stone avalanche. Rosana, Stefan and Kostant's little sister, is only 13. A defiant child, the brother's accident marks the onset of pain and threatened death in her existence, and at the same time the beginning of her transformation into a woman.

A few months later, Kostant is on the mend and the Sachik family has moved to a farm in the country. Martin Sachik has stayed in Sfaroy Kampe and works in the quarry, his sister visits him occasionally and on the occasion also the convalescent Konstantin. Stefan observes the conversation between the two of them with suspicion, the now 14-year-old Rosana with admiration for the ladylike demeanor of Ekata, which she immediately and successfully imitates, because Martin Sachik invites her for a walk. They hike to an abandoned quarry that is now filled with deep water: "Rosana realized that her feet were on the ground, but that they themselves rose into the sky, that they wandered through the sky, just as birds flew through it."

The contrast between being bound to the city in the Karst plain, to a life in eternal lime dust, and on the other hand the wishes and plans of the brothers and sisters with their mutual attractions culminate in Stefan's senseless nocturnal ride out to the farm where Ekata lives. In the morning Stefan and Ekata ride away:

“Where to?” Called the cousin, trembling. "Up and away," the young man called back, they rode past her, the water in the puddles cracked into diamond splinters in the March sun, and were gone. "

A Week in the Country - 1962

Stefan and Kasimir, two students from Krasnoj, travel to the country for a week during the semester break, where Kasimir's father works as a doctor and his family, the parents with six siblings, live in a large house outside Prevne. On the journey you come through Vermare, where in the rain you can see the ruins of the tower of Vermare, the remains of Count Freyga's castle from the story The Hünengrab . But that is not the only back reference, because Stefan's last name is Fabbre and is the grandson of Stefan Fabbre from the previous story.

When the two arrive in Prevne, it is still raining and there is no one to pick them up. On the way out through the night to the family house, Stefan catches a cold, develops pneumonia and lies for a few days with a high fever. In his fantasies during this time, he remembers a day when he was 13 and visiting his grandfather in Sfaroy Kampe with his father Kosta. That day, father and grandfather had discussed politics. The grandfather had said:

“What would we do with freedom if we had it, Kosta? What did the West do with it? You eaten. [...] He sits at the table, eats and eats, invents machines that teach you more to eat and more. Throw a few chunks under the table to the black and yellow rats so they don't nibble through the walls. There he sits, and here we are, with nothing but air in our stomach, air and cancer, air and anger. "

Bruna, one of Kasimir's sisters, comes into the hospital room and Stefan looks at her from the perspective of that April day on the sunny Karst plain, with no reminder that the grandfather would die in a deportation train and the father would be shot in the criminal actions of 1956.

Stefan gets well again and falls in love with Bruna. An idyll develops in which one lies on a meadow and forges plans for the future, one future is more and the other less gloomy, but Bruna is determined. However, when a few days later Stefan goes to Prevne with Kasimir to buy tickets for the return trip, Kasimir is shot by soldiers who recognize him as an escape helper and agent. Stefan is locked up and released after a few days. He wants to go back to Krasnoj alone, but Bruna comes to him and insists that they should get married, she has already told her mother.

On that April day, the grandfather had placed his hands on Stefan's shoulder, the grandson, who “was born in prison where nothing has value, no anger, no understanding, no pride, nothing but steadfastness, except loyalty.” This legacy is true in mind Stefan finally to Bruna, they want to stay together, hold on to each other: “Letting go wouldn't be good, right? [...] No, not at all good. "

To the music - 1938

Sheet music from To the Music

First reprinted in 1961 in The Western Humanities Review .

When the great impresario Otto Egorin is on tour with his wife, a singer, in the old town of Foranoy, a poorly dressed man turns up with his son and some sheet music. He introduces himself as Ladislas Gaye and he writes music. With some skepticism Egorin takes a look at the sheet music, but is surprised to see that there is obviously a talented composer in front of him. It concerns some song settings and parts of an unfinished mass. Egorin now asks what he is doing, where he has studied, and above all what else Gaye has. Gaye has to admit that this is all, his job and his family obligations left him little time to compose. Egorin advises him to concentrate on setting songs. He could put them here or there, but it would be difficult with a large work such as a mass, especially with a previously unknown composer. Gaye opposes this practical advice. The mass, that is his real work, his task, that is what he is called to do.

