Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Обмен by Yury Trifonov The Exchange (Trifonow) The exchange ( Russian Обмен Obmen ) is a story by the Soviet writer Yuri Trifonow , which appeared in 1969 in the December issue of the Moscow literary magazine Nowy Mir and in 1973 on p. 5–62 of the Langer Abschied collection , also in Moscow. The text belongs to Trifonov's urban prose - the Moscow novellas . Towards the end of the 1960s on the Moscow periphery: Viktor Georgievich Dmitrijew, called Vitja, wants to solve his housing problem. contents. action. In this satire on the annoying crampedness of the high-rise apartment buildings, the 37-year-old family man Vitja speculates with the death of his mother Xenia Feodorovna, who is suffering from stomach cancer, in the urgent solution to his housing problem. To be more precise: when the mother is discharged from the hospital terminally ill, Vitja's wife Lena first comes up with the idea of ​swapping an apartment. If a tenant willing to move in is found for the mother's apartment and the mother moves in with the son, then the family of four is entitled to larger living space. In realizing this idea, Lena sends her Vitja to the front and acts sparingly from the background. In all of this, Vitja, this hypocrite, has a sly behind the ears. The mother absolutely does not want to move, although she loves her teenage granddaughter Natascha and her son Vitja beyond measure. The obstacle is the wicked daughter-in-law. Xenia Feodorovna had previously been the senior librarian in a large Moscow academy library and, as a pensioner, had completed her knowledge of the English language by herself to pass the time, because she wanted to consume these entertaining crime novels in the original. Lena, who works as a professional translator of technical literature from English, laughed at the pronunciation of Xenia, who was learning English, and thus drew her anger. The office worker Vitja, who graduated from university as a technician years ago and gave up his dissertation, is completely unfamiliar with the procedure for swapping an apartment at the Moscow municipal housing administration. He turns to Tanja, mother of 11-year-old Alik. His 34- year-old former lover Tanja, now divorced, arranges a conversation with one of her work colleagues. This gentleman generously informs Vitja of the first necessary step when swapping an apartment. Tanja goes even further. The 34-year-old takes Vitja into her apartment after work and gives him money. Vitja, who after 14 years of marriage to Lena still thinks that Tanja would have been the better match, does not take advantage of the opportunity to have sex and quickly gets out of the dust with the money. Tanja is too thin for him. With his mother, who is staying in her daughter Lora's apartment, Mitja doesn't know how to bring the exchange of apartments up. Circumstances come to his aid. Lora wants to go on her annual expedition to Kunja with her husband, Felix. When Vitja suggests moving to the mother in this context, the patient refuses. A few days later, Xenia Feodorovna, who has such a longing for her granddaughter Natascha and does not want to stand in the way of her daughter Lora, agrees. At the first attempt, the bureaucratic hurdles in the Moscow municipal housing administration cannot be overcome. In the second attempt, this actually succeeds - lately well equipped with practically acquired bureaucratic knowledge. But the mother has since succumbed to her illness. Yuri Valentinovich Trifonov. Yuri Walentinowitsch Trifonow ( Russian Юрий Валентинович Трифонов , scientific transliteration Yuri Trifonov ; born August 28, 1925 in Moscow ; † March 28, 1981 ibid) was a Soviet writer in the Russian language and a leading representative of the so-called Soviet "urban prose movement" 1970s, inspired by the psychologically complex works of Chekhov and his American successors in the 20th century. One critic noted, "Trifonov's prose is a study of all of Soviet culture." contents. Trifonov grew up in the luxury district of Moscow's Arbat and lived his entire life in Moscow . After his father Valentin Trifonov became a victim of the Stalinist purges in 1937 , his family moved from the famous " house on the embankment " (opposite the Kremlin ) to a run-down communal apartment building. After serving as an air force helper in Moscow in 1941, he was evacuated to Tashkent , where he graduated from high school. 