E-Book, Englisch, Band 4, 260 Seiten
Andreyev / Kharms / Pushkin Big Book of Best Short Stories - Specials - Russia
1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-3-96799-712-5
Verlag: Tacet Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Volume 4
E-Book, Englisch, Band 4, 260 Seiten
Reihe: Big Book of Best Short Stories Specials
ISBN: 978-3-96799-712-5
Verlag: Tacet Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Maxim Gorky was born in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, on March 28, 1868. He worked in many jobs during an impoverished and abusive childhood before finding fame and fortune as a writer. Initially a Bolshevik supporter, Gorky became a critic when Vladimir Lenin seized power. However, Gorky later served as a Soviet advocate and headed the Union of Soviet Writers. He died in Moscow on June 18, 1936. Leonid Andreyev, in full Leonid Nikolayevich Andreyev, Andreyev also spelled Andreev, (born August 21, 1871, Oryol, Russiadied September 12, 1919, Kuokkala, Finland), novelist whose best work has a place in Russian literature for its evocation of a mood of despair and absolute pessimism. Daniil Kharms (30 December 1905 2 February 1942) was an early Soviet-era avant-gardist and absurdist poet, writer and dramatist. Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was born on June 6, 1799 in Moscow. His first major work was the poem Ruslan and Ludmila. His political verses associated him with the Decembrist revolt, causing him to be banished. He worked on Boris Godunov and the novel in verse Eugene Onegin before Nicholas I allowed him to return to Moscow in 1826. Pushkin died at age 37 after being forced into a duel. Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev was born in Orel province, Russia, on 9 November, 1818. The Turgenevs were wealthy landowners, and when Ivan's father died his domineering and abusive mother oversaw the running of the farms and their serfs. After attending University of St. Petersburg, Turgenev moved to Germany and entered University of Berlin. There he concentrated on studies of history and the philosophy chiefly of Georg W. F. Hegel (1770-1831). After a time working as a civil servant he met French singer Pauline Viardot with whom he had a lifelong affair. He set up residence in France and it was there that he began writing in earnest. Travelling often between Europe and Russia, Turgenev was arrested and imprisoned for suspicious revolutionary activities.
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Leonid Andreyev was a Russian author and playwright. He was born on 1871 in the provincial town of Oryol. After his father’s death in 1889, he had to provide for his mother and younger siblings. While pursuing a career in law, Andreyev tried his hand as a police-court reporter and found this line of work much more engaging. In 1898 his first short story, a Dickensian Christmas story titled “Bargamot and Garaska,” was published in Kuryer newspaper, marking the beginning of his quick ascension to literary fame.
Less than ten years later, in 1907, he would be dubbed “Russia’s foremost man of letters – except for Tolstoy, of course.” His body of work includes two novels, five novellas, and a number of short stories and plays. Andreyev’s style defies easy labeling. During his lifetime he was ranked among realists, then symbolists, sometimes romanticists and even pulp fiction writers. Naturally inclined to the fantastic and grotesque, Andreyev went through a shift toward realism due to his longtime friendship with Maxim Gorky, Russia’s leading social-realist writer of the time. However, even his down-to-earth stories hint at another, darker reality which exists beyond everyday experiences.
Leonid Andreyev’s life was filled with extravagancies: he had five children with two wives; was considered a handsome and flamboyant man, and had over 100 colored photographs of himself. He also had his portraits made by Russia’s premier painters of the time. As he grew rich, he designed a grand villa for his family, which would eventually be built in Finland, due to Andreyev’s grave disappointment of the Russian Revolution in February 1917. In 1918, he moved to Finland to spend the rest of his life in poverty and misery, struggling to draw the world’s attention to the outcome of the Bolshevik revolution.
He died of a heart failure in 1919, most likely as a result of stress and anguish. His last major work was Satan’s Diary, an account of the Devil’s misfortunes in the treacherous world of humans. It is little wonder that Andreyev’s works were hardly known during the Soviet period. It was only in the late 1980s that Leonid Andreyev returned as a full value classic. His popularity has been growing steadily ever since.
Lazarus
I
When Lazarus rose from the grave, after three days and nights in the mysterious thraldom of death, and returned alive to his home, it was a long time before any one noticed the evil peculiarities in him that were later to make his very name terrible. His friends and relatives were jubilant that he had come back to life. They surrounded him with tenderness, they were lavish of their eager attentions, spending the greatest care upon his food and drink and the new garments they made for him. They clad him gorgeously in the glowing colours of hope and laughter, and when, arrayed like a bridegroom, he sat at table with them again, ate again, and drank again, they wept fondly and summoned the neighbours to look upon the man miraculously raised from the dead.
The neighbours came and were moved with joy. Strangers arrived from distant cities and villages to worship the miracle. They burst into stormy exclamations, and buzzed around the house of Mary and Martha, like so many bees.