Egorin is a little disappointed with this stubbornness, but not surprised. In parting he says to Gaye:

“This is not a good world for music. This world, now, 1938. You are not the only one asking what is it about. Who needs music Who wants her Who, in a Europe littered with armies like a corpse with maggots, where symphonies are being written in Russia to celebrate the newest boiler factory in the Urals, where the highest purpose of music is that Putzi's piano playing soothes the leader's nerves . You know, when you have finished your mass, all the churches will be shattered into little pieces, and your male choir will wear uniform and will also be shattered into little pieces. [...] Music has no value, no use, Gaye. No more."

After his visit, Gaye returns to the old town across the river, where he lives in cramped conditions with his old mother, his sickly, quarrelsome wife and three children. The newspaper headlines of the day announce that Chamberlain is in Munich. In the evening he crosses the bridge again, he has to give a piano lesson. On the way he can think of a voice to accompany a song, but he has no time to write it down and it slips away from him again. When he got home, he tried to remember the details, but to no avail. He thinks he is in despair, suddenly he hears the voice, at first thinks it is in his head, but it is on the radio. It has long been written. Lotte Lehmann sings An die Musik on Schubert's radio :

"You lovely art, I thank you."

Gaye sits there and thinks for a long time:

“Music will not save us, Otto Egorin said. […] What is the use of music? None, thought Gaye, and that's the point. To the world, its states and armies and factories and leaders, she says, "You are meaningless," and arrogant and gentle as a god she says nothing to the suffering person but, "Listen." Salvation is not the point. Music is no salvation. Mercilessly and without hesitation, she tears open the shelters, the houses of the people, so that they can see the sky. "

The House - 1965

When Mariya goes to Aisnar to visit Pier Korre, whom she divorced eight years ago, she finds him very different. He no longer lives in the house that had belonged to his family for generations, where the publishing house was, Korre and Sons, from 1813 until the nationalization in 1946. Pier now lives in a room that is sublet with a working-class couple. He says he was in jail. In the publishing house, in which he still worked as managing director after the nationalization, some politically problematic publications had appeared, he and his partner had been tried and he had been free again for two years.

Mariya also says that she has been divorced from the man she married after breaking up with Pier for four years. And that breaking up with Pier was a mistake. At the time she had thought that the only way to be herself was to leave him. But it didn't help her, she didn't find herself, just loneliness: “And then you get older, you think about death, and in times like these it just seems pointless and mean, life and also death. […] I feel like an ant in a swarm, I can't do it alone! ”It is not the first time that ants appear in the stories as a metaphor for human existence. In Brothers and Sisters , Stefan Fabbre says: "I feel like an ant, something so small, so small that you can barely see it crawling across this huge plain." And his son Kosta Fabbre says in One week in the country : "There will always be enough ants to populate all the anthills - worker ants, soldier ants."

Mariya and Pier take a walk and come to the house that once housed the publishing house, which is now locked and seems unused. You hear the splashing of the fountain in the square in front of it and the corresponding splashing of the Naiaden fountain in the garden of the abandoned house. Above the garden wall you can see the branches of the apple tree, which once stood in front of the window with its blossoms like white foam in spring. Mariya tells Pier that she wants to be his wife again, that she has to be his wife because she was never anything else: "You are the house I come home to, whether the doors are locked or not." Piers apartment, Piers landlords come back from work. Piers introduces Mariya with the words “This is Mariya Korre. My wife."

