Elfriede Jelinek (born 1946) is an Austrian novelist, playwright, poet and literary critic, winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature, winner of the Heinrich Böll Prize (Cologne, 1986), the Georg Büchner Prize (1998), the Heinrich Heine Prize (2002), the Czech Franz Kafka Prize (2004). One of the most provocative writers of the twentieth century.
Biography
Elfrida Jelinek was born on October 20, 1946 in the provincial Austrian city of Murzzuschlag, Styria, Austria. My childhood and youth were
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Elfriede Jelinek (born 1946) is an Austrian novelist, playwright, poet and literary critic, winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature, winner of the Heinrich Böll Prize (Cologne, 1986), the Georg Büchner Prize (1998), the Heinrich Heine Prize (2002), the Czech Franz Kafka Prize (2004). One of the most provocative writers of the twentieth century.
Biography
Elfrida Jelinek was born on October 20, 1946 in the provincial Austrian city of Murzzuschlag, Styria, Austria. My childhood and youth were spent in Vienna. Her mother, Olga Buchner, came from a wealthy family and worked as an accountant for a long time; her father, Friedrich Jelinek, was a chemist. Despite his ethnicity (Jelinek was half Czech and half Jewish), his father managed to escape persecution by the National Socialist regime, primarily because of his profession necessary for the war economy. In the 1950s Friedrich Jelinek became mentally ill and remained at home for a long time under the care of his family; he died in 1972 in a state of complete loss of mind.
From the moment of her father’s illness, Elfrida’s upbringing completely passed into the hands of her mother: Jelinek attends a Catholic kindergarten, and then a school at the monastery (her attitude to which the writer later expressed in the essay “Going to school is like dying”). In addition, the mother plans a musical career for her daughter: Elfrid takes piano, flute, guitar, violin and viola lessons at school. At the age of 13, Jelinek was admitted to the Vienna Conservatory, where she studied organ, piano, block flute and musical composition. At the same time, she graduates from public law school.
After passing the final exams, Jelinek has a nervous breakdown: she tries to study the history of art and theater at the University of Vienna for several semesters, but interrupts her studies in 1967 due to growing attacks of fear. She spends the whole year at home in complete isolation. It was at this time that Jelinek began writing. Her first poems (written in the manner of the Vienna group only in lowercase letters, which is quite important for the German language) are published first in various journals, and then her collection “Shadows of the Lisa” (Lisas Schatten) (1967). The following year, she finished her novel Bukolit, which remained unpublished until 1979. After the death of his father, Elfrida to a certain extent released from his fears and for a while joined the leftist movement of German students in the 1960s.
In 1971, Elfrida Jelinek took the organ exam at the conservatory. Her literary development during these years was influenced by Roland Barthes, to whom she dedicated her essay "Infinite Innocence" (die endlose unschuldigkeit). In 1972 Jelinek moved to live with his friend Geert Loschutz in Berlin, but a year later returned to Vienna, where he took an active part in the leftist movement, held a number of cultural events, and in 1974 married Gottfried Hungsberg, known for his music for films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, although he worked since the mid-1970s as a computer scientist in Munich. Jelinek regularly comes to live in Munich for her husband.
In 1975, Jelinek the writer comes to a turning point: the publication of her novel “Mistresses” (die liebhaberinnen), a Marxist-feminist parody of a patriotic novel, forces everyone to talk about a new dimension in German-language literature. In the early 1980s, her novel “Before the Closed Door” (Ausgesperrten) about dysfunctional teenagers from prosperous families, ending with a shocking scene of the mass murder of an entire family, an audio play is released on the novel, and then it is filmed by Paulus Manker.
1983 marked Elfrida Jelinek's first major scandal. On the theatrical stage there is a play Burgtheater (City Theater), which raises the theme of Austria’s attempts to suppress its National Socialist past and the head of the narrative is the figure of the then famous actress Paula Wessely, a former associate of Jelinek in the left movement. Jelinek's fame as a "whistleblower" of her own country is growing. In the same year, almost the main work of Elfrida Jelinek was published – the novel “The Pianist” (Die Klavierspielerin), in which both critics and readers immediately saw autobiographical meaning with a strong element of sublimation through the text in the basis.
The next “troublemaker” for Europe was her novel “Lust”, which immediately hit the bestseller lists and was written under the influence of the increased debate of feminists on the topic of pornography. The subsequent theatrical production of Jelinek’s play “Raststätte”, which provoked personal attacks on Jelinek by the Free Party of Austria (nationalist-conservative, populist) during the 1995 election in Austria, forced the writer to withdraw all her plays from theatrical scenes and impose a ban on further productions.
In his later works Jelinek departs from the feminist overtones of his literature and focuses on social criticism and criticism of Austria in particular for its failure to overcome its Nazi past (Die Kinder der Toten). It is during this period of creativity that the writer comes to worldwide recognition and fame. In 2001, her The Pianist was filmed in a very radical manner by Austrian director Michael Haneke with Isabel Huppert as Erika Kohut. The film was unanimously recognized as one of the most revolutionary in modern cinema and received three main prizes at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival (best director, best female role, best male role).
The apotheosis of Elfrida Jelinek’s work was her announcement in 2004 as the winner of the prestigious Nobel Prize in Literature for “musical polyphony in novels and dramas, which, with a linguistic passion peculiar to her, exposes the absurdity and the social clichés that compel the power.”
In Russia, Elfrida Jelinek for a long time was represented by a translation of only “Mistresses” and her most famous work – “Pianists”. However, immediately after awarding her the Nobel Prize, all her major works were translated into Russian, including several theater plays.