Anatolii Kuznetsov is a novelist of Russian and Ukrainian descent who lived through the Nazi occupation of Ukraine and collected much first- and secondhand information about the Nazi massacre of more than thirty thousand Jews and more than a hundred thousand people of other nationalities in the ravine of Babi Yar, near Kiev, beginning in 1941. In his novel Babii Yar: Roman-dokument (1967; translated as Babi Yar: A Documentary Novel, 1967; as Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel, 1970), the account of the atrocities is placed in its historical context and in the frame of universal human experience.

Born on 18 August 1929 to Maria Fedorovna Kuznetsova (née Semerik), a woman of peasant origins, and Vasilii Kuznetsov, a Party-member teacher who abandoned her, Anatolii Vasil'evich Kuznetsov lived in his native Ukrainian city, Kiev, during the German occupation of 1941-1943. He was too young to be conscripted to forced...