Vasily Yan (Vassily Grigoryevich Yanchevetsky, 18741954) was a writer of historical novels whose popularity survives the test of time. He was widely read throughout the Soviet era and continues to be popular in the post-Soviet era. This book is not just a biographical sketch of an important Russian/Soviet writer basically unknown to the Western public. The focus on Yan and his work also impressively demonstrates the dominant role of ideology in a totalitarian society, which is not just a socio-economic and political system of the past, but could reemerge in the future as ISIS has demonstrated. Shlapentokh shows that ideology and the cultural and intellectual life in totalitarian regimes are more complex than is often assumed. Intellectuals often enough engaged in stressful, but -- in its literary outcome -- captivating cat and mouse games with censors, the powerful, and the government.

This volume addresses a problem of high controversy: Relating the Holocaust to poetic and aesthetic phenomena has often been seen as a taboo, as only authentic testimonies, documents, or at least unliterary, prosaic approaches were considered appropriate for dealing with the topic. However, from the very beginning of Holocaust literature and culture, there were tendencies towards literarisation, poetisation, and ornamentalisation. Nowadays, aesthetic approaches -- also in provocative, taboo-breaking ways -- are more and more regarded as important instruments to evoke the attention required for keeping the cataclysm in the collective memory. The contributions of the volume using examples predominantly from Polish, Czech, and German Holocaust literature and culture focus on selected aspects of this complex of problems, such as: poetry of concentration camp detainees; lyrical poetry about the Holocaust; poetical tendencies in narrative literature and drama; ornamental prose about the Holocaust; devices and functions of aestheticisation in Holocaust literature and culture.

Text in English & German. This volume assembles 22 English and German contributions dealing with the literature and culture of the Holocaust in the years since 1989 thereby focussing on Poland, the Czech Republic and Germany. It becomes apparent from these essays that the Nazi genocide continues to be a pivotal issue in literature, theatre and film even at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century. Included are overviews of the literary and cultural developments of the last decades, comparative studies and numerous analyses of the works of individual authors of the older as well as the middle and younger generation. Among the authors whose works are discussed are R. Kluger, R Ligocka, L Weliczker, A Bart, M Bienczyk, M Tulli, Z Rudzka, O B Kraus, M Uhde, A Goldflam, J Topol, I Douskova, R Denemarkova and H Andronikova. The growing use of provocative and taboo-breaking forms of expression turns out to be an important instrument in keeping the memory of the horrible events alive in the collective memory.