Eduard Kochergin

Christened with Crosses (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Christened with Crosses is the unforgettable story of a young boy's dangerous, adventure-filled westbound journey along the railways of postwar Russia. Based on a true story of Kochergin's amazing life, this book depicts the awakening of artistic talent under highly unusual Russian circumstances. It is the memoir 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.

Orphaned when his parents are taken away as "enemies of the people", young Stepanych finds himself a ward of the Soviet state. He is miraculously rescued from a government orphanage in Nazi-besieged Leningrad, only to be placed in another children's institution in Siberia-a place of Dickensian attributes, where the leaders earn nicknames like Toad and Screwface, and where the young inmates are able to live their own lives only in secret, by night. Desperately longing for his native city and his Polish mother, Bronya, Stepanych flees the orphanage soon after the end of World War II.

The eight year old boy secretly jumps on board the trains heading west, towards Leningrad. 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.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Glagoslav Publications B.V.
• Erscheinungstermin: 25. Juli 2012
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781909156159
• Artikelnr.: 38370211

Autorenporträt

Edward Kochergin was born in 1937, at the height of Stalin's repression. He was separated from his parents as a small child. They were arrested under false charges of being foreign spies. The boy was sent to Siberia to an orphanage for children of "public enemies". Some time later he escaped from the orphanage. It took him 6 years to reach St. Petersburg. He returned to his native city and, as if by a miracle, found his mother who had spent ten years in prison. The boy had survived only because he could make tattoos and bend wire in the shape of Soviet leaders' profiles. It was only later, after studying at the academy of arts, that he was able to turn his artistic talent 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 Bolshoi Dramaticheski Teatr (Tovstonogov Theater) in St. Petersburg.