That which was new in Lazarus' face and gestures they explained naturally, as the traces of his severe illness and the shock he had passed through. It was evident that the disintegration of the body had been halted by a miraculous power, but that the restoration had not been complete; that death had left upon his face and body the effect of an artist's unfinished sketch seen through a thin glass. On his temples, under his eyes, and in the hollow of his cheek lay a thick, earthy blue. His fingers were blue, too, and under his nails, which had grown long in the grave, the blue had turned livid. Here and there on his lips and body, the skin, blistered in the grave, had burst open and left reddish glistening cracks, as if covered with a thin, glassy slime. And he had grown exceedingly stout. His body was horribly bloated and suggested the fetid, damp smell of putrefaction. But the cadaverous, heavy odour that clung to his burial garments and, as it seemed, to his very body, soon wore off, and after some time the blue of his hands and face softened, and the reddish cracks of his skin smoothed out, though they never disappeared completely. Such was the aspect of Lazarus in his second life. It looked natural only to those who had seen him buried.
Not merely Lazarus' face, but his very character, it seemed, had changed; though it astonished no one and did not attract the attention it deserved. Before his death Lazarus had been cheerful and careless, a lover of laughter and harmless jest. It was because of his good humour, pleasant and equable, his freedom from meanness and gloom, that he had been so beloved by the Master. Now he was grave and silent; neither he himself jested nor did he laugh at the jests of others; and the words he spoke occasionally were simple, ordinary and necessary words—words as much devoid of sense and depth as are the sounds with which an animal expresses pain and pleasure, thirst and hunger. Such words a man may speak all his life and no one would ever know the sorrows and joys that dwelt within him.
Thus it was that Lazarus sat at the festive table among his friends and relatives—his face the face of a corpse over which, for three days, death had reigned in darkness, his garments gorgeous and festive, glittering with gold, bloody-red and purple; his mien heavy and silent. He was horribly changed and strange, but as yet undiscovered. In high waves, now mild, now stormy, the festivities went on around him. Warm glances of love caressed his face, still cold with the touch of the grave; and a friend's warm hand patted his bluish, heavy hand. And the music played joyous tunes mingled of the sounds of the tympanum, the pipe, the zither and the dulcimer. It was as if bees were humming, locusts buzzing and birds singing over the happy home of Mary and Martha.
II
Some one recklessly lifted the veil. By one breath of an uttered word he destroyed the serene charm, and uncovered the truth in its ugly nakedness. No thought was clearly defined in his mind, when his lips smilingly asked: "Why do you not tell us, Lazarus, what was There?" And all became silent, struck with the question. Only now it seemed to have occurred to them that for three days Lazarus had been dead; and they looked with curiosity, awaiting an answer. But Lazarus remained silent.
"You will not tell us?" wondered the inquirer. "Is it so terrible There?"
Again his thought lagged behind his words. Had it preceded them, he would not have asked the question, for, at the very moment he uttered it, his heart sank with a dread fear. All grew restless; they awaited the words of Lazarus anxiously. But he was silent, cold and severe, and his eyes were cast down. And now, as if for the first time, they perceived the horrible bluishness of his face and the loathsome corpulence of his body. On the table, as if forgotten by Lazarus, lay his livid blue hand, and all eyes were riveted upon it, as though expecting the desired answer from that hand. The musicians still played; then silence fell upon them, too, and the gay sounds died down, as scattered coals are extinguished by water. The pipe became mute, and the ringing tympanum and the murmuring dulcimer; and as though a chord were broken, as though song itself were dying, the zither echoed a trembling broken sound. Then all was quiet.
"You will not?" repeated the inquirer, unable to restrain his babbling tongue. Silence reigned, and the livid blue hand lay motionless. It moved slightly, and the company sighed with relief and raised their eyes. Lazarus, risen from the dead, was looking straight at them, embracing all with one glance, heavy and terrible.
This was on the third day after Lazarus had arisen from the grave. Since then many had felt that his gaze was the gaze of destruction, but neither those who had been forever crushed by it, nor those who in the prime of life (mysterious even as death) had found the will to resist his glance, could ever explain the terror that lay immovable in the depths of his black pupils. He looked quiet and simple. One felt that he had no intention to hide anything, but also no intention to tell anything. His look was cold, as of one who is entirely indifferent to all that is alive. And many careless people who pressed around him, and did not notice him, later learned with wonder and fear the name of this stout, quiet man who brushed against them with his sumptuous, gaudy garments. The sun did not stop shining when he looked, neither did the fountain cease playing, and the Eastern sky remained cloudless and blue as always; but the man who fell under his inscrutable gaze could no longer feel the sun, nor hear the fountain, nor recognise his native sky. Sometimes he would cry bitterly, sometimes tear his hair in despair and madly call for help; but generally it happened that the men thus stricken by the gaze of Lazarus began to fade away listlessly and quietly and pass into a slow death lasting many long years. They died in the presence of everybody, colourless, haggard and gloomy, like trees withering on rocky ground. Those who screamed in madness sometimes came back to life; but the others, never.
"So you will not tell us, Lazarus, what you saw There?" the inquirer repeated for the third time. But now his voice was dull, and a dead, grey weariness looked stupidly from out his eyes. The faces of...
