Место

by Friedrich Gorenstein, Фридрих Горенштейн

Фридрих Горенштейн эмигрировал в конце 70-х, после выпуска своевольного «Метрополя», где была опубликована одна из его повестей – самый крупный, кстати, текст в альманахе. Вот уже два десятилетия он живет на Западе, но его тексты насыщены самыми актуальными – потому что непреходящими – проблемами нашей общей российской действительности. Взгляд писателя на эту проблематику не узко социален, а метафизичен – он пишет совсем иначе, чем «шестидесятники». Кажется иногда, что его свобода – это свобода дыхания в разреженном пространстве, там, где не всякому хватит воздуха. Или смелости: прямо называть и обсуждать вещи, о которых говорить трудно – или вообще не принято. Табу. Табу – о евреях. Дважды табу – еврей о России. Трижды – еврей, о России, о православии. Горенштейн позволил себе нарушить все три табу, за что был неоднократно обвиняем и в русофобии, и в кощунстве, и чуть ли не в антисемитизме.

848 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Friedrich Naumovich Gorenstein (Russian: Фридрих Наумович Горенштейн), or Fridrikh Gorenshtein (1932–2002) was a Russian author and screenwriter. His works primarily deal with Stalinism, anti-Semitism, and the philosophical-religious view of a peaceful coexistence between Jews and Christians.
Gorenstein was born in 1932 to Jewish intellectuals in an orphanage. His father, a political economist, died under Stalinist anti-Semitic cleansings, maintained by the intelligence State Political Directorate (GPU). He was arrested and exiled to a gulag, where he was shot down in 1935 after trying to escape. His mother, an educator, died of tuberculosis in 1943 in a hospital in Orenburg. After her death, Gorenstein was raised by relatives in Ukraine who brought him with them to the Caucasus during the war.
Following World War II, Gorenstein struggled as an unskilled worker, until Nikita Krushchev's De-Stalinization allowed him to return to Kiev. He studied mining in Dnipropetrovsk in the 1950s and worked as a miner and mining engineer in the Ural Mountains and Ukraine.
Gorenstein moved to Moscow in 1962 to complete his scenarist course at the State Film University. He began writing screenplays to support himself. Most of his adaptions were censored, but he managed to finish his works, including writing the script for the 1972 science fiction film Solaris, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. He also wrote books, but none were published except "Дом с башенкой" (The House with the Tower) (1964).
In 1977 Gorenstein released his works through foreign emigration presses to bypass censorship. That and his membership in the forbidden writers union and Almanach Metropol by Vasily Aksyonov got him in trouble with the Soviet government. He received a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service and emigrated to Berlin in 1979, working there as a writer until his death in 2002. His novel Place was nominated for the 1992 Russian Booker Prize.
In 1995 he was a member of the jury at the 19th Moscow International Film Festival.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Place is one of the most powerful and epical Russian novels of the second half of the last century.
There are so many places in this world: place in life, place in the sun, place of concealment, home place…
The protagonist of The Place all his life was looking for his place and couldn’t find any.

Every time, when the spring came, now already three years in a row, I’ve got a severe heartache expecting eviction…

The hero always was someplace and never in a place he could call his own.
There is no place like home and without home there is no place.

[tomsyak · Rating 3 out of 5]

Очень хорошо, но нельзя впихнуть невпихуемое - этот мега-роман мог быть стать несколькими отличными повестями.

[просто · Rating 3 out of 5]

Насколько понравилась первая часть - настолько не понравились три последующие. 5, 2, 2, 2. Мытарства Гоши в общежитии выписаны тонко и больно, а дальше всё было долго, путано, странно с периодическими взлетами.