Friedrich gorenstein biography

He was shot in after trying to escape. He later regained his original name. His mother was the director of a home for juvenile offenders in Berdichev, Ukraine. During the Nazi invasion ofhe and his mother were evacuated to Orenburg in the Urals. His mother died of tuberculosis in in Orenburg. Friedrich was placed in an orphanage. After the war, he was raised by his aunts, Zloty and Rachel, in Berdichev.

He studied mining in Dnipropetrovsk in the s and worked as a miner and mining engineer in the Ural Mountains and Ukraine. Infollowing his participation in the samizdat literary almanac Metropol, he was forced to leave the Soviet Union and thereafter lived in West Berlin, supporting himself from books published in German and French as well as from a German victims' pension.

Gorenstein was "rediscovered" in post-communist Russia and even became a literary celebrity after the publication of three volumes of his selected works in Moscow in the early s. Not only his contentious political views but also his iconoclastic literary tastes, which he flaunted in articles and interviews, contributed to his alienation from the mainstream of Russian cultural life.

Yet despite his marginality — or perhaps because of it — Gorenstein always felt himself part and parcel of the great Russian literary tradition.

Friedrich gorenstein biography: Friedrich Gorenstein was a Ukrainian

His attitude to that tradition is different from that of his celebrated Russian-Jewish literary precursors, Isaac Babel and Vasily Grossman. Whereas Babel tried to have his Soviet cake and eat it, too, by inscribing himself into the new Soviet ideological and stylistic idiom and preserving his autonomy as a Jewish artist — a delicate position which sometimes led him to ambiguity if not friedrich gorenstein biography — Gorenstein was always a staunch opponent of all forms of totalitarianism and antisemitism.

Like Babel, he was attuned to the nuances of Russian-Jewish idiom, but he was also able to elevate this "Jewspeak" from the level of melodramatic ethnography to the philosophical heights of classic Russian literary discourse. He was less reverential toward the grand narrative of Russian literature than Grossman, whose magisterial novel "Life and Fate" was a successful 20th-century recreation of Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace.

Yet like his great predecessors, Gorenstein wrestled with the big questions of Russian literature: the nature of evil, the destiny of Russia and its people, the alienation of the "little man" from the society. His closest literary precursor was Anton Chekhov, who also tended toward the parochial and ordinary. It may be that Gorenstein's significance as a writer and a thinker will become evident gradually, as his self-imposed image of a literary provocateur and intellectual anarchist fades and more of his works filter into readers' consciousness.

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 science fiction film Solarisdirected by Andrei Tarkovsky. In 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 inworking there as a writer until his death in In he was a member of the jury at the 19th Moscow International Film Festival. Gorenstein's themes reflect the repressive political life he witnessed in Communist Russia. He expressed his belief in a united, peaceful nation with conformity and without totalitarianism and anti-Semitism.

Friedrich gorenstein biography: Biography. Gorenstein was born

Other works move away from existentialism and incorporate religious themes, particularly Judaism. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history.

Friedrich gorenstein biography: The name Friedrich Gorenstein, the Kiev-born

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