Home | Books By Year | Books from 1966
Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel
Buy Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel now from AmazonFirst, read the Wikipedia article. Then, scroll down to see what other TopShelfReviews readers thought about the book. And once you've experienced the book, tell everyone what you thought about it.
Wikipedia article
'Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel' is an internationally acclaimed documentary novel by Anatoly Kuznetsov about the Babi Yar massacre. The two-day murder of 33,771 Jewish civilians on September 2930, 1941 in the Kyiv ravine was one of the largest single mass killings of the Holocaust.United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, [http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/ Holocaust Encyclopedia]. [http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005421 Kiev and Babi Yar]
History
Kuznetsov began writing a memoir of his wartime life in a notebook when he was 14. Over the years he continued working on it, adding documents and eyewitness testimonies.
The novel was first published in 1966 in what Kuznetsov would later describe as a censored form in the Soviet monthly literary magazine 'Yunost' in the original Russian language. The magazine's copy editors cut the book down by[?] a quarter of its original length and introduced additional politically correct material.
In 1969 Kuznetsov defected from the USSR to the UK and managed to smuggle 35-mm photographic film containing the unedited manuscript. The book was published in the West in 1970 under a pseudonym, A. Anatoli. In that edition, the edited Soviet version was put in regular type, the content cut by editors in heavier type and newly added material was in brackets. In the foreword to the Russian-language edition by the New York-based publishing house Posev, Kuznetsov wrote:
In 2022, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine proposed the removal of 'Babi Yar' as well as many other Russian, Soviet and Belarusian works from the school curriculum for grades six through eleven.
Content
The novel begins as follows:
Kuznetsov describes his own experiences, supplementing them with documents and testimonies of survivors. The tragedy of Babi Yar is shown in the context of German occupation of Kyiv from its first days of September 1941 until November 1943. "It is also about the curious fact that a 14-year-old boy can show up anywhere and adults -- German soldiers -- don't especially care. By accident, then, he saw what others were not allowed to see. And by accident, he survived the occupation and lived to write about it."[http://archive.salon.com/books/bag/2001/02/16/furst/index.html Book review. War Zone. Babi Yar by Anatoli Kuznetsov] by Alan Furst. Salon.com. February 16, 2001 The chapter "How Many Times I Should Have Been Shot" lists 20 reasons the fascists should have shot him according to orders issued by the Nazi occupiers.
When he talks about his own family, the author does not shy away from criticizing the Soviet regime. Several intermissions directly address the future reader.
One of the most often-cited parts of the novel is the story of Dina Pronicheva, an actress of Kyiv Puppet Theater. She was one of those ordered to march to the ravine, forced to undress, and then shot. Badly wounded, she played dead in a pile of corpses, and eventually managed to escape. One of the very few survivors of the massacre, she later told her horrifying story to Kuznetsov.[https://www.pbs.org/wnet/heritage/episode8/documents/documents_13.html A Survivor of the Babi Yar Massacre. The story of Dina Pronicheva] (PBS)
The novel concludes with a warning:
See also
* Babi Yar
* Babi Yar memorials
References
Buy Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel now from Amazon
<-- Return to books from 1966