Boris Schumatsky

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Boris Schumatsky ( Russian Борис Борисович Шумяцкий , scientific transliteration Boris Borisovič Šumjackij ; * 1965 in Moscow ) is a German-language writer , journalist and screenwriter .

Life

Boris Schumatsky's great-grandfather Boris Sakharovich Schumyatsky was the Soviet film minister in the mid-1930s. Schumatsky studied art history in Moscow and Leningrad and political science in Berlin. Since the beginning of the 1990s he has lived in Germany as a freelance author and publicist for German-language newspapers, and later also for radio and television.

In his first book Silvester bei Stalin (1999), Schumatsky traced the story of his family during the revolution of 1917, the Stalin terror and the Second World War . In the autobiographical radio feature class reunion with Marklena (2001) he talks about his school days in Moscow in the 1980s.

The essay book Der neue Untertan , published in 2016 . Populism, postmodernism, Putin deals with the phenomenon of “ Putin understanders ” in the course of the Russian annexation of Crimea and the xenophobic “concerned citizens” during the refugee crisis from 2015 onwards.

His novel The Defiant (2016) follows the life and love stories of four young Germans and Russians who move between Moscow, where real socialism is collapsing, and Berlin at the time of the fall of the wall. The action begins on the day of the 1991 August coup in Moscow.

Boris Schumatsky lives in Munich and Berlin.

Political commitment

After the end of the first Chechen War in 1996, Schumatsky worked with the aid organization Cap Anamur / German emergency doctors in Chechnya and Ingushetia . Until 2005 he was a member of the Eastern and Central Europe section of the Bundestag parliamentary group Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen and is now a member of the PEN Center for German-Speaking Authors Abroad and the Writers in Prison group .

reception

The Süddeutsche Zeitung called New Year's Eve with Stalin “a moving document at the interface of official and private interpretation of history.” The FAZ saw the book as a necessary contribution “to a Russian coming to terms with the past”.

The new subject was read by the NZZ as a call for “an open democracy ”, and while the world complained about “Putin bashing”, the taz said that Schumatsky's “language says exactly what he thinks the matter is: leftists, especially them , and many who now find a home in the current of the Pegidas and the AfD , do not want the open, democratic society ”.

The novel The defiant refers to the Frankfurter Rundschau as a picaresque novel , the Bayerische Rundfunk , however, was Schumatsky tell "means a picaresque story. No, rather it is reality that surpasses all fiction. Sometimes as grotesque, sometimes as tragedy. ” Die Zeit emphasizes the successful connection between the political and the literary and writes that“ Schumatsky's fast-paced, wild novel ”reads“ like a subtle commentary on our present ”:“ Anyone who gets involved with Schumatsky encounters on the abyss of our freedom. "

Works

Books
Contributions to the press, radio and film

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A fit of anger , taz April 1, 2016
  2. Sylvia Schütz: Murder in the projector. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , March 8, 2000 (PDF).
  3. Ralph Dutli : No water for the boss. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , August 10, 1999 (PDF).
  4. Ulrich M. Schmid : Ideologisches Allerlei. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , April 28, 2016.
  5. Sonja Margolina: Entrance into the self-inflicted minority. In: Die Welt , April 13, 2016.
  6. Jan Feddersen : A fit of anger. In: taz , April 1, 2016.
  7. Cornelia Geissler: Kisses on the barricades. In: Frankfurter Rundschau , August 12, 2016.
  8. Christine Hamel: "The Defiant" by Boris Schumatsky. ( Memento from August 18, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) In: Bayern 2 Buchkritik , August 17, 2016.
  9. Adam Soboczynski : Why does freedom flirt with dictatorship? In: Die Zeit , August 18, 2016.