The Lady of Moge - 1640

The young aristocrat Andre Kalinskar visits Moge Castle with his father. The subject of the visit is a planned marriage between him and Isabella Oriana Mogeskar, Princess of Moge. When the two are alone, Isabella asks him to refrain from advertising. She does not find Andre repulsive, on the contrary, but wants to live her own life. Inside she feels something that can hardly be named, light and heavy at the same time, which she does not feel entitled to sacrifice to a foreseeable fate as a wife and mother.

In 1640, two years after this first meeting, there was a war for the throne. The Lords of Moge remain loyal to the king, Andre Kalinskar is on the opposite side and charged with besieging and taking the Moge fortress. The siege becomes protracted, the residents of the city of Moge fight tenaciously and doggedly, as one hears, inspired by the young lady of the castle. Inwardly, Andre is delighted with this course of events: “It would give her the opportunity to give up the hopeless resistance, but also the opportunity to prove herself, to use the courage that she had felt bright and heavy in her chest, like a secret sword in sheath. ”Finally the city falls and the besiegers set about breaking the walls of the fortress. If the defenders fail, Andre is injured and captured.

When he wakes up in the castle ward, Isabella is sitting by his bed. He learns that Isabella's older brother has fallen and that George, the younger, is badly wounded and has lost an eye. When she accuses him of betraying their friendship, Andre defends himself:

“I did what I could. I served your glory. You know that even my soldiers sing songs about you, about the mistress of Moge, like an archangel on the castle battlements. In Krasnoy people talk about you and sing the songs. Now you can also say that you took me prisoner. You are spoken of with admiration, your enemies cheer you. You have won your freedom. "

But it turns out differently, because soon George, the brother, visits him and offers him to hand over the castle on one condition: Isabella must be allowed to leave the castle to ask the distant king for relief. But she must not find out anything about this contract, otherwise she would stay here and fight to the end and to her death. His only concern was about her life, she was the last of the Mogeskar, the Count of Helle and Prince of Moge.

Decades later Andre meets Isabella at a ball. He is a grizzled warrior, she a matron, a powerful, self-contained woman. In retrospect, he feels that he betrayed her:

“The gift he owed her, the soldier's one gift, was death, and he had withheld it from her. He had turned her down. And now, at sixty, after all the days, wars, years, areas of his life, he had to look back and realize that he had lost everything, that he had fought for nothing, that there was no princess in the castle. "

Imaginary Countries - 1935

Asgard in the Twilight of the Gods

First published in The Harvard Advocate , Winter 1973.

Baron Severin Egideskar, Professor of History at Krasnoy University, spends the summer in the country with his wife and three children, reading and writing a comprehensive history of Orsinia, the “Ten Provinces”, in the Middle Ages. But he is not in focus, the focus of the children and their fantasy worlds are: Zida, the youngest, is expanding egg carton, fabric remnants and hangers a unicorn case , but has caught so far no Einhorn, of the seven-year-old Paul builds of toy cars traveled roads and tunnels , and 14-year-old Stanislas is mapping the forest in which there is a large, old oak that he calls Yggdrasil . These are the last days before the house will be locked for the rest of the year and the family will return to town. The baroness and the housemaid Rosa are busy packing. For Josef Brone, Egideskar's research assistant, too, these are the last days before he will enter a seminary and begin a completely different life. The last day is coming, the family says goodbye to the house and the summer with regret, Zida resists and defies and does not want to get into the waiting taxi, you look back and wave goodbye to the factotum Tomas.

The similarities between Le Guin's biography and this story have been noted: like Severin Egideskar, Le Guin's father was also a professor, and the family spent the summers in a property in the Napa Valley called “Kishamish”. According to Theodora Kroeber , the place had the name of Le Guin's brother Karl Kroeber, who called two nearby hills " Thor " and "Kishamish" in a phase of Nordic myth fantasies , the latter an invented giant. In addition to the already mentioned giant tree named by Stanislas "Yggdrasil", which is not an ash but an oak as in the myth , there are other references to Nordic mythology in the story , such as the summer house of the family " Asgard ", called Severin his wife " Freya " and the children play " Ragnarök ", where Zida is once Thor and once the Fenriswolf . Zida was recognized as a reflection of Le Guin, in 1935, at the time of the narration, Le Guin was appropriately six years old. Another analogy is the numerous, colorfully mixed visitors: in the “Kishamish” of the Kroeber family not only scholars but also Californian and other Indians (Le Guin's father was an anthropologist), in the “Asgard” of the Egideskars there are not only Polish historians but also duck hunters in both families Friends of the children and parents come along.

