Eduard Kochergin

Gebundenes Buch

Christened with Crosses

Beschreibung

While the mothers in Siberia wait for their soldier sons to return from the war in the west in 1945, the eight-year-old Eduard secretly jumps on board the trains heading in the opposite direction, heading west, towards Leningrad. Placed in a Siberian orphanage as a child because his parents were arrested as public enemies, there is only one thing he wants: to go back home to Leningrad and to find his mother again. It is not only his desperate courage and his youthful agility that ensure his survival, it is also his artistic talent. With his agile fingers the boy is able to bend wire in the shape of profiles of Lenin and Stalin, as if in silhouette. He uses them to cheer up the invalid war veterans on the train stations returning from the front, who then give him a piece of bread, a bowl of soup and who, in a spirit of comradeship, warn him of the railway police and the secret service henchmen wanting to send the runaway back to the orphanage.Eduard spends more than six years on the run, experiencing close encounters with post-war Russia where life and fate have become synonyms. He encounters other stowaways, professional beggars, soldiers returning from the war and wartime profiteers, the mothers of soldiers and war invalids, Chinese from the Ural, Cossacks dealing in hashish, Bashkir Estonians, Russian penal colony escapees and, time and again, orphanage directors. In order to survive the winter he often registered himself voluntarily in the next orphanage, each one always a little closer to the West, running away again before the servants of the Stalinist state are able to send him back to Siberia.The memoirs of an old man who, as a boy, learnt to find his way between extortionate state control and marauding banditry, the two poles that characterize Russia to this day. A story about the awakening of artistic talent under highly unusual Russian circumstances.

Autor

Born in 1937, at the height of Stalin's repression, Eduard Kochergin was separated from his parents as a small child when they were arrested under false charges of being foreign spies. Sent to Siberia to an orphanage for children of "public enemies", some time later he managed to escape, though it took him six years to reach St. Petersburg. Upon his return to his native city, as if by a miracle, he found his mother, who had spent ten years in prison. Kochergin had survived his journey only because he had picked up some skills as a tattoo artist, and because he was also able to bend wire into the shape of Soviet leaders' profiles. It was only later, after studying at the academy of arts, that he was able to turn his talent for art into his profession. Kochergin went on to become an internationally acclaimed stage and set designer and is currently the head of stage design at the Tovstonogov Bolshoi Drama Theatre in St. Petersburg.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: GLAGOSLAV PUBLICATIONS B.V.
• Seitenzahl: 228
• Erscheinungstermin: 25. Juli 2012
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 209mm x 132mm x 16mm
• Gewicht: 341g
• ISBN-13: 9781909156142
• ISBN-10: 1909156140
• Artikelnr.: 36394489