Leona Toker* Anatoly Kuznetsov, Author of Babi Yar: The History of the Book and the Fate of the Author https://doi.org/10.1515/eehs-2023-0020 Published online May 29, 2023 Abstract: This Introduction to the special issue devoted to Anatoly Kuznetsov, author of Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel, dwells on the different aspects of the book’s importance, surveys the life of the author as intertwined with the history of this book, suggests a way of reading his other work in the light of Babi Yar, and notes the contributions of the articles collected in this issue. Keywords: Kuznetsov, Babi Yar, Holocaust, Soviet literature, censorship, memorialization In 1966, a sensation was produced in the literary world of the Soviet Union when Anatoly Kuznetzov’s narrative entitled Babi Yar: Roman Document (literally, Babi Yar: A document-novel) came out in the widely circulating Soviet journal Iunost (Youth). The shock waves of this literary event crossed the no-man’s land between the usual literary audiences and the broader public; they also crossed the borders of the Soviet Union – translations were published in more than 30 countries. It is largely owing to that narrative, in its initial and later forms, that “Babi Yar” became a generic name 1 for what is now known as “the Holocaust by bullets” in Eastern Europe (see Desbois 2008), the way Auschwitz became a generic name for the industrial production of death in Nazi extermination camps (see Epelboin 2015, 2; and Kovri- gina’s article in this collection, 2023). Though the first journal edition and the book-publication that followed were harshly censored, the fact of their coming out in *Corresponding author: Leona Toker, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel, E-mail: toker@mail.huji.ac.il. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4107-233X 1 “Babi” in “Babi Yar” is the most frequently used transliteration of the toponym in the West. I use it in this introductory essay, following the title of the 1970 edition of Kuznetsov’s book, translated by David Floyd. In her article in this issue, written in the midst of Russia’s war against Ukraine, Victoria Khiterer uses the Ukrainian form of the toponym, Babyn Yar. I give the Ukrainian versions of the toponyms in parenthesis after mentioning the locations for the first time. East. Eur. Holocaust Stud. 2023; aop Open Access. © 2023 the author(s), published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.