Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel (Russian: Бабий яр. Роман-документ) 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 29–30, 1941 in the Kiev ravine was one of the largest single mass killings of the Holocaust.
Kuznetsov began writing a memoir of his wartime life in a notebook when he was 14. Over the years he continued working...
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Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel (Russian: Бабий яр. Роман-документ) 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 29–30, 1941 in the Kiev ravine was one of the largest single mass killings of the Holocaust.
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 eyewitnesses 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...
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