Eichhörnchen (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews Eichhörnchen, by Anatolii Kim. Translated from the Russian [Belka] into German by Thomas Reschke. suhrkamp taschenbuch 1670. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1989. 294 pp. 16 D.M. The Soviet-Korean author Anatolii Kim (b. 1939) in his novel Belka [Squirrel], written in 1984, follows the unhappy life of four artists. These four characters become acquainted at the Moscow School of Fine Arts. The author describes how each of them allows himself to be led astray to a lifestyle that alienates him from the artistic work for which he had previously striven. "One of us went to his mother in the country and spent the rest of his life in the village, the second followed his wife to Australia and became a rich man, the third remained in Moscow —and was suddenly officially promoted" (p. 193). The fourth, Dmitrii Akutin, "after he had risen from the grave" (p. 193) succeeded only in living a second unmeaningful life. All four die a solitary or violent death. Kim begins the novel with the character of Innokentii Lupentin, who outlives the others, and tells the story of his friends. Innokentii, "a silent bureaucratic lump, an eternally careworn civil servant of minor rank" (p. 285), is of Korean ancestry. His parents were victims of the Korean War. The small child lay in the forest next to the corpse of his mother. A squirrel stared at him with lively, sparkling eyes and thereby gave the child the strength and determination to live. Later Innokentii discovers that he belongs to the oboroten, or as Thomas Reschke neatly translates it into German, the Wandungen [changelings], "whom people, not aware, call petit bourgeois" (p. 187). They are sometimes animal and sometimes human. In the same way that Innokentii is able to transform himself into a squirrel, he is able to, as the narrator, put himself in the place of his friends. We realize at the end that the four talented students fail to become true artists because of the conspiracy of the oboroten against them. "So large is the 114BOOK REVIEWS conspiracy of the animals, that it has covered our planet. At the present it is useless to think that we can defeat them, because our individual existence is fragmented. The animals, suspecting mischief from the human principles, were clever enough to organize themselves worldwide. ... I myself have participated in their grandiose congress in Honolulu" (pp. 227-228). It is only in the Epilog that the plot starts to be uncovered: the squirrel wanted with all his strength to "discover facts about the conspiracy . . . and could not understand, that the conspiracy was as much within himself as it was within all other humans" (p. 287). Although the novel ends with an epilog, the usual framework does not exist. This "Fairytale Novel," as the original Russian edition of Belka is subtitled , can be considered Anatolii Kim's most successful novel to date. It was published in 1984 in Moscow by Sovetskii pisatel' with a press run of one hundred thousand. Within a few days the bookstores were completely sold out. On the black market the novel attained a commercial value of a proud hundred rubles. Before the large West German publisher Suhrkamp introduced it into the market through an East German license, Reschke's translation was published in 1987 in East Berlin. It is Kim's third publication in Germany. In 1986 Suhrkamp brought out Kim's 1980 work Lotos [The lotus flower]. Two years later the German translation of his Solov'inoe ekho [Nightingale's echo], also written in 1980, followed. This work combines penetrating insights into several stages and levels of reality, in the way that a film can quickly blend and separate individual scenes. The story depicts the history of a German merchant , Otto Meissner, who shortly before World War I travels in the Russian Far East and falls in love with a girl of Korean descent. She elopes with him, marries him, and bears him children. Through the chaos Meissner is finally driven to suicide . The unique virtuosity of the author was shown as several critics deceived themselves into taking Kim's dexterously staged phantasmagoria as gospel truth and identified the author...