Authors

Aleksei Surin¹;  ¹ Bar-Ilan University, Israel

Discussion

Over the last two decades, Russian literature has surprisingly seen very little non-memoir and non-documentary prose about the Holocaust. Although many contemporary writers have used separate motifs in their work, and there are many memoirs, stories and poems on the topic, there are very few works in large-form genres that are entirely devoted to it. However, a significant number of works on the Holocaust have been created in Israel by Russian-speaking writers who emigrated to the country in the 1990s after the collapse of the USSR. The Holocaust fiction they wrote is united not only by the place of creation but also by specific poetics that describe the tragedy and horror of the Shoah. In their texts, each of these authors describes a situation of timelessness, returning to a mythic non-time, and the situation of myth-making, wherein death and ultimate freedom are conflated. In this paper, I will analyze today's Russian-language literature's main narrative and poetic paradigms about the Shoah created in Israel by Russian immigrants. I will examine the novels of Alex Tarn, Elena Makarova, and Daniel Kluger and identify their motivations for turning to the myth of the abolition of time when portraying the Holocaust. I will also try to explain the nature of the desire of Russian-Israeli writers to write about the Holocaust through the lens of myth and mythopoeia.