The narrative, more like a series of images, ends with the sentence: “But all of this happened a long time ago, almost 40 years ago; I don't know if it still happens today, even in countries of the imagination. ”The Orsinian Tales appeared a good 40 years after 1935. It is the only place where the narrator speaks directly to the reader and it has been assumed that the last sentence refers not only to the narrative itself, but to the entirety of the Orsinian stories. In this respect and also with regard to the chronology, this narrative has been assigned a central position in the collection.

Malafrena

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Further stories from Orsinia

After the short story volume (1976) and the novel (1979), two more stories were published in Orsinia, namely Two Delays on the Northern Line ( Eng . " Two Delays on the Northern Line ") in the anthology The Compass Rose (1979) and 11 Years later Unlocking the Air (1990), first in Playboy and in 1996 in the short story book Unlocking the Air and Other Stories .

Two Delays on the Northern Line

According to the title, they are actually two stories that are superficially connected only by the fact that each involves a journey on the railway line between Brailava and the capital Krasnoy, on which there is a delay in each case.

In the first story, Going to Paraguanza , Eduard Orte drives to Krasnoy because he has received an alarming telegram from his sister, in which there is talk of an attack by his old mother and he should come quickly. The arrival is delayed because the Molsen River has overflowed and flooded the railroad tracks. When he arrives at his mother's house, she passed away shortly before. He sleeps in a strange room in a house with people who are actually strangers to him. He dreams of a trip to Paraguanza, in his dream the capital of Paraguay , but "there are many delays on the route because of the floods, and when he arrives in Paraguananza, beyond terrible abysses, it was no different than here."

In Metempsychosis (a term for transmigration of souls ), the second part, Eduard Russe learns that a great-uncle has died and left him a house in Brailava. He hardly remembers his great-uncle or the house, only two cavalry sabers that hung crossed over the fireplace. His wife died of an aneurysm three months ago. He sleeps poorly, feels unhappy and disoriented. After some hesitation, he decides to take a few days off to see the house in Brailava, maybe to sell it. There was an accident on the train journey, you had to wait for a replacement locomotive and when the Russian arrived, it was already night. He drives to the house, wanders through the unfamiliar rooms, finds a made bed and goes to sleep. When he wakes up, he sees the two sabers hanging on the wall, tools of death, including his death, which he now sees clearly and relaxed, as he sees the rest of the rooms and the doors that would lead to "a new life, for a transfer request to Brailava, the wild cherry blossom in the mountains in March, a second marriage, all that [...] he had arrived. "

Unlocking the air

Unlocking the Air is the cover story of a collection of stories published in 1996 and the last story of Orsinia, which completes the long arc of stories from a relatively small country, repeatedly oppressed and occupied by powerful neighbors, also insofar as it is set against the background of disintegration of the Eastern Bloc in 1990. It takes up the story of the Fabbre family from Brothers and Sisters and A Week in the Country . Stefan Fabbre married Bruna and now works as a biologist in a laboratory. You live quite comfortably and have a grown-up daughter.

