Description
The first edition, first printing of Babi Yar: A Documentary Novel of the holocaust, by Anatoly Kuznetsov.
Octavo, xv, [1], 399pp. Black cloth, title stamped in red on the spine. Stated “First Printing, 1967” on the copyright page. Previous ownership stamp and inscription on the front endpapers. Solid text block, free of marks or notations. Faint offsetting to the front endpaper. In the publisher’s dust jacket, $5.95 on the front flap, two tape repairs to verso, ink repair to center of the spine, chipping along edges.
This first English edition of Babi Yar follows the original structure of the Russian edition. The full story, titled Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel by Anatoly Kuznetso, is a semi-autobiographical account of the Nazi massacre of Jews and others at Babi Yar, a ravine in Kyiv, Ukraine, during World War II. Kuznetsov, who was a teenager living nearby at the time, originally published the work in the Soviet Union in 1966 in a heavily censored form in the journal Yunost. The full, uncensored version-distinguished by different font sections to show cuts and additions-was smuggled out of the USSR when Kuznetsov defected to the West in 1969. It was first published in English in 1970 by Jonathan Cape in the UK and Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US under the pseudonym A. Anatoli, revealing for the first time the true scope of the atrocities and Soviet censorship.
