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Lädt ... Aufzeichnungen eines Jägers (1852)von Ivan Turgenev
Russian Literature (19) » 5 mehr Lädt ...
Melde dich bei LibraryThing an um herauszufinden, ob du dieses Buch mögen würdest. Keine aktuelle Diskussion zu diesem Buch. (I haven't read the whole book, just this story which is reprinted in Saunders' book) The second story that George Saunders explores in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (see my review) is ‘The Singers’ by Ivan Turgenev (1818-1893). It comes from an 1852 collection of short stories called A Sportsman’s Sketches also translated as A Sportsman’s Notebook, The Hunting Sketches and Sketches from a Hunter’s Album. According to Wikipedia, this collection was a milestone of Russian realism, and it made Turgenev’s name. When I read Fathers and Sons, I was very taken by the characterisation of the young idealist Bazarov and in the comments below my review you can see where I admired the way Turgenev uses dialogue to differentiate his characters. There is not much dialogue, however, in this most engaging short story about a singing competition in a remote rural pub. Instead, it is Turgenev’s powers of description which impel the reader on. Plunging into the story reproduced in Saunders’ book without an introduction or any context, it’s not immediately obvious who the unnamed narrator is and why he is roaming about in the vicinity of Kolotovka, a small and cheerless village. But within a couple of pages we have learned that he’s an observant outsider, (which is apparently an element of the Russian realist tradition where the narrator is usually an uncommitted observer of the people he meets.) However, he passes by regularly enough to be acquainted with some of the drinkers at the Cosy Corner pub, and to make some judgements about them. He’s a gentleman well-educated enough to have ‘readers’ and even if we didn’t have Wikipedia, we could guess that he’s either a journalist or that he’s writing a newsy letter for educated people at home, who’re going to read it en famille as people did in those days. He explains his reasons for being in such a dismal place by saying that he’s a sportsman who goes everywhere. Since he’s pursuing this sport alone out in the middle of nowhere this is enough to identify him as a hunter, (though some of us would dispute that shooting animals is any kind of sport.) Outside, the narrator witnesses an excited exchange between two patrons of the pub. Booby exhorts Blinker to hurry up because everyone is waiting: there is Yashka the Turk, the Wild Gentleman, and the contractor from Zhizdra. (The contractor is not named, not even with an intriguing nickname although Russians are past-masters at giving nicknames.) The excitement is because Yashka and the contractor have made a bet: they’ve wagered a quart of beer to see who wins. So in this remote rural outpost, with nothing to commend it, an extraordinary cultural moment takes place—a singing competition between the local hero and a challenger from a nearby village. To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/06/15/the-singers-by-ivan-turgenev-translated-by-d... On the face of it this seems a very modest, unassuming collection of short stories, most of them little more than sketches or anecdotes, narrated by a gentleman who has inherited his grandfather's estate in the Russian countryside and goes there to shoot for a few weeks of the year. But it's considered to be one of the most politically influential texts in 19th century Russian literature. The reason for that seems to lie in the way Turgenev's sportsman-narrator engages with the country people he meets and tries to discover their stories and the way they live. Naturally, they all turn out to be complex human individuals, each with a unique background and personal characteristics, and highly-specific relationships, problems, hopes and dreams. The serfs stubbornly refuse to dissolve into the romantic notion of "Russian peasant" (spirituality, resignation, stubbornness, tradition); the landowners equally fail to fall into any stereotypical notions we might have of gentlemanly or aristocratic attitudes. Moreover, it often turns out that the serf characters have had their lives messed up in multiple ways by the thoughtless and arbitrary behaviour of their owners. The narrator never explicitly criticises this behaviour, but he notes its effects, and he leaves us to draw our own conclusions about whether that sort of thing is acceptable in a modern European country in the middle of the progressive nineteenth century. The narrator is always described as a sportsman, but shooting birds doesn't enter much into the stories. The usual pattern is that he goes to a particular place in order to shoot, there's a lyrical description of the landscape, and then something happens to prevent him from getting to grips with the birds, and he meets someone who turns out to have an interesting story. More often than not, something else then happens to prevent that person from quite getting to the end of the story, so we are left dangling slightly, and have to work things out for ourselves a little. A couple of times we get someone who appears as a minor character in one story and is then fully developed in their own right in the next, but apart from that there is no overall development between the stories. Oddly enough, Turgenev's technique reminded me very strongly of Mary Russell Mitford, a writer from a rather different background, but with the same kind of intelligent interest in how rural life works and what problems country people have to deal with. And the same sort of mix of lyrical-but-precise scenic description and realistic observation of human behaviour. Lovely, compassionate and very compelling writing in both cases. The 2020 Ecco edition of the Hepburn translation (originally published by Everyman) comes with an extra introduction by Pakistani-American writer Daniyal Mueenuddin, who talks about how relevant he still finds Turgenev's stories to the semi-feudal agricultural society he grew up in. keine Rezensionen | Rezension hinzufügen
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"Der russische Schriftsteller Iwan Turgenjew (1818-1883), der zu einem der bedeutendsten Vertreter des russischen Realismus gez hlt wird, schenkte in seinem Werk "Aufzeichnungen eines J gers" der ungerechten Lage einfacher Bauern in der russischen Gesellschaft besondere literarische Aufmerksamkeit. Seine unkomplizierte und nat rliche Beschreibung des einfachen Menschen und der Natur stellte einen ganz neuen Schritt in der russischen Literatur dar. Die Aufzeichnungen handeln nicht etwa direkt von der J gerei, sondern von russischen Bauern und der russischen Landschaft, die liebevoll und liebenswert dargestellt wurden. Als die Erz hlungen 1852 als Buch erschienen, machten sie Turgenjew zu einem der beliebtesten und ber hmtesten Schriftsteller Russlands und Europas." Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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Google Books — Lädt ... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)891.733Literature Literature of other languages Literature of east Indo-European and Celtic languages Russian and East Slavic languages Russian fiction 1800–1917Klassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt:
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