1. Home

Filter By Topic

Filter By Subject

Filter By Volumes

Filter by Years

Constructing the Memory of the Holocaust: The Ambiguous Treatment of Babii Yar in Soviet Literature

Abstract:

The article deals with literary constructions of memory of the Holocaust as it happened on the territory of the Soviet Union. This article focuses on the slaughter of Kiev’s Jews in the ravine Babii Iar, September 29--October 3, 1941, the horrifying event that has received the most significant treatment in officially permitted Soviet literature. Complicating the problem of confronting the Holocaust on Soviet soil were two contradictory tasks: 1) the authors’ goal of remembering the Nazis’ deliberately anti-Jewish genocide in the context of their also deliberate anti-Slavic and anti-Soviet designs, and 2) the editors’ and censors’ goal of reasserting a specious Soviet ideology of internationalist, egalitarian “humanism” that held that no nationality should get a preferential treatment. Works discussed range from those of the 1940s (Erenburg, Grossman, and Ozerov), through the 1960s (Evtushenko, Kuznetsov), to the 1970s (Rybakov). 

 

June 2005: Edith W. Clowes is professor of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas. She is the author of numerous articles and books on German and Russian philosophy and the interactions of philosophy and Russian fiction in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They include: The Revolution of Moral Consciousness: Nietzsche in Russian Literature, 1890--1914 (Northern Illinois University Press, 1988; translated into Russian: Nitsshe v Rossii, St. Petersburg, 1999), and Russian Experimental Fiction: Resisting Ideology after Utopia (Princeton, 1993). Her most recent book is Fiction’s Overcoat: Russian Literary Culture and the Question of Philosophy (Cornell University Press, 2004).

 

Publisher's Version

Volume 3, issue 1 Literature and Ideology Topoi Holocaust Literature
Last updated on 04/18/2020