The literary and social position of the Soviet-German writer Andreas Saks on matters of church and religion (1930s – 1960s)

The Soviet-German writer Andreas Saks (1903–1983) is known as an atheist, an activist of anti-religious propaganda in the 1930s carried out in the Republic of the Volga Germans, and as an author satirizing the religious superstitions of people and the vices of clerics. Applying the biographical approach of intellectual history the author of the article reconstructs A. Sack’s literary and social position on matters of church and religion. As sources for that the author uses Sack’s anti-religious humorous stories as well as his unpublished reviews of the works by Astrakhan novice writers where he expresses his views on the church, clerics and religiosity. There is a conclusion in the article that in those anti-religious works Andreas Saks remained tactful and delicate as he derided the religious superstitions of individual people, mostly, from an older generation who were baptized before the October revolution of 1917. Theomachism and the insulting the people’s religious feelings are not found in his works. It may reflect the Soviet Germans’ “cultural resistance” to the antireligious and anti-clerical campaigns waged by the communist authorities, to the closures of churches and repressions against the clerics in the 1930s. On the other hand, that reflects the writer’s understanding of man’s religiosity as “a complex existential issue” and his realization of big difficulties in “an ideological fight” against church and religion.

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