The Recontextualization of History in Anatoly Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar: A Novel-Document (1966) and Sergei Loznitsa’s Film Babi Yar: Context (2021)

Abstract

Abstract In several presentations of his latest documentary “Babi Yar. Context” (2021), the Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa has emphasized that reading Anatoly Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar (1966) in his Soviet youth had a tremendous effect on his understanding of the Soviet oblivion regarding the Holocaust in Kyiv. In my paper, I examine the uses and misuses of history in Loznitsa’s documentary film on the tragedy of Babyn Yar. The “context” — archival documentary footage of the preceding explosions of the administrative quarter in Ukraine’s capital organized by the NKVD in September of 1941 and of the welcoming reception by Western Ukrainians of the German army’s occupation of Lviv during the summer of 1941 — provide an important yet inconvenient historical framework for understanding the collective responsibility in mass execution of Kyivan Jews. However, when viewed within Loznitsa’s cinematographic aesthetics, it becomes clear that Kuznetsov’s literary representation of the unspeakable brutality of the Babyn Yar massacre served as a model for the director’s film. Both — Kuznetsov in the 1960s and Loznitsa in the 2020s — used a wide array of artistic tools to communicate the long-lasting effect of the silenced tragedy on the human soul.