|  Autumn
Thoughts Under Ruins and Snow: An Experiment in Ethnic Anthology.
Two Centuries of German-Russian Poetry, Short Stories, and Essays
By Samuel D. Sinner
Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, North Dakota State University
Libraries, Fargo, ND, 2003, 328 pages, softcover.
 The
Germans from Russia Heritage Collection is pleased to announce publication
of this important anthology by Dr. Samuel D. Sinner.
This compelling anthology presents for the first time in English
translation a wealth of captivating works by ethnic-German writers
of Russia and the Soviet Union. Many of the authors whose dramatic
works are found between these covers led creative literary lives
and were harassed by Soviet authorities obsessed with cultural uniformity
and thought control; some were executed, others vanished forever
in the Gulag. The brilliant and alluring voices of these men and
women authors have been silent for decades. Now they speak again,
offering an illuminating glimpse into their provocative lives caught
between two worlds.
The editor, Samuel Sinner, also presents his own striking literary
compositions, in which he intensifies the traditional themes of
the earlier translations, adding to them imaginative motifs from
Jewish mysticism, Scandinavian mythology, fantasy and philology,
and even quantum physics, in an overpowering attempt to understand
and explain the haunting nature and mystery of a universe where
individuals are capable of persecuting and liquidating their fellow
human beings.
 Supplementing the anthology are Sinner's forceful translations
of verses by the two greatest lyrical poets of twentieth-century
Russia, Anna Akhmatova and Stalin victim Osip Mandelstam, and the
short story writer and Stalin victim Boris Pilnyak. Taking into
account works which have influenced Russia's German-language authors,
Sinner offers an evocative selection of German poetry by Georg Trakl,
Rainer Maria Rilke, Nikolaus Lenau, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Eduard
Möike, and Hermann Hesse, including the latter's three poems
which Richard Strauss set to music in his "Vier letzte Lieder"
("Four Last Songs").
With marvelous skill, Sinner gathers the most widely disparate
literary traditions and themes and sews them together, creating
a uniquely eclectic and breathtaking unity, a vision at once epic,
tragic, and magical. Including translations of Russian, German,
and ethnic German-Russian works, this rich literary volume is a
truly German-Russian anthology in the fullest sense.
"Samuel Sinner's latest work, subtitled An Experiment
in Ethnic Anthology, is a work of striking and multifaceted
originality. A mother lode of imagination, of language, of history,
both personal and ethnic, this book intentionally blurs the distinctions
between literary genres, and besides the author's own works, reveals
to the American public for the first time a variety of powerful
Germans from Russia artists and writers."
-- Ronald Vossler, award-winning author and documentary film-script
writer
"With this important new anthology, German-Russian writers
long absent from the scene of world literature now take their
rightful place at center stage. Firmly grounded in the history
and steeped in the cultural traditions of the people whose ethnic
identity he shares, Dr. Samuel Sinner as editor, author, and translator
of "Autumn Thoughts" presents a skilled evocation of
a lost world. His judicious selection of representative works
by recognized authors among the Germans in Russia, a nation now
in diaspora, is set against the backdrop of ancient Germanic and
contemporary Russian works which offer the reader glimpses into
the literary milieu and political context which inspired these
creations. Thanks to Sinner's immense erudition and inerrant ear
for language, voices once stilled by Stalin speak again. More
than mere translations, the pieces in the collection read like
English language reincarnations of the spirit of this vanished
people. In his own original compositions included here, Sinner
reveals mystical depths and a muscular writing style that prove
him the apt inheritor of his relative and namesake, Johann Peter
Sinner--that prescient poet who, while recalling a German-Russian
golden age, perceived the sharp winter winds of persecution and
exile about to descend on his people."
-- Dr. Nancy Bernhardt Holland, former executive director of
the American
Historical Society of Germans from Russia
 The
anthology contains translations of poems and short stories by German-Russian
authors from the Black Sea villages of Pordenau and Annette, from
the Criema village Hohenberg, from Siberia, and from the Volga-German
villages and cities of Saratov, Engels, Schilling, Neu-Schilling,
Frank, Balzer, Kana, Katharinenstadt, etc. Among the uniquely talented
authors represented in the volume are the following: Peter Sinner,
Kamilla Sinner, David Kufeld, August von Neu, Franz Bach, Rudolph
Dirk, Jacob Wagner, Julie Hanke, Emilie Löffler, Friedrich
Reimer, Georg Dönhoff, Maria Görzen, Waldemar Weber, Reinhold
Frank, Dominik Hollmann, Eduard Stössel, Herbert Henke, Viktor
Schnittke, Nelly Wacker Robert Weber, and Reinhold Keil.
About the Author
A noted ethnic activist, author, and scholar, Samuel D. Sinner
grew up in California's Mojave Desert where he enjoyed a closeness
to nature reminiscent of that enjoyed by his Volga-German ancestors
in the mountains and steppes of Russia. From his father's stories,
as a child he became interested in German literature and history.
He is an avid researcher of such widely diverse topics as Jewish
mysticism, philosophy, theology, world folklore and mythology, ancient
history and languages, classical literature, ancient Jewish and
Christian apocryphal literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and quantum
physics.
He began his higher education in Oklahoma, later gaining undergraduate
degrees in California and Nebraska in Liberal Arts and in Modern
Languages and Literatures. He earned his M.A. in 1998 from the University
of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) in Modern Languages and Literatures, with
a History minor. His Ph.D. from UNL was also in Modern Languages
and Literatures, with a minor and internship in Museum Studies.
He has worked for several years as a librarian and archivist. At
UNL, he studied German philology and linguistics under the internationally
known German dialect expert Dr. Dieter Karch. In April 2002, Sinner
completed his 614-page German-language dissertation, Johann
Peter Sinner (Petr Ivanovich Zinner, 1879-1935) Russlanddeutscher
Autor und Stalinopfer: Sein Werk und Schicksal [Johann Peter Sinner
(Petr Ivanovich Zinner, 1879-1935) Russian-German Author and Stalin
Victim: His Literary Works and Fate].
Sinner's published books include the groundbreaking The
Open Wound: The Genocide of Ethnic-German Minorities in Russia and
the Soviet Union, 1914-1945 and Beyond, and Letters
from Hell: A Bibliography of Famine Letters published in Die
Welt-Post, 1920-1925; 1930-1934. His research on the Jewish
Holocaust has been published by Oxford University Press and will
soon be published by Berghahn Books (Oxford and New York). His translations
and essays on history and literature have been published in Holocaust
and Genocide Studies (Oxford), the Journal of Genocide
Research (New York and United Kingdom), Nebraska History,
Journal of the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia,
and Heritage Review. Forthcoming essays on German-Russian
literature and the Holocaust will appear in Russia and Germany.
Sinner is presently working on a number of writing projects related
to German-Russian history, literature, and folklore, including a
second anthology of German-Russian literature and a bibliography
on German-Russian women writers. He is also presently conducting
archival research projects on Lord Byron, Shakespeare, and H. G.
Wells.
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Review by Edna Boardman
Autumn Thoughts -- Under Ruins and Snow
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