It is a time of restlessness and anticipation, and weekly demonstrations take place on Thursday in Roukh Square in front of the government building. One of Stefan's colleagues says: “The experiment is over. […] Here and everywhere. You know, there on Roukh Square. Go there. You'll see. Such jubilation is only experienced when a tyrant dies or when a great hope fails. "

Fana (Stefana), the daughter of Stefan and Bruna, is prominently involved in the pursuit of freedom. One Thursday she takes her a little hesitant and a little frightened mother with her. The people stand tightly packed, suddenly everyone takes their keys out of their pockets and jingles with them: “They stood on the stones in the softly falling snow and listened to the silver, trembling sound of thousands of keys swinging to unlock the air, once, at a time. "

expenditure

Orsinian Tales
Malafrena
Further stories from Orsinia
  • Two Delays on the Northern Line. First published in: The New Yorker , November 12, 1979. First published in: The Compass Rose. Pendragon Press & Underwood-Miller, Portland, Oregon 1982, ISBN 0-934438-60-9 .
    • German: Two delays on the northern line. Translated by Hilde Linnert. In: The Compass Rose. Heyne Library of Science Fiction Literature # 47, 1985, ISBN 3-453-31156-6 .
  • Unlocking the Air. First printed in: Playboy , December 1990. First published in: Alice K. Turner (Ed.): Playboy Stories: The Best of Forty Years of Short Fiction. Dutton, 1994, ISBN 0-525-93735-8 . Also included in: Le Guin: Unlocking the Air and Other Stories. HarperCollins, 1996, ISBN 0-06-017260-6 .
Collective editions

