Published: 2021-06-27

The Representations and Reassessment of the Holocaust in the Novels by the Strugatsky Brothers from the Middle Period

Dennis Sobolev Logo ORCID

Abstract

The article addresses the representations of the Holocaust in the novels by the Strugatsky brothers and their recurrent attempts at reassessing these representations. Even though the writings of the Strugatsky brothers are traditionally considered as science fiction, since the beginning of the 1960s all their major novels focus on their allegorical, philosophical and social, content. Their representations of the Holocaust belong with the most significant ones in the Russian language. This article focuses on three novels by the Strugatsky brothers from the middle period, and analyzes the fragmented representations of the concentration camps, mass murder, mass suffering and the irrevocability of loss, each representation implicitly acknowledging its own impossibility, as well as the impossibility of speaking the ineffable. In all the three novels, the Strugatsky brothers represent the choice of resistance to the socially and technologically overwhelming machine of violence and suppression as the only possible ethical choice, while representing this resistance as mostly hopeless and doomed to defeat.

Download files

Citation rules

Sobolev, Dennis. 2021. “The Representations and Reassessment of the Holocaust in the Novels by the Strugatsky Brothers from the Middle Period”. Iudaica Russica, no. 1(6) (June):60-96. https://doi.org/10.31261/IR.2021.06.03.

Cited by / Share

No. 1(6) (2021)
Published: 2021-06-27


ISSN: 2657-4861
eISSN: 2657-8352
Ikona DOI 10.31261/IR

Publisher
Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego | University of Silesia Press

This website uses cookies for proper operation, in order to use the portal fully you must accept cookies.