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The 'Buffalo Sacrament' and Other Ways of Engaging with Evil in 1960s-1980s Prose

Thu, November 20, 3:00 to 4:45pm EST (3:00 to 4:45pm EST), -

Abstract

From 1952, Heinrich Böll's works were regularly published in large editions in the USSR. The most popular were Billiard at Half-Past Nine (1961, 1965 editions with a total of almost 300,000 copies) and The Clown (300,000 copies). According to various surveys of varying degrees of representativeness (including samizdat), Böll remained at the top of the list of translated Western authors, competing with Hemingway and Remarque, that is, with authors who wrote about a hero who had gone through the war and evaluated the war experience negatively. At the same time, Böll must be seen as a key author in a different sense: an author through whom the Soviet reader could learn about West Germany's postwar reflection on one's own inclusion in a repressive society ("Buffalo Sacrament"). The paper examines the rezeption of images that in Billiard at Half-Past Nine refer to communion with evil in the prose of Moscow authors who wrote on these themes (Grossman, Shalamov, Okudzhava, etc.).

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