The poetry of the abyss

This book invites us to reconsider the geography and forms of the Shoah, even if this is not its main point. Specialists in Russian literature, Annie Epelboin and Assia Kovriguina are primarily interested in memory and its literary crystallizations. But the events to which this memory refers constitute a particular historical background, poorly known to those whom they call, not without irony, the “ Uninformed Westerners “.

They recall that more than two thirds of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis and their proxies were murdered, in full view of the local populations, on Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian or Russian territories, which the army occupied. German. That almost half of these victims were executed on the spot, by shootings or in gas trucks, the others in the killing centers of the“ Action Reinhardt “, if not by hunger, exhaustion and disease in the ghettos. This geography of murder in some way limits the centrality of Auschwitz-Birkenau which, over the decades, became the place of “ global memory » of the Shoah. They put the hidden nature of the crime into perspective and even question us about the identity of the victims we remember today, seventy years later.

Publicity of crime, burial of memory

By addressing the memory of the massacres perpetrated by the Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union, the authors place us before facts whose specificity has long been hidden by the communist authorities. They tell at length how, after the ephemeral enterprise of black book (1945-1947) and the liquidation in 1948 by Stalin of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, the “ Russian glory ” and state anti-Semitism have buried in the myth of “ great patriotic war », the singularity of the Shoah and the memory of the Jews. Which also explains the underground pathways of this memory, where literature occupies an essential place.

However, a big difference with the crimes suffered by Jews in Western Europe is their publicity. The witnesses who were able to maintain the memory were less survivors, who were quite few in number, than people who saw or knew what was happening: “ The Nazis often admitted the presence of third parties during executions. It was not uncommon for non-Jewish residents to be used to help with this work and thus compromised and manipulated. » Volunteers or requisitioned, these spectators saw everything.

“ It is certain that a genocide on the ground cannot be perpetrated without the active participation of local populations. (…) The goods, clothing and personal effects, of which the victims were robbed at the edge of the ravines, were shared between the Nazis and their various collaborators, volunteers or not. »

It even happened that newspapers and posters were published by the Germans, announcing after the massacres that “ the atmosphere had been purified » (pp. 37-38).

Write despite everything

This witness did not only witness the shootings. He suffered other repressions before, during and in the following years, which facilitated the blurring of memories by the power and its various agencies. Ravine Literature begins with long developments which dissect these manipulations ; they identify a sort of determination to forget the Jews, for the benefit of “ Soviet civilians », according to an ideological process well known to historians.

The fact remains that some witnesses wrote “ despite everything ”, according to the title of the second part of the book. “ Those who dared, the authors tell us, had to brave renewed repression, which was as much physical, material as intellectual. The threat involved the lives of an entire family. It meant for those who took the risk of stating forbidden truths the condemnation to a life of pariah, for themselves and for their loved ones. » (p. 152). A long investigation into still little-explored Soviet archives has brought to light several of these testimonies, sometimes of great literary quality, produced in these “ conditions of radical cultural suffocation and forced integration into norms. » Many of these documents, which Assia Kovriguina had already named “ ravine literature » in previous research, mention massacres by shootings at the edge of ravines, as at Babi Yar. They are studied in detail, cited at length in beautiful translations, in this second part which is undoubtedly the most innovative of the book.

By detecting non-Jewish testimonies even in official works, the authors unearth notes, notebooks or poems written during and after the catastrophe ; some published late, others lying dormant in private collections or police archives. They draw a portrait, as diverse as it is extraordinary, of two or three generations of almost unknown Holocaust writers. There are the surviving authors who saw their voices stifled, third parties who expressed their suffering at having witnessed them, great writers who kept diaries or wrote poems clearer than their production. official », authors of documentary fiction, a singer and playwright, etc. I will only cite two opposing examples here.

