Constantin V. Ponomareff Boeken

The main thrust of this collection of essays, excluding those on Russian literature, is to visualize the European Holocaust from a number of different vantage points - the historical and cultural, the political and individual, the psychological and social, and the critical and literary. This wider perspective, especially as it relates to the range and extent of human suffering, suggests that a redefinition of the twentieth-century Holocaust is now timely.

This essay explores the historical impact of war and totalitarianism on the literary imagination of several major Soviet Russian and West German writers. The painful experience which has become muted in this fiction is articulated through a «second», more subconscious and metaphorical, language. It is this subliminal poetic voice in the works of Borchert, Aitmatov, Grass, Pasternak and Nossack which provides us with a heightened sense of the spiritual condition of European man and the nature of modern and contemporary European writing.