An Autobiography of Childhood: Anatoly Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar as Bildungsroman

Abstract

This article represents an attempt to read Anatoly Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel in its complete and uncensored version (published 1970) as a novel of education. Critical interpretation of this text has been dominated by the story of the mass shootings of the Jewish population witnessed by the adolescent Tolya, with the youngster’s own story often relegated to the background. But the analytic framework of the Bildungsroman makes it possible to see how, in addition to serving as a testimonial of the “Holocaust by Bullets,” the book demonstrates the full extent of the deformation of a child under conditions of war and occupation. The theoretical apparatus of the analysis is largely based on research in narratological theory (Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan). Discussion of the structural features of an autobiography of childhood also draws on Kate Douglas’s studies on autobiography, trauma, and memory. As a process of socialization, Bildung in Babi Yar turns into an anti-Bildung of adolescence: Kuznetsov’s novel shows how the experience of war deforms the personality on a variety of perceptual levels—optical, olfactory, haptic, and sonic.

Keywords

• autobiography of childhood
• bildungsroman
• narrating self
• experiencing self
• childhood trauma