Thus this young 19-year-old Russian musician, Ludmila Titova (1921-1993), who accompanied a Jewish friend at her request to the meeting on September 29 in kyiv ; she is caught in the crowd that the SS lead to death. She narrowly escapes. Returning home, terribly shocked, she wrote poems:

“ You see, you see, it’s falling bloody snow,

She falls, and everything turns purple… »

Or again:

“ Grace would be to forget everything.

But forgetting — that means betraying. »

All her life, the musician will hear “ the note of pain »:

“ And the sound endures and reigns over everything,

A unique sound, as if now

Neither themes nor colors existed anymore,

But only pain without remedy » (pp. 175-178)

Conversely, Ilya Ehrenburg (1891-1967), famous writer and “ charming ambassador » of the Soviet regime, appears more complex. A war correspondent, he wrote three articles a day, which exalted the Soviet homeland and the heroism of its soldiers. He excelled in double acting and literary duplication. Artisan, with Vassili Grossman, from Black book, he centralized thousands of letters and testimonies, he went there, particularly in kyiv.

But Babi Yar was his “ place of personal pain “. A Jew born in kyiv, he said in a book of memories: “ I had no relatives among the victims, but it seems to me that nowhere have I experienced such anguish, such a feeling of abandonment as on the sands of Babi Yar. » His texts from black book are more distant. In 1945, however, he published a cycle of five poems, certainly allusive, but powerful. He refuses indifference: “ The misfortune of others is like a gadfly, / No matter how much you chase it away, it comes back, / You want to leave, it’s too late / (…) This misfortune hears nothing, like a possessed person, / he comes and he moans at night. » And only poetry provides him with the right words to “ express the pain of his experience as a witness, underline Annie Epelboin and Assia Kovriguina. He made a division and reserved for poetry the art of transposing impossible mourning into images. » (pp. 209 and 216).

Many other authors are cited. Some are known and already published in French, such as Vassili Grossman, Andreï Platonov, Anatoli Kouznetsov or Macha Rolnikaïté. Most of it is still inaccessible to Western (and even Russian) audiences. The sample is, however, limited to Russian-speaking texts.

The poetic state

This fascinating work opens an original perspective on literary testimonies. It is no longer a question of using them to establish facts in the manner of historians. These texts hardly inform us. They transmit an emotion, a trauma, a suffering, they place themselves beyond the event. The frequent choice of a poetic expression does not only reflect a local specificity (“the Russian poets “) ; it speaks of the strength of a language, of a writing deemed most capable of transmitting and experiencing the incommunicable. This is evidenced by this young poet, Lev Ozerov, author of the major report on Babi Yar which opens the black book. At the same time, he wrote a long poem, “ his deep cry », say the authors. “ We read there the desperate attempt to give linguistic form to extreme suffering. The lyrical “I”, so repressed elsewhere, is finally expressed here. Ozerov comes out of his restraint. » His poem is chanted like a song with these lines: “ I have come to you, Babi Yar, / If there is an age to pain, / Then I am immensely old. / We could not count it even in centuries » (pp. 196-200). He echoes Ludmila Titova, the young musician already mentioned: “ Listen ! We put them in a row / We put their belongings in a pile on the flagstones / Half asphyxiated, half dejected / We half covered them with earth… » (p. 178)

These poetic voices, so precious, pose another question to the historian: why write a poem at the heart of the catastrophe ? Why choose this form at the edge of a ravine, or at the entrance to a gas chamber, like this young Czech woman cited by Kulka, or even at the bottom of a ghetto, the day before annihilation, like Wladyslaw Szlengel in Warsaw ? Why poetry ? What does she tell us ? “ The space of poetry, respond the authors, allows us to overcome the problem of the unrepresentable, radical violence can be shown using symbolic reality, metaphors or allegories, the multiple resources of poetic images which offer powerful evocations for readers. »

They are right. However, beyond poetic language, we should also revise our questions, no longer talk about poetry. After ” but “ with » the Shoah, and wonder what the response is topoetic state in these moments. Facing death. Is there not a behavior of the victim which goes beyond the testimony? ? These Russian writers invite us to think about it.