Valery Jakowlewitsch Tarsis

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Valery Tarsis ( Russian Валерий Яковлевич Тарсис ; born 10 jul. / 23. September  1906 greg. In Kiev , † 3. March 1983 in Bern ) was a Soviet writer , translator and critics of the system .

Life and work

Tarsis was born in 1906 in Kiev to a Ukrainian mother and a father of Greek descent. He studied Western European literature at the University of Rostov-on-Don and graduated in 1929 with a dissertation on the poetry of the early Renaissance . In the same year he published a textbook on contemporary foreign writers ( Современные иностранные писатели ). From 1929 to 1937 he worked as an editor at the Moscow publishing house Khudozhestvennaya Literatura, which specializes in classics of world literature and contemporary foreign authors. Tarsis translated 34 books into Russian, a. a. from French , Greek , Italian and Ukrainian .

In 1935 his first story, Ночь в Харачое (Night in Kharachoi) appeared in the literary magazine Nowy Mir . In 1940 he became a member of the Writers' Union of the USSR . During the Second World War , Tarshish was a war correspondent . He was badly wounded during the Battle of Stalingrad . At the hospital he met his future wife, the Latvian Rosa Yakovlevna Alksnis. In 1944 he became a member of the CPSU . After trying to publish his novel Флорентийская лилия (Florentine Lily) in Italy , he was expelled from the CPSU in 1960.

His satires Сказание о синей мухе (The Blue Fly) and Красное и черное (Red and Black) appeared in Great Britain in 1962 and in the USA in 1963, as well as in the Frankfurt Possev-Verlag of the Russian-exile association NTS - Association of Russian Solidarists . In Сказание о синей мухе a philosophy professor kills a blowfly and then ponders about human existence - why he can't kill people who bother him. It begins his metamorphosis into the blue bow tie that gives it its name, “that is, into a nonconformist, intellectual, into an uncomfortable mind”. Because of this Tamizdat publication, Tarsis was forcibly admitted to Moscow Psychiatric Clinic No. 1 (Кащенко) on August 23, 1962 and was not released until February 1963. He processed this in his autobiographical novel Палата № 7 (Station 7), the title of which alludes to Chekhov's story Sick Room No. 6 (1892). In Palata No. 7 , the patients are healthy, but the doctors turn out to be crazy jailers and informers. Smuggled out of the country and published in Tamizdat in 1965, the novel drew international attention to the abuse of psychiatry in the USSR .

In 1964 Tarsis was excluded from the Soviet Writers' Union. In 1966 he was given permission to read at some western universities. While Tarsis was abroad, the Supreme Soviet revoked his citizenship , making a return to the USSR impossible. The KGB then continued its measures to discredit Tarsis abroad as "mentally ill". Tarsis, in turn, presented it as his main literary task to fight against communism and described life in the Soviet Union as the mere "existence of animals".

In the Federal Republic of Germany , many of his (previously unpublished) writings were published by Possev-Verlag as collected works in Russian, including the novels Прекрасное и его тень (The Beauty and Her Shadow), Комбинат кос каслажевений and Наслажедений (Not far from Moscow), the story Седая юность ( Gray- haired Youth), the poetry collections Танго перед закрытием (Tango before closing) and Сомневаюсь во всем ( Doubts about everything) and the poem Адсем Адс .

Tarsis settled in Switzerland . From 1970 he worked there at a research institute in Bern and married the translator Hanni Dormann. On March 3, 1983, he died of a heart attack.

Works (selection)

  • "Ночь в Харачое", in: Nowy Mir , No. 5 (1935)
  • Сказание о синей мухе (1963)
    • The blue fly . Munich: Hanser, 1965, translated by Josef Hahn .
  • Палата № 7 (1966)
    • Message from the madhouse . Frankfurt am Main: Possev-Verlag, 1965, translated by Elimar Schubbe .
  • Russia and the Russians , Lucerne and Frankfurt am Main: Bucher Verlag, 1967.

literature

  • Margarita Khazova, “В. Тарсис и В. Максимов о судьбе человека в тоталитарном государстве ( "Палата № 7" - "Семь дней творения") ", in: Вестник КГУ им. Н.А. Некрасова . Научно-методический электронный журнал , Volume 21, No. 2 (2015) pp. 92–96 ( PDF ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Valery Tarsis Is Dead; Soviet Emigre Novelist (March 4, 1983) at nytimes.com, accessed August 29, 2015.
  2. ↑ a b c d Валерий Яковлевич Тарсис (1906-1983) at: belousenko.com, accessed August 29, 2015 (Russian).
  3. ^ A b Victor Terras (Ed.), Handbook of Russian Literature , New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985 ISBN 978-0300048681 pp. 464-465.
  4. ↑ a b c d e Документы свидетельствуют: Смотрели за каждым ... "ПАЛАТА No 7" , in: "Вопросы литературы" No. 2 (1996), accessed in Russian ).
  5. ↑ Тарсис Валерий Яковлевич at: antology.igrunov.ru, accessed on August 29, 2015 (Russian).
  6. ^ Roman Braun, Im Bild der Blaue Fliege (June 25, 1965) at: zeit.de, accessed on August 29, 2015.
  7. ↑ a b Robert van Voren, Cold War in Psychiatry: Human Factors, Secret Actors , Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2010 ISBN 978-90-420-3046-6 S. 140th
  8. ^ Rosalind Marsh, Soviet fiction since Stalin: science, politics and literature , London: Croom Helm, 1986 ISBN 0-7099-1776-7 p. 208.
  9. ↑ "Указ Президиума Верховного Совета СССР" О лишении гражданства СССР Тарсиса В. Я. » от 19 февраля 1966 года “[Ukas of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR“ On the withdrawal of the citizenship of the USSR by V. J. Tarsis ”from February 19, 1966], in: Ведомости Верховного Совета , February 23, Совета 1966, Art. 135, p. 125.
  10. ↑ Larry Meysenburg, “Tarsis Interprets New Russian Revolt”, in: The Allegheny Campus (May 13, 1966) p. 1; as a PDF file at: dspace.allegheny.edu, accessed on August 30, 2015 (English).
  11. ↑ Advertisement from Possev Verlag in: Посев 39 (23 September 1966), Собрание сочинений В. Я. Тарсиса (PDF file) at: rucont.ru, accessed on August 29, 2015 (Russian).
personal data
SURNAME Tarsis, Valerij Jakowlewitsch
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Та́рсис, Вале́рий Я́ковлевич (Russian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Soviet writer, translator and system critic
DATE OF BIRTH September 23, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Kiev
DATE OF DEATH March 3, 1983
Place of death Bern