Guest at the ilb 2002
Alan Cherchesov was born in 1962 as the son of an
Ossetian father and Russian mother in Ordshonikidse, North Ossetia,
today known as Wladikawkas in the Russian Federation where he
still lives.
After completing his A-levels he studied Slavonic studies in
his hometown; in 1985 he worked at the Institute for American Studies
at the Moscow Lomonossow University and did his PhD there on 'Mass
culture and literature'. Today Alan Cherchesov is not only
lecturer at the chair for world cultures of the North Ossetian
Wladikawkas University but also vice chancellor of the Institute for
Civilisation, founded by him, and managing Editor of the institute’s
academic almanac. He also works as translator from the American
literature. In 1990 Cherchesov’s first literary publication came
out , the stories 'And it will be Summer…', 'Nacked Island' and the
novella 'Rain is a Lonely Passant'. His first big success was
with his novel debut 'Requiem for a Living Person' (1994) a
multilayered panorama of memories. Here from different
perspectives, the story of a young orphan boy is told who settles in a
remote Caucasian farming village. The initial distrust of the
villagers slowly turns into open hatred. The lonely boy both
rejects and keeps their customs and traditions according to his own
will and so becomes a touch-stone for their daily culture.
Through his unconventional contact with the villagers he comes into
great wealth and yet at the same time he must remain a stranger like in
the beginning. After many years he leaves the village upon which
his figure, in the stories and memories of the villagers, becomes a
legend.
Cherchesov’s epos is a call for tolerance, for a creative reflection
of foreign and unknown things. With regard to his protagonist he
tells the story of a hero, who through his solitude wins an incredible
degree of freedom thanks to which he is sentenced to a magnificent
damming of his own existence and in the end becomes a prisoner of his
freedom. With this novel the author consciously doesn’t place
himself in the line of contemporary post-modernists, but instead looks
for the connection to the big Russian narrators like Dostoievski and
Tolstoy and also to Faulkner, Camus or García Marquez.
Cherchesov’s novel 'Wreath on the Grave of the Wind' (2000) was
awarded the 'Apollon-Grigorjew Literary Prize', one of the most highly
regarded prizes in Russia today. It tells the story of three nameless
outsiders who live on the shores of the cursed river near a Caucasian
canyon. They reluctantly give shelter to a stranger called Azamas - his
name being an allusion to the Ossetian myth. He forces them to
encounter their past and to take on their names again, thereby
accepting their individuality. Together they build houses and a bridge
which causes more and more people to settle down there and form a small
community. The author, who writes in Russian, achieves with his work a
complicated balancing act as he is on the one hand an Ossetian writer
who stands for Ossetian cultural identity and on the other hand he is
celebrated in the Moscow feuilletons as a Russian author.
© international literature festival berlin
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