BABI YAR: A DOCUMENTARY NOVEL (Babii Iar: Roman-dokument)

Novel by Anatoli Kuznetsov, 1966

Anatoli Kuznetsov's Babi Yar (1966, republished in an expanded version in 1970), which the author described as a documentary in the form of a novel, offers significant insight into the experience of the Holocaust and World War II in the lands of the Soviet Union. Furthermore, the extraliterary context of this work's editing, censorship, and subsequent republication in an expanded edition outside the Soviet Union reveals much about further atrocities of the period that Soviet censorship had suppressed.

Babi Yar details life during World War II and the Holocaust period primarily through the point of view of a non-Jewish preadolescent boy, Tolia Semerik, who is based on the author's life and experiences. The novel depicts general living conditions and the catastrophic events that took place in Kiev, Ukraine, during the Nazi occupation from fall 1941 to fall 1943. Tolia's own experiences of famine, repeated escapes from possible capture by the Nazis, and confusion about nationality and patriotism are mixed with his impressions of the September 1941 massacre and mass burial of nearly the entire Jewish population at Babi Yar, a ravine not far from his family's home. Tolia reports hearing the gunfire of the massacre and of the continuing executions that resulted in the deaths of more than 100,000 local residents at the hands of the Nazis. In the novel's structure Tolia's reports are complemented by eyewitness accounts of the massacre at Babi Yar and of conditions in a concentration camp, which Kuznetsov had recorded from Jews who had miraculously escaped from both places. Throughout the novel Kuznetsov intersperses Tolia's impressions and the eyewitness accounts with relevant excerpts from Nazi and Soviet propaganda statements released during the German occupation period of Ukraine, as well as descriptions of what happened differently from the material contained in the propaganda. Furthermore, particularly in the uncensored version of his novel (1970), Kuznetsov rounds out the perspectives in the novel with the extensive commentary, warnings, exhortations, and reflections of Tolia as an adult years after the war. In this way Kuznetsov achieves a syncretic or mixed work that makes its points by combining features of several different genres: the novel, the memoir, and the general wartime documentary.

Even in its censored form, Kuznetsov's novel played an important role in spreading awareness about the atrocities at Babi Yar, which the Soviet government had previously downplayed. His work expands on Yevgeny Yevtushenko 's poem "Babii Yar" (1961), which also focuses on the overpowering image of devastation and death at the ravine and the importance of this place for all Soviet citizens. Like Yevtushenko's poem, Kuznetsov's novel repeatedly returns to the image of the ravine as the symbol of the Holocaust and World War II for the Soviet people and the world as a whole. The thematics and fate of Kuznetsov's work are also particularly comparable to those of Vasily Grossman , whose novels In a Good Cause (1952) and Life and Fate (written in 1960, published first outside the Soviet Union in 1980) also treat the Soviet experience of World War II, including anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. The publication of Grossman's Life and Fate was suppressed at least partly because this work depicted a Nazi concentration camp and a Soviet gulag in equal measure. Similar sections in Kuznetsov's novel that detail and criticize Soviet atrocities toward Jews and prisoners of war were completely excised by censors. Kuznetsov's work is also comparable to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which treats conditions in a gulag for an ordinary worker who has been sent there for forced labor. Kuznetsov's novel, like Solzhenitsyn's, makes use of some conventions of socialist realism, which was the generally accepted set of literary norms for Soviet writers. Kuznetsov deals with conditions and details of everyday life for average citizens and workers to demonstrate the crushing and divisive impact of the war and the Holocaust. Kuznetsov, however, openly breaks with socialist realism in that rather than wholeheartedly extolling the glories and progress of his Soviet homeland and the virtues of the Soviet citizen and proletarian, he depicts in full the presence of anti-Semitism and other atrocities in his country and presents people as atomized individuals who must struggle for mere existence, sometimes against each other.

Kuznetsov's novel is valuable to the literature of the Holocaust for several important reasons: for its candor in revealing crucial facts about the Babi Yar massacre, for its continuation of a previously suppressed dialogue about the Holocaust and World War II in the Soviet Union, and for its own history of composition as evidence of the impact of censorship on knowledge and awareness.

—Alisa Gayle Mayor