Perceptions of the Holocaust in Films and Literature

The research project focuses on Jewish memory of the Holocaust that was presented in Soviet literary and artistic visual works which were published or filmed between the late 1940s and the 2010s. The traditional research view of Soviet public memory emphasizes that the tragedy of the Holocaust was not reflected in it. But in fact, the situation was more complicated: the Holocaust was not at the centre of attention of Soviet school and university teaching or in official commemorations. But the Holocaust as the mass killing of »Jewish civilians« and a part of the Nazi occupation politics against the »Soviet people« was presented in the Soviet public discourses, during the war and in the postwar decades. 
Some poems, poetry and novels of such Soviet writers as Ilya Ehrenburg, Vasily Grossman, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Anatoly Kuznetsov, Boris Slyzkiy and others were devoted to the ­Holocaust tragedy and its victims, sometimes directly, ­sometimes on the level of motives. In the late Soviet period, several films were produced that dealt with the extermination of the Jews of Europe, including »The Unconquered« by Mark Donskoy (1945), »Komissar« by Aleksandr Askoldov (1967), »The Ladies’ Tailor« by Leonid Gorowetz (1990) and others. The goal of the project is to study several samples of Soviet literature and cinema as paradigmatic samples of the varied strategies of narration and representation of the Holocaust in different Soviet political epochs: from the immediate postwar period through the Cold War until the post-Soviet era of the 2010s.
Despite the fact that these artistic and documentary works (both fiction and memoirs) are hardly known to contemporary Western public and partially forgotten in post-Soviet culture, they are representative in terms of the content of the Holocaust commemoration policies in each particular political period and its changes in focus and forms.