“Come Down, Moses ” ( English Go Down, Moses ) is a collection of seven interconnected short stories by William Faulkner , which is often called a novel (in particular, the author himself insisted on this genre definition in recent years). They are united around the Makkaslin family.
The entire book, as well as many works by Faulkner, takes place in the fictional district of Yoknapatof , Mississippi . Among the central themes of the work is slavery , which determines the choice of title. The book is named the same way as the famous Spiritual Go Down Moses on the theme of Exodus ; a direct parallel between Jewish slavery in Egypt in biblical history is drawn in the last story, where the character of Molly Besham reiterates that her great-grandson was "sold to the Pharaoh ."
Creation History
According to Faulkner, the structure of the book was to repeat the one that the author had already used in The Undefeated . However, it turned out to be quite difficult to combine the already written unrelated stories on Negro subjects into a single work. As a result, of those stories that Faulkner originally intended to use in the book, three were combined into one, one was excluded, and three more were added (two more stories were used in the work on them, one of which has not been published before). Faulkner worked on the book from May to December 1941 , and in March 1942 it was published by Random House , which added the subtitle “and Other Stories”. In further publications, the subtitle was withdrawn at the request of the author.
The book was published in Russian in translation by a team of authors - V. Golyshev , O. Soroki , E. Golysheva , N. Rakhmanova.
Stories
- It was
- Fire and the Hearth
- Black Harlequinade ( eng.Pantaloon in Black )
- The Old People
- The Bear
- Autumn in the Delta ( English Delta Autumn )
- Come down, Moses ( English Go Down, Moses )