Valentin Petrovich Kataev

Valentin Kataev in the 1920s

Valentin Kataev ( Russian Валентин Петрович Катаев ., Scientific transliteration Valentin Petrovich Kataev * January 16 ^jul. / 28. January  1897 ^greg. In Odessa ; †  12. April 1986 in Moscow ) was a Soviet playwright and novelist .

Kataev's rich imagination, empathy, and literary experimentation made the staunch communist one of the most internationally respected Soviet writers.

Early work

Kataev was the son of a teacher. His first literary steps were short stories, which he began to write in 1916 , but by 1910 he had published his first poem, "Осень" ("Autumn"), in a daily newspaper . After the October Revolution, he joined the Red Army , which he left in 1920 to become a journalist in his hometown of Odessa.

In 1922 Katajew moved to Moscow and worked for the satirical magazine "Гудок" ( The Pipe ), together with Ilya Ilf , Mikhail Bulgakov , Mikhail Soschtschenko and his brother, Yevgeny Petrov , who was also successful as a writer and who will work with Ilya Ilf in the future should.

In 1926 , after a few isolated short stories from the early 1920s, Kataev's first novel “Расстратчики” (“The Cheaters”) was published. The satirical novel in the tradition of Gogol , in which the story of two employees of a corporation is told, who embezzle a sum of money together and thus go in search of “high society”, was also his breakthrough. Already in 1929 he was appointed as "The embezzlers " by Alfred Polgar dramatized and was at the Berlin Theater Winter 1930 /31, a huge success that it in 1931 as " The Good Sinners " by Fritz Kortner with Max Pallenberg and Heinz Rühmann was filmed.

On September 28, 1928 , his comedy "Квадратура круга" (" Squaring the Circle") premiered in Moscow , which was also his first dramatic work. It's a play about two married couples with marital problems who have to share a room due to the housing shortage in Moscow in the 1920s . Almost all of Kataev's early work is satirical or comedic in color. The main focus of Kataev's attention was on the social conditions in the Soviet Union during the post-revolutionary period.

Stalinism and War

In the early 1930s, Kataev traveled with the poet Demjan Bedny to the construction site of a hydroelectric power station on the Dnieper and visited agricultural collectives on the Don and Volga . On their onward journey through the Urals, they also reached Magnitogorsk , a steel town built from 1929 onwards, which impressed him so deeply that he stayed there for some time.

With the final fading of the post-revolutionary lightness through the establishment of Stalinism in the USSR, Kataev turned away from satire and struck more serious tones in his work. His journey through the country and his stay in Magnitogorsk were the basis for the novel "Время, вперёд!" ("Im Sturmstufe Vorwärts!"), In which influences from John Dos Passos can be found, about a work brigade that set the world record in Wants to break concrete pouring. Regardless of its allegiance to the party line, the novel is considered an outstanding classic of Soviet literature. With his next novel, "Белеет парус одинокий" ("A lonely sail flashes") from 1936, he wrote another classic, which to this day is probably his best-known work. It deals with the revolutionary events of 1905 from the perspective of two schoolboys from Odessa . The semi-autobiographical novel has been translated into numerous languages ​​and filmed several times.

In 1937 he published the novel "Я, сын трудового народа ..." ("I, a son of the working people"), which he reworked in 1939 with Sergei Prokofjew into the opera " Semjon Kotko ".

During the Great Patriotic War , ie the Second World War , Katajew was a war correspondent for the " Pravda " and the " Krasnaya Zvezda ".

His experiences as a war correspondent culminated in 1945 in the novel "Сын полка" ("Son of the Regiment"), which was awarded the Stalin Prize in the following year , the story of an orphan who is adopted by a regiment and becomes a war hero, another novel set against a war background, За власть Советов ("In the Catacombs of Odessa ") appears in 1949 and portrays Odessa when the citizens of the city retreated to the catacombs of Odessa after the German attack in order to wage the partisan fight against the occupiers from there.

Thaw and late work

In 1955 he founded the magazine Юность ("Youth"), which he oversaw until 1962 , where he also published the first texts by authors of the " thaw " generation, e. B. Yevgeny Yevtushenko ( 1959 ) and Bella Akhmadulina .

The next big title of Katajew appears in 1967. "Саятой колодец" , ("The Holy Well"), makes it clear that he had become familiar with the work of the great Western authors Marcel Proust , James Joyce and Franz Kafka . The intertwined and interwoven dreams and memories of Katajew, who was anesthetized , form a stream of consciousness that was hitherto unknown in the Soviet Union , a method that can also be found in the follow-up "The Grass of Forgetting".

Katajew remained an active author until his death in 1986, and his late work can be characterized as "moderately experimental".

bibliography

Katajew's works were used worldwide as templates for films (in some of which he was involved as a screenwriter), dramatizations, radio plays ("Die Messer" by Manfred Janke, Süddeutscher Rundfunk, May 1981) and even comics ("Es blinks a lonely sail" by Günter Hain) , 5 episodes in Frösi 9 / 1976-1 / 1977). In 1952/53 Gerhard Wimberger composed the “cheerful opera in 6 pictures” “Schaubudengeschichten” based on a novella by Katajew.

• 1926: The Defraudanten (novel)
• 1928: Squaring the Circle (Comedy)
• 1930: avant-garde (comedy)
• 1931: The Brave Sinner (German comedy film)
• 1932: Forward by storm! (Novel)
• 1936: A lonely sail flashes (novel)
• 1944: his wife (novel)
• 1945: son of the regiment (novel)
• 1949: In the Odessa Catacombs (novel)
• 1964: The Times of Love (Comedy)
• 1966: The holy well (memories)
• 1967: the grass of oblivion (memories)
• 1973: Violets (drama)
• 1978: My Diamond Crown (novel)
• I want to see Miussow! (Comedy)
• Agony of hell
• Praise to stupidity
• Winter wind
• Cubic . German and with an afterword by Swetlana Geier. Dörlemann Verlag , Zurich 2005. ISBN 978-3-908777-13-7
• The confessions of my old friend Sascha Ptscholkin
• The echo of the war years, stories, sketches, notes
• The little iron door

Filmography

• 1931: The good sinner (Director: Fritz Kortner )
• 1954: Defraudanten (Director: Leo Mittler )
• 1967: I want to speak to Myussov (Director: Rolf von Sydow )
• 1967: Valentin Katajew's surgical interventions in the mental life of Dr. Igor Igorowitsch (Director: Helmut Käutner )
• 1968: Squaring the Circle (Director: Boleslaw Barlog )
• 1968: The Abducted Bride (Director: Hubert Kreuz)
• 1971: Avant-garde (theater recording)
• 1979: A day of rest (Direction: Georg Ruest, Werner Kraut)
• 1984: Pension Butterpilz - Das Freizeitparadies (Direction: Hartmut Ostrowsky )

Web links

Commons : Valentin Kataev  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Valentin Petrowitsch Katajew in the catalog of the German National Library
• Valentin Kataev in the Internet Movie Database (English)