Name: Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel; New, Complete, Uncensored Version (in English)
Price: 15.66 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Masha Gessen
ISBN: 9781250883834

portada Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel; New, Complete, Uncensored Version (in English)

Type

Physical Book

Author

Introduction by

Publisher

Language

English

Pages

496

Format

Paperback

Dimensions

20.8 x 13.5 x 2.5 cm

Weight

0.36 kg.

ISBN13

9781250883834

Synopsis "Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel; New, Complete, Uncensored Version (in English)"

"[A] masterpiece . . . Babi Yar [is] every bit the peer of the canonical works of witness [such as] Anne Frank's diary . . . Wiesel's Night . . . Solzhenityn's Gulag Archipelago." --George Packer, The AtlanticAn internationally acclaimed documentary novel that describes the fateful collision of Russia, Ukraine, and Nazi Germany, and one of the largest mass executions of the Holocaust, with a new introduction by Masha Gessen. "I wonder if we shall ever understand that the most precious thing in this world is a man's life and his freedom? Or is there still more barbarism ahead? With these questions I think I shall bring this book to an end. I wish you peace. And freedom." At the age of twelve, Anatoly Kuznetsov experienced the Nazi invasion of Ukraine, and soon began keeping a diary of the brutal occupation of Kiev that followed. Years later, he combined those notebooks with other survivors' memories to create a classic work of documentary witness in the form of a novel. When Babi Yar was first published in a Soviet magazine in 1966, it became a literary sensation, not least for its powerful and unprecedented narratives of the Nazi massacre of the city's Jews, and later Roma, prisoners of war, and other victims, at the Babi Yar ravine--one of the largest mass killings of the Holocaust. After Kuznetsov defected to Great Britain in 1969, he republished the book in a new edition that included extensive passages censored by the Soviets, along with his later reflections. In its fully realized form, Babi Yar is a classic of Holocaust and World War II testimony. With sustained immediacy, it relates a scrappy but principled boy's day-to-day fight to survive and provide for his family. He dodges bullets and avoids transport to Germany, befriends black market horse dealers and pre-revolutionary aristocrats, wonders at the pomp of the Nazi's opera performances, overhears his mother and grandparents debate the merits of German versus Soviet rule, collects grenades, digs hiding places, and confronts the moral dilemmas of assisting neighbors or looting stores--all the while hearing the constant hum of bullets at the Babi Yar ravine nearby. In a bravura feat of reporting, he tells the story of what happened at Babi Yar--from the deceptive roundup of the city's Jews and execution of the national soccer team, to the memories of the site's few survivors and the story of a daring escape. The book's once-censored passages explore the Soviet effort to hide the realities of the massacre and other facts about wartime that the regime did not want discussed. In the manner of Elie Wiesel's Night or The Diary of Anne Frank, here is a book that tells some of the most uncomfortable truths of the past century--and the most essential.

Masha Gessen

(Introduction by)

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Es autora del best seller The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (2012). Ha escrito diez libros de no ficción, su obra más reciente The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, ganó el National Book Award for Nonfiction en 2007; también ha escrito sobre los derechos de la población LGBTI y es considerada la principal activista LGBTI de Rusia.

Redactora en The New Yorker desde 2007. Ha colaborado en medios como The New York Times, The Washington Post y el Los Angeles Times.

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