«Mein Teil ist, ganz in Asche aufzugehen»: Johann Peter Sinner (Petr Ivanovič Zinner, 1879–1935) russlanddeutscher Autor und Stalinopfer. Sein Werk und Schicksal

The dissertation is a biography of Russian professor, poet, and Stalin victim Johann Peter Sinner (Petr Ivanovič Zinner). Sinner was an ethnic German born 1879 in the Volga village Schilling (Sosnovka). He taught history, German linguistics and literature, and economics at the Tenishev School (where Russian authors Osip Mandelstam and Vladimir Nabakov studied) and the University of Saratov and St. Petersburg/Leningrad. Besides scientific publications, he authored poems and short stories, which were often critical of the Soviet regime, and which resulted in repeated arrests between 1923 and 1935. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the history and literature of the ethnic Germans in Russia, a brief outline of Sinner\u27s life listing several colleagues and friends (Vladimir Korolenko, Viktor Zhirmunskij, Maksim Gorki, Boris Pilnyak, etc.), and an overview of publications about Sinner published in Russia, Germany, and North and South America from the 1920s to the present. Chapters 2–5 present Sinner\u27s biography based on his publications, memoirs, archival evidence, and oral traditions. These chapters analyze his contact with illegal Social Revolutionary circles in Saratov during the 1890s, his participation in the early women\u27s movement, his attempts to stop Jewish pogroms in Ukraine, his interest in pedagogical reform for ethnic minorities, etc. In the Soviet period, he fears his own ethnic group is doomed to extinction as a result of assimilation, the regime\u27s mass executions, and other forms of terror. In the 1920s he is publicly defamed as a counterrevolutionary. After a 1930 arrest and sentencing for counterrevolutionary activities and espionage, he dies in the Gulag in 1935. Chapters 6 and 7 interpret several of Sinner\u27s short stories and poems, which express fears of his impending death and that of his ethnic group. Examples of his translations of works by Vasyl\u27 Stefanik, Shevchenko, and Nekrasov are presented. Parallels to Sinner\u27s poems in the works of Shevchenko, Pilnyak, Mandelstam, and J. R. R. Tolkien are also explored