Poetry of Witness and Poetry of Commentary: Responses to the Holocaust in Russian Verse

Abstract

This essay proposes two categories for understanding Holocaust poetry: the documentary and testimonial poetry of witness, written in the immediate aftermath of the event, and the lyrical and hermeneutic poetry of commentary, written at a temporal and spatial distance from it. The essay focuses on how these two modes are represented in Russian poetry written in the Soviet Union, where memory of the Holocaust was obfuscated by the regime. The essay analyzes both official and underground poets—Boris Slutsky, Ian Satunovsky, and Semen Lipkin—and shows how their verse both defines and defies the two categories, broadening our understanding of the overall relationship between the catastrophe and the poetic word.