Anatoly Ignatevich Pristavkin

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Anatoly Pristavkin

Anatoli Ignatjewitsch Pristavkin ( Russian Анатолий Игнатьевич Приставкин , scientific transliteration Anatolij Ignat'evič Pristavkin ; born  October 17, 1931 in Lyubertsy ; † July 11, 2008 in Moscow ) was a Russian writer . From 1992 to 2001 he was chairman of the Russian President's pardon commission , and from 2001 until his death he was the presidential advisor on pardon issues.

Life

Youth and education

Pristavkin was born into a working class family. His mother died of tuberculosis in 1940 , and his father went to the front as an officer. Pristavkin grew up in various orphanages and children's institutions. He lived with hunger, street children's gangs, rubbish dumps and black markets.

At the age of 14 he ran away from an orphanage and then made his way as a worker in a canning factory and an assistant at an airport. He trained as an aircraft technician and worked as an electrician and radio operator. In 1959 he graduated from the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow and published his first short stories. He became a concrete worker on the Bratsk power plant construction site in Siberia , and wrote as a correspondent for the weekly newspaper Literaturnaja Gazeta . In the 1970s he went back to Moscow.

writer

Pristavkin published his first poems in newspapers immediately after the war. In 1959, the short story Aufschriften meine Contemporaneous was printed, followed by Das Land Lepija in 1960 , in 1964 the Taiga campfires and in 1967 the novel Golubka . In 1970 the military story Soldat i maltschik (Russian Солдат и мальчик , dt. The soldier and the boy ) was created. Since 1981 he has taught prose and literature as a professor at the Maxim Gorki Institute , where he became dean .

In 1982 he processed his traumatic childhood experiences in the Caucasus for the first time in the novel Sleeping a golden cloud , (Russian Ночевала тучка золотая , transliteration : Notschewala tutschka solotaja ). Because it contained forbidden historical truths, it could not be published until 1987 during perestroika in Russia. It became a bestseller, translated into all European languages ​​and filmed by Sulambek Mamilov under the title Nochevala tuchka zolotaya ... (Children of Storm) . The novel received a state award in 1988 and became compulsory reading in Russian schools.

In 1989 the novel Wir Kuckuckskinder followed (Russian Кукушата, или жалобная песнь для успокоения сердца , transliteration : Kukuschata, ili schalobnaja pesn dlja uspokojenija serdza ). In it Pristavkin described the life of orphaned children of victims of the Great Terror in the Stalin era. This book also became a bestseller. His short stories Ryazanka (1991) and Radiostanzija Tamara (1994) could not build on the previous successes.

Pristavkin had been a member of the Soviet Writers' Union since 1961, and in the late 1980s he became chairman of the Aprel faction ( April ), which campaigned for democracy and glasnost . He was the managing director of the Russian Writers' Union and a board member of the Russian PEN Center .

Opposition

Pristavkin was friends with the Germanist and dissident Lev Kopelev , and secretly wrote him letters in exile in Cologne . On November 4, 1989, he took part in the large-scale demonstration against the GDR regime on Berlin's Alexanderplatz .

In 1991 he supported the Latvian independence movement, stood on the barricades in Riga , appealed to the Soviet soldiers on regional television not to shoot civilians. He described his experiences in the volume Tichaja Baltija , published in Riga in 1992 . Latyšckij dnevnik (German. Silent Baltic States. Latvian diary ).

In 1995 and 1996 he traveled to Chechnya, witnessed attacks against civilians and criticized Russia's Chechnya policy in the media.

  1. ^ Detlef Henning: Forms of cultural autonomy in the Baltic states . // v. Pistohlkors, Weber (ed.): State unity and national diversity in the Baltic States. - Oldenbourg 2005, p. 47

Politician

In 1992 he was at the suggestion of human rights activist Sergei Kovalyov of Boris Yeltsin as Chairman of the Clemency Commission of the Russian president appointed. He filled the body, soon to be called the Pristavkin Commission , with proven dissidents, including the chansonnier Bulat Okudschawa and the writers Ales Adamowitsch and Lev Rasgon . The commission saved the lives of just under 1,200 prisoners sentenced to death under old Soviet law and mitigated disproportionately high prison sentences in over 57,000 cases.

In 1999, President Yeltsin confirmed the commutation of the last death sentences to imprisonment. In 2001 his successor Vladimir Putin dissolved the commission. Pristavkin became the presidential advisor on pardons and set up regional commissions in the provinces. In his book Dolina smertnoi teni (Russian Долина смертной тени , German I beg for execution ), he summarized his work in 2002 and sharply criticized the traditional Russian judicial system.

The literary and political importance of Pristawkins is hardly known in Germany. In a very decisive way, Pristavkin actually ensured with the then central grace commission that the death penalty was no longer carried out in Russia - the death penalty has still not been abolished there, although this was actually the prerequisite for the admission of Russia in the 1990s would have been to the Council of Europe.

However, President Putin's abolition of the Central Mercy Commission in 2001 did not discourage Pristavkin. In his inherently powerless new function as Putin's advisor on questions of grace, he has made a name for himself by winning numerous important personalities for the new regional grace commissions. He has won doctors, professors, writers, retired public prosecutors and others for this stressful work and in numerous seminars in various regions of Russia and Germany, which thanks to the support of the German Foundation for International Legal Cooperation (IRZ) and the Council of Europe have continued into the year 2008, familiarized with German and European constitutional standards. He was also interested in strengthening a new civil society in Russia.

However, this work is at risk. The regionalization of the grace commissions, which can only make recommendations, has not also led to a regionalization of the decision-making authority in questions of grace. The decisions will continue to be made by the Russian President, which was heavily criticized by Russian representatives at the last seminar in Kazan in June 2008. Due to his illness, Pristawkin could no longer attend this seminar.

Reception in Germany

Pristawkin was first relocated to the GDR . In 1975 my contemporary's notes appeared there , and in 1981 The Soldier and the Boy . Lew Kopelew introduced Pristawkin to West German publishers in 1988. A golden cloud slept was first printed in German in western Germany. A year later the novel was published in the GDR and appeared on the GDR stages as a play. Wir Kuckuckskinder and The Soldier and the Boy were printed in Berlin in 1990.

The cuckoo children were awarded the German Youth Book Prize in 1991 . In 1996 Pristawkin received a working grant for the Berliner Literaturwerkstatt and in 2001 a grant from the Prussian Sea Handling Foundation for a stay at the Literary Colloquium in Berlin . At Wannsee , he completed work on his book I beg for an execution .

In 2002 he was honored in Stuttgart with the Alexander Men Prize for cultural exchange between Russia and Germany.

Pristavkin was married with three children and four grandchildren.

Works

Web links

Commons : Anatoly Pristavkin  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Pristavkin, Anatoly Ignatjewitsch
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Анатолий Игнатьевич Приставкин (Russian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian writer
DATE OF BIRTH October 17, 1931
PLACE OF BIRTH Lyubertsy
DATE OF DEATH July 11, 2008
Place of death Moscow