Шампанское с желчью

by Friedrich Gorenstein, Фридрих Горенштейн

Фридрих Горенштейн (1932-2002) - русский писатель и сценарист, автор романов "Искупление", "Псалом", "Место", множества повестей и рассказов; по его сценариям поставлено пять фильмов, в том числе таких, как "Раба любви" и "Комедия ошибок".

В сборник "Шампанское с желчью" вошли затерянные в периодике рассказы и повести писателя, а также пронзительный и светлый роман о любви "Чок-Чок".

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

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]

“For I perceive that thou art in the gall of bitterness, and in the bond of iniquity.” Acts 8:23
Champagne and Gall is an anthology of the previously uncollected short stories and a novelette. All the tales are darkly satirical and psychologically acute. They are as sparkling as champagne and as bitter as gall…
The story Heap portrays community not just as a faceless herd but as a shapeless heap. A Fly Before a Drop of Tea is a peculiar case of a mental disorder and the title tale is an acrid depiction of the race relations in the Soviet Union.
The novel Chock-Chock – the name of a squirrel from a fairy tale and a nickname of a little girl – is a wicked comedy of gender relations tracing protagonist’s life from his childhood to his death.
From his first sexual experience:

Piquant confusion of feelings, a desire to live and a wish to die, an affect of bliss and heartache of ennui – all the emotions of a victim when a predator rips its throat out – he had undergone all of these before he died as an innocent lamb and then rose from the dead as a lewd goat.

To his habitual day-to-day unhappiness: “A little bit of love, a little bit more of pathology and a lot of boredom…”
That’s life.