“Hero” and “Enemy” in the Soviet-German Writer Andreas Saks’ Reviews of the Historical Works of Aspiring Authors (1960s)

One of the directions of the literary activities of Soviet-German writer Andreas Saks (1903 – 1983) was reviewing novice authors’ works and providing literary consultations for them. His unpublished reviews dating back to the 1960s of historical literary works written by novice writers of Astrakhan are used for the study of his identity and intellectual world of his creative personality. His reviews normally feature the “hero – enemy” binary opposition. Each of the binary concept and their interrelation are treated by Andreas Saks as an obvious regularity in a historical literary work, i.e. the diminishing of the defeated enemies of the Soviet state results in the diminishing of the winners themselves, the revolutionary and Civil War heroes as well as in downgrading their heroic deeds and the significance of their victory. In his mind, the enemies of the young Soviet state were strong, educated, experienced, well-armed, and committed to overthrow the Soviet power, thus making the victory over them by the Red Army and the people at large, led by Bolsheviks, still more valuable and significant. His treatment of the “hero” concept is combined with his conviction that the enemies of the Civil War deserve to be pardoned by the state, half a century after those events. The content of the “hero – enemy” binary opposition reflects Andreas Saks’ perception of destalinization of the political life in the USSR as well as the effect of changes undergoing in Soviet arts during the “thaw” period.