The Masterpiece No One Wanted to Save

Censored and then forgotten, Anatoly Kuznetsov's Babi Yar, about the Nazi occupation of Kyiv, is again painfully relevant.

- George Packer

"There is no possible way of responding to Belsen and Buchenwald," Lionel Trilling wrote in 1948. "The activity of mind fails before the incommunicability of man's suffering." The crimes of both the Nazi and Soviet regimes in the 1930s and '40s defied all precedents of analysis and feeling. No ism could account for them; no wisdom could make them bearable. Though inside the stream of history, they seemed to belong to a realm of occult, pure evil. Today we're drowning in art and scholarship about Europe's terrible 20th century, but for contemporaries of the events, there was no language.

This silence-fear, shame, denial, simple inarticulateness was broken soon after the war by the emergence of a new prose genre: the literature of witness. If the crimes could not be comprehended, they could at least be told-by victims and survivors, in subjective first-person voices, all the more authoritative for their lack of rhetorical flourishes and theological frames: Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz and its sequel, The Reawakening, Anne Frank's diary; Elie Wiesel's Night; Charlotte Delbo's trilogy, Auschwitz and After; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago; and, in the 1990s, I Will Bear Witness, the Dresden diaries of the German Jewish scholar Victor Klemperer. These and a few other books now comprise a European canon of the worst that human beings have done and suffered.

That Babi Yar, by the Russian Ukrainian writer Anatoly Kuznetsov, never joined the list is a strange omission with a story of its own. The book's subject, the Nazi occupation of Kyiv, and its literary qualities make Babi Yar every bit the peer of the canonical works of witness. Its fraught journey to publication half a century ago, and now to a reissue (with an introduction by Masha Gessen) amid the Russian assault on Ukraine, only adds to its power as enduring testimony. The book's very typography carries the scars of its struggle to tell the truth.