literature

  • James W. Bittner: Persuading Us to Rejoice and Teaching Us How to Praise: Le Guin's "Orsinian Tales". In: Science Fiction Studies , Vol. 5, No. 3 (November 1978), pp. 215-242.
  • Mike Cadden: Ursula K. Le Guin Beyond Genre: Fiction for Children and Adults. Routledge, New York 2005, ISBN 0-415-97218-3 , pp. 31-34.
  • Elizabeth Cummins: The Land-Lady's Homebirth: Revisiting Ursula K. Le Guin's Worlds. In: Science Fiction Studies , Vol. 17, No. 2, Science Fiction by Women (July 1990), pp. 153-166.
  • Elizabeth Cummins: Understanding Ursula K. Le Guin. University of South Carolina Press 1993, ISBN 0-87249-869-7 , pp. 126-152.
  • Larry McCaffery, Sinda Gregory: An Interview with Ursula Le Guin. In: The Missouri Review , Vol. 7, No. 2, 1984, pp. 64-85.
  • Charlotte Spivack: Ursula K. Le Guin. Twayne, Boston 1984, ISBN 0-8057-7393-2 , pp. 100-106, 114-116.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In his small country a man could get out of sight only by not moving at all, by keeping voice, body, brain all quiet. He had always been a restless, visible man.
  2. ↑ [...] the taciturn, complicit darkness of all forests where fugitives have hidden.
  3. ↑ There are no hiding places left. There are no thrones; no wolves, no boars; even the lions of Africa are dying out. The only safe place is the zoo.
  4. ↑ Elizabeth Cummins: Understanding Ursula K. Le Guin. London 1993, p. 136 f.
  5. ↑ She knew that it was she, her will, her presence, that set him free; but she must go with him into freedom, and it was a place she had never been before.
  6. ↑ There's nothing left to us, now, but one another.
  7. ^ After all, we have no one but each other.
  8. ↑ […] his home, the town where he had never been.
  9. ↑ Of course the road led westward as well as eastward, only he had never thought of that.
  10. ↑ [...] to join the army of the unarmed and with them to go down the long streets leading westward to, but not across, the river.
  11. ↑ Rosana realized that though their feet were on the earth they themselves stuck up into the sky, it was the sky they were walking through, just as birds flew through it.
  12. ↑ "Where ye going?" the cousin shouted, trembling. “Running away,” the young man called back, and they went past her, splashing the puddles into diamond-slivers in the sunlight of March, and were gone.
  13. ↑ What would we do with freedom if we had it, Kosta? What has the West done with it? Eat it. [...] He sits at table eating, eating, thinking up machines to bring him more food, more food. Throwing food to the black and yellow rats under the table so they won't gnaw down the walls around him. There he sits, and here we are, with nothing in our bellies but air, air and cancer, air and rage.
  14. ↑ the boy […] had been born in jail, where nothing is any good, no anger, understanding, or pride, nothing is any good except obduracy, except fidelity.
  15. ↑ “No good letting go, is there. [...] No good at all. "
  16. ^ The Western Humanities Review , Vol. XV, No. 3, Summer 1961.
  17. ↑ This is not a good world for music, either. This world now, in 1938. You're not the only man who wonders, what's the good? who needs music, who wants it? Who indeed, when Europe is crawling with armies like a corpse with maggots, when Russia uses symphonies to glorify the latest boiler-factory in the Urals, when the function of music has been all summed up in Putzi playing the piano to soothe the leader's nerves . By the time your mass is finished, you know, all the churches may be blown into little pieces, and your men's chorus will be wearing uniforms and also being blown into little pieces. […] But music is no good, no use, Gaye. Not any more.
  18. ↑ Music will not save us, Otto Egorin had said. […] What good is music? None, Gaye thought, and that is the point. To the world and its states and armies and factories and leaders, music says, “You are irrelevant”; and, arrogant and gentle as a god, to the suffering man it says only, "Listen." For being saved is not the point. Music saves nothing. Merciful, uncaring, it denies and breaks down all the shelters, the houses men build for themselves, that they may see the sky.
  19. ↑ And then you get older, and you think about dying, and in a time like this it seems so mean and pointless. Living and dying both. [...] I feel like an ant in a swarm, I can't do it alone!
  20. ↑ I feel like I was an ant, something smaller, so small you can hardly see it, crawling along on this huge floor.
  21. ↑ There'll always be enough ants to fill up all the ant-hills — worker ants, army ants.
  22. ↑ You're the house to which I come home. Whether the doors are open or locked.
  23. ↑ He would give her every chance: the chance to withdraw from the hopeless fight and the chance, also, to prove herself, to use the courage she had felt heavy and shining in her breast, like a sword lying secret in its sheath.
  24. ↑ I've done what I could. I've served your glory. You know that even my own soldiers sing songs about you, about the Lady of Moge, like an archangel on the castle walls. In Krasnoy they talk about you, they sing the songs. Now they can say that you took me prisoner, too. They talk of you with wonder. Your enemies rejoice in you. You've won your freedom.
  25. ↑ […] the gift he had owed her, the soldier's one gift, was death; and he had withheld it. He had refused her. And now, at sixty, after all the days, wars, years, countrysides of his life, now he had to turn back and see that he had lost it all, had fought for nothing, that there was no princess in the castle.
  26. ^ Theodora Kroeber: Alfred Kroeber: A Personal Configuration. . University of California Press, Berkeley 1970, p. 140.
  27. ↑ James W. Bittner: Persuading Us to Rejoice and Teaching Us How to Praise: Le Guin's "Orsinian Tales". In: Science Fiction Studies , Vol. 5, No. 3 (November 1978), pp. 225 f. and footnote 34.
  28. ↑ But all this happened a long time ago, nearly forty years ago; I do not know if it happens now, even in imaginary countries.
  29. ↑ James W. Bittner: Persuading Us to Rejoice and Teaching Us How to Praise: Le Guin's "Orsinian Tales". In: Science Fiction Studies , Vol. 5, No. 3 (November 1978), p. 229.
  30. ↑ Elizabeth Cummins: Understanding Ursula K. Le Guin. University of South Carolina Press 1993, ISBN 0-87249-869-7 , pp. 139 f., 150.
  31. ↑ But they met with long delays along the line from floods of water, and when he got there, across terrible abysses, to Paraguananza, it was no different from here.
  32. ↑ […] would lead to his life, his request for a transfer to the Bureau here in Brailava, the wild cherry flowering in the mountains in March, his second marriage, all that, […]; he had arrived.
  33. ^ I think the experiment is over. […] Here and everywhere. They know it, down at Roukh Square. Go down there. You'll see. There could be such jubilation only at the death of a tyrant or the failure of a great hope.
  34. ↑ They stood on the stones in the lightly falling snow and listened to the silvery, trembling sound of thousands of keys being shaken, unlocking the air, once upon a time.