The body itself
Vsevolod Garshin, signal and Other Stories , Password, Zaragoza, 2010.
Trad. Sara Gutierrez. Foreword by José-Carlos Mainer
One of the articles of Agustín de Foxa Jordi Amat just selected for Nostalgia, intimacy and aristocracy (Fundación Banco Santander, 2010, pp. 315-317), the Falange in Madrid visit in 1942 the house of the painter Ilya Repin Yemifovich and looks at some of his works. Perhaps even including the striking portrait was dedicated in 1884 to Repin Ukrainian writer Vsevolod Garshin (1855-1888), table with which José-Carlos Mainer now begins his presentation of that Ukrainian writer, almost unknown to us.
The nine stories that the publisher has met Zaragoza Password signal and Other Stories are extraordinarily good, a revelation. Were written between 1877 and 1887, a year before his young and troubled author committed suicide, and, apparently, are the best of literary production as scant as great a work that was appreciated and applauded from the beginning and admired by authors as demanding as Tolstoy or Turgenev (whose memory is dedicated to the story "Red Flower", one of the most disturbing and one of the most sharply over "bad but good", something very characteristic of Garshin). In fact, the tone of this writer exudes a pity that, as noted and explained Mainer, very reminiscent of the time that Tolstoy applied to their accounts, as always launches a sympathetic look-or at least understanding-of their homeless and vulnerable characters. Garshin
tone is more bitter, more torn, sometimes sordid and sinister, but get a strange mixture of pessimism and hope, suffering and consolation, and expresses a sadness to the world and aggression that does not shut down the instinctive joy in life. The stories are responsable por suicidas, enajenados, soldados agonizantes, prostitutas alcohólicas, ingenieros corruptos, artistas en crisis o ciudadanos vacíos y traumatizados inaugurando la modernidad. Pero lo que cabe destacar por encima de todo es la verdad con la que Garshin, que había luchado como voluntario en una de las guerras rusas contra los turcos, expresa su profundo antibelicismo, con una actitud ya no sólo pacifista sino antimilitarista. Baste como ejemplo una cita, tan sencilla como sublime, del cuento “El cobarde”: “Yo soy un joven tranquilo, de buen corazón, que hasta ahora sólo conocía sus libros, el aula, la familia y unas cuantas personas cercanas, que piensa en comenzar su propio trabajo dentro de uno o dos years, a labor of love and truth, I finally got used to observe the world objectively, used to put before me, I think that everywhere I can see the existing evil and therefore I avoid this evil, I see everything my peace building collapsed [...]. And no progress, no personal knowledge or the world, no spiritual freedom will give me the sad physical freedom, the freedom to dispose of the body itself. "
(Review published in the supplement 'Arts & Letters' of Heraldo de Aragón, n º 320 (December 30, 2010), pp. 4-5.)
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