The (excellent) presentation this week at my Thursday morning breakfast group was about Babi Yar, the ravine in Kiev which was the site of the massacre of at least 100,000 (mainly Jews) by the occupying Nazis in 1941. For a long time, there were no memorials placed at the site by the Soviet Union.

Yevgeni Yevtushenko, young Russian avant-garde poet (then in his late 20s), visited the site in 1961, twenty years after the massacre occurred, and was saddened by what he saw. He immediately wrote what remains his most famous poem, called simply “Babi Yar”. Here are excerpts:

“No monument stands over Babi Yar

A steep cliff only, like the rudest headstone.

I am afraid.

Today, I am as old as the entire Jewish race itself…..

“I see myself an ancient Israelite.

I wander o’er the roads of ancient Egypt

And here, upon the cross, I perish, tortured

And even now, I bear the marks of pain………

“There is no Jewish blood that’s blood of mine.

But hated, with a passion that’s corrosive,

Am I by antisemites, like a Jew.

And that is why I call myself a Russian.”

(1996 translation by Benjamin Okopnik)

When the poem was published, it was very polarizing, as you might imagine, within the Soviet Union. Although I have never studied the reactions, the reasons seem pretty straightforward. The official Soviet policy was to deny the existence of antisemitism and, more than that, to disregard the entire concept of ethnic differences among the Soviet people. Of course, in real life, this policy was more absent than observed. Even when monuments were placed at Holocaust sites, the references were never to “Jews”, but to “Soviet citizens”.

Yevtushenko called out Soviet antisemitism, but did so carefully enough not to touch Soviet ideology. But his message was clear. In addition, as you can see, he referred to himself as a Russian, and not as a Soviet citizen. This too could have ruffled some feathers. This, by the way, was before the movement to permit Soviet Jews to leave the country picked up steam in the United States and elsewhere. While I don’t know this as a fact, I would assume that Yevtushenko’s poem was one of the things that influenced the creation of that (eventually successful) movement.

But while the poem was criticized heavily in official circles, it was highly praised in others. And one of Yevtushenko’s supporters was Dmitri Shostakovich, the composer, who decided to write a symphony (his 13th) based on Babi Yar and several other Yevtushenko poems, a symphony designed to be played with an accompanying narrative.

Shostakovich was perhaps the best known Soviet composer of his time, and once he wrote his 13th Symphony, it didn’t take Kirill Kondrashin and the Moscow Philharmonic long to premiere the work. You can listen to the 1962 performance on YouTube, and I recommend you do so.

Both Yevtushenko and Shostakovich were able to escape the dangers of being judged an antisocial artist in the Soviet Union of their time. How they managed to do this (with some close calls, as I understand it), I don’t know. [This is where it is appropriate to say: “If he don’t know anything, how come he thinks he can write about this?”]

The poem and the symphony begat even more references to Babi Yar in the Soviet Union. Take for example, a book by Anatoly Kuznetsov, a Soviet writer who published in 1966 a book called: Babi Yar: a Document in the Form of a Novel. I haven’t read it, and probably should. Kuznetsov wrote the book, had it published in a shortened censored (or perhaps self-censored) version, and then was able to defect in 1969, bringing his original manuscript with him on microfilm).

[And this is where you might ask: Kuznetsov? Didn’t he used to play with the Washington Capitals? In fact, Kuznetsov is, according to Wikipedia, the third most common name in Russia. There are 85 Kuznetsovs with their own articles on Wikipedia. And – for your further edification – a “kuznets” is a blacksmith in Russian. So, Kuznetsov = Smith. Thank you.]

Antisemitism continued to be an ongoing problem in the Soviet Union, of course, and Shostakovich continued to be outspoken in his attacks on antisemitism. For example, from his memoirs:

“I often test a person by his attitude toward Jews. In our day and age, any person with pretensions of decency cannot be anti-Semitic….

“I never condoned an anti-Semitic tone, even then, and I didn’t repeat anti-Semitic jokes that were popular then. But I was much gentler about this unworthy trait than I am now. Later I broke with even good friends if I saw they had anti-Semitic tendencies….

“It would be good if Jews could live peacefully and happily in Russia, where they were born. But we must never forget about the dangers of anti-Semitism and keep reminding others of it, because the infection is alive and who knows if it will ever disappear.”

BUT YOU MUST READ THIS (if you have read this far). Shostakovich’s memoirs were published by Solomon Volkov, a Russian music scholar, four years after Shostakovich died, and there has been a lot of debate as to whether these are really his memoirs, meant to be published as such, or a collection of older essays, or a combination, and even whether included are things that Shostakovich never said, but Volkov thought he would say. There are people who agree with Volkov that these are Shostakovich’s words, those who think this is a novel posing as memoirs, those who say that Shostakovich wrote some but not all of this, those who say that Shostakovich didn’t write all of this, but that everything in the memoirs conforms to Shostakovich’s positions. And there are other people, by the way, who originally thought the memoirs were the composers, but then changed their minds. And still others, who originally thought these were not by Shostakovich, but later changed their minds. As to the accuracy (or actual authorship) of the paragraphs copied above, I have – of course – no clue. [This is where you may return to the first bracketed statement in this posting]

Is this post too long? It takes about 4 minutes to read it (and another 4 if you didn’t understand a word of it and have to read it again) and another 55 minutes if you listen to the symphony and other material in the link. So, is an hour today devoted to artis80 too long? You decide.