1942–1945 he worked as a locksmith, dispatcher and editor of the company newspaper of a Moscow aircraft equipment factory. Trifonow studied in 1944 as a distance student and from 1945 to 1949 directly at the Gorki Literature Institute under Konstantin Fedin , where he transferred to Heine and Johannes R. Becher . The big dimension (1947) was his first publication. His first novel, Die Studenten (1950), which was staged at the Yermolowa Theater in 1952 , won him the Stalin Prize III. Class one. Trifonov's subsequent works dealt with topics such as the moral ambiguity of the Soviet intelligentsia and the tragic fate of the Cossacks during the Russian civil war . In 1973 he published the historical novel Impatience , which describes the tragic story of the radical conspiratorial group of Narodowolts . This emerged as a split-off of the Narodomists in an intermediate phase between anarchist / nihilistic and moderately democratic underground movements and the Russian social democracy that emerged a little later . After the murder of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, it was crushed by the secret police. Trifonov's best works are his well-read “Moscow Novellas”: The Exchange ( Обмен , 1969), Interim Balance ( Предварительные итоги , 1970), The Long Farewell ( Долгое прощание , 1971), Another Life (1975) and Das House on the quayside ( Дом на набережной , 1976). The novel Zeit und Ort ( Время и место , 1981) and The Overturned House , a collection of 7 travelogues, were published posthumously. Critics consider this literature to be among the most sophisticated works of Soviet literature in terms of both artistic form and content, as well as aesthetically perfect. Trifonow died of a pulmonary embolism after a nephrectomy . He was married to the writer Olga Trifonowa (* 1938) in his third marriage since 1975 . Yury Trifonov. Yury Valentinovich Trifonov was a leading representative of the so-called Soviet "Urban Prose". He was considered a close contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981. 1. Childhood and family Trifonov was born in the luxurious apartments on the Arbat Street and, with a two-year interval in Tashkent, spent his whole life in Moscow. His father, Valentin Trifonov 1888–1938, was of Don Cossack descent. A Red Army veteran who commanded Cossacks in the Don during the civil war and later served as a Soviet official, he was arrested on 21/22 June 1937 and shot on 15 March 1938. He was rehabilitated on 3 November 1955. Trifonovs mother, Evgeniya Abramovna Lurie 1904–1975, an engineer and accountant, was of half Russian and of half Jewish descent. She spent eight years in a labour camp for not denouncing her husband. She was released in 1945, and returned to Moscow in 1946. Later in life, she worked in a school library, and wrote childrens books under the name E. Tayurina. She was rehabilitated in 1955. During their mothers imprisonment, Trifonov and his sister were raised by their maternal grandmother, Tatyana Aleksandrovna Lurie nee Slovatinskaya, 1879 - 1957, who had been a professional revolutionary and took part in the Russian Civil War. Trifonovs maternal grandfather, Abram Pavlovich Lurie 1875 - 1924, had been a member of an underground Menshevik group, and a cousin of Aaron Soltz. After the purge, Trifonovs family moved from the famous House on the Embankment just across the river from the Kremlin, into a kommunalka. At school, Trifonov edited class newspapers, composed poetry and wrote short stories. He spent 1941 and 1942 in Tashkent, capital of the Uzbek SSR. During the war, in 1942–45, he worked as a fitter in a factory in Moscow. In 1945, he edited the factorys newspaper. 3. Personal life Trifonov was married from 1949 to 1966 to the opera singer Nina Nelina born Nurenberg, the daughter of the well-known artist Amshey Nurenberg. The marriage was ended by Nelinas death. In 1951, they had a daughter, Olga Tangyan. Later, he was married to Anna Pavlovna Pastukhova, an editor. In 1975, he married for the third time, to Olga Romanovna Miroshnichenko b. 1938, a writer formerly married to the writer Georgy Beryozko. Their son Valentin was born in 1979. After Trifonovs death, Olga Miroshnichenko-Trifonova published her late husbands diaries and notebooks, going back to the writers schooldays and ending in 1980. She published her memoirs of Trifonov in 2003. 4. English translations A Short Stay in the Torture Chamber, from The Wild Beach and Other Stories, Ardis, 1992. Students: A Novel, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1953. Another Life and The House on the Embankment novel, Northwestern University Press, 1999. The Old Man, Northwestern University Press, 1999. Disappearance, Northwestern University Press, 1997. The Impatient Ones, Progress Publishers, 1978. The Long Goodbye: Three Novellas, Ardis, 1978. The Exchange and Other Stories, Northwestern University Press, 2002. My languages. I’m a British translator, born in Glasgow, raised in Leicester. As a literary translator, your strongest asset is your expert command of the language you write in, and for me that’s my first language, English. But I’m multilingual and multicultural, with many places I call home. I’m half Indian, a little bit Portuguese, with family in Quebec, France and Norway, but for various reasons (and because I love a challenge) I chose three other languages to study to a professional level: German, Russian and Arabic.