Interim balance (Trifonow)
Interim balance sheet ( Russian Предварителъные итоги Predwaritelnyje itogi ) is a story by the Soviet writer Yuri Trifonov , which appeared in the December issue of the Moscow literary magazine Nowy Mir in 1970 and in 1973 on pp. 63–126 in the Langer Abschied collection , also in Moscow. The text belongs to Trifonov's urban prose - the Moscow novellas .
Infested chest pain 48-year-old Muscovite poetry - translator Gennady Sergeyevich, "a man without ulterior motives," does not spare himself when he called to the reader in a tangled inventory of the minor circumstances of his marital crisis after 20 years of living together with Margarita Nikolayevna, Rita, to revealed in the smallest detail.
overview
The above-mentioned attribute “confused” first of all points to the occasional indistinguishability of the two locations Moscow and Tochir.
The first-person narrator Gennadi - in permanent financial need - packs his suitcase resignedly. Three egoists in the Moscow apartment are one too many. Rita and 17-year-old son Kirill, called Kirka, have the stronger nerves. In March Gennady travels to the Persian border to visit his Turkmen customer Mansur Geldievich in Tochir. Gennadi translates Mansur's huge poem “Goldbellchen” into Russian interlinearly and is to appear in Moscow and Minsk . After arriving in Turkmenistan, Gennady receives 25 rubles as nest egg from his friend Mansur. Yuri Trifonov offers the reader a happy ending. Gennady soon travels back to Moscow and is reconciled with his family there. Until then, the first-person narrator is spreading his marital crisis - as I said - during his flying visit to Central Asia.
When Gennadi arrives back in Moscow from the barely bearable hot south, people are still wearing their winter coats. What was it like in sunny Turkmenia? The 26-year-old nurse Valja, the foster daughter of a Turkmen couple, had treated Gennadi's hypertension. The young woman, divorced from her Ossetian husband, had fled to Gennadi's hut late in the evening from the staggers of the Tochir bachelors, turned off the light there as a precaution and lay down next to her patient with heart disease. Gennadi was allowed to touch Valja's shoulder. When he became aware of the woman's scent, it happened. A memory of Rita - twenty years ago - had initiated the return trip to Moscow.
Marital crisis
Twenty years ago Gennadi had left his first wife and child. Then he had taken the beautiful Rita out of the son of a homeopath. At that time Rita had still called her Gennadi Genochka.
Twenty years later, the couple failed to get a grip on the antics of their unwary son Kirill, despite their best efforts. For example, Gennadi sniffs in the son's diary. In it, Gennadi's sister Natascha scarecrow is scolded. That is why there is an argument between the father and the underage son. At the top of the mountain, the father hits his son in the face. Kirill escapes and stays out of the house overnight. The parents were worried that night because the militia informed them that the body of a 17-year-old boy had been found in Koptewo . Kirill returns safe and sound the next day.
The worries about the boy are not over yet. The lazy kid Kirill wants to study. At Rita's order, Gennadi has to arrange this. This is not an easy undertaking. After all, tutoring has to be arranged and paid for. Fortunately, the tutor named Hartwig, the son of a Greek woman and a Russified German, is friends with the secretary of the admissions committee at the university. Kirill counts the drudgery on the way to university entrance qualification as his sole merit. The parents really did everything. Gennadi becomes jealous of the 37-year-old, suntanned athlete Hartwig, because the tutor, who holds a nice position at the institute as a candidate for science, was able to submit to Rita almost effortlessly. Gennadi doesn't like the way Hartwig gets involved in family life. So the teacher asks the landlord for lines and threads, as if he wanted to put a dossier on him.
Hartwig even drove to the village of the housekeeper Anna Fedosejewna, called Nyura, and got two icons from a relative's hut . Nyura falls ill and has to go to the hospital. The household of the three dissolute people who remained behind is rotting. A certain Katerinkin, investigator at the local law enforcement agency, asked Gennadi for a discussion. Before the interview, the summoned person reflects on his past years in his mind. That goes as far as the memory of the volume of an encyclopedia that Gennadi "borrowed" from a convalescent home for over a year - apparently unnoticed. None of the presumptions of guilt are on the agenda. Katerinkin will eventually let Kirill to justice because the student a slide one of the icons Njuras sold for 120 rubles. Gennadi is under pressure to act; goes to the university as a supplicant. The father gets all the wrongdoings of the son rubbed under his nose. Again Hartwig bailed out the family. Hartwig's friend from the admissions committee has now been promoted to the rectorate of the university. Kirill gets away with a reprimand. He has to take Nyura the 120 rubles to the hospital.
reception
- Ralf Schröder registered in April 1982 that after his trip to Turkmenistan, i.e. after attempting to break out of his family entanglements, Gennady was falling back into the Moscow circle without any alternative. The first-person narrator recognizes his interim balance sheet, attempts at self-justification and self-accusations, as petty, pitiful hypocrisy and fraud.
literature
German-language editions
- Yuri Trifonow: Interim balance . German by Corinna and Gottfried Wojtek. Volk und Welt publishing house (Spectrum series, vol. 70), Berlin 1974
- Yuri Trifonov: Moscow Novellas. Interim balance. German by Corinna and Gottfried Wojtek. P. 315–385 in Juri Trifonow: Selected works. Volume 2 . Verlag Volk und Welt, Berlin 1983 (1st edition, edition used)
Secondary literature
- Ralf Schröder (Ed.): Juri Trifonow: Selected works. Volume 4. Verlag Volk und Welt, Berlin 1983 (1st edition)
Web links
- The text
- Entry at fantlab.ru (Russian)
Individual evidence
- ^ Schröder, Juri Trifonow: Selected works. Volume 4 , p. 401, last entry
- ↑ Russian ten stories, reference at fantlab.ru
- ↑ Russian Тохир
- ^ Schröder, Juri Trifonow: Selected works. Volume 4 , afterword, p. 386