The article deals with the ways in which the memoirs of Il'ia Ehrenburg, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Emma Gershtein, and Raisa Orlova testify to their authors’ life during the Stalinist terror and to the fates of their contemporaries who fell victim to persecutions. Ehrenburg compared his having avoided arrest during the years of terror to having drawn a lucky lottery ticket: indeed, though each of the four memoirists took various measures to escape repres-sions, a great deal depended on sheer luck. Nevertheless, there was also the authors'  partial concurrence with the ide-ology of the Soviet system. These are issues that Lidiia Ginzburg called ‘areas of identification’ or ‘points of compatibility’, that is, aspects of the Soviet reality with which even the criticsof the regime consented, feeling a genuine inner need to cultivate such consent.

In the final episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Molly Bloom recollects how, in response to a priest’s question “where,” she returned an answer not about a part of her body but about a geographical location. This alludes to an episode of similar cross purposes of Widow Wadman and Uncle Toby in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. The interplay between the two texts is associated with the positive valorization of ambiguity on the part of the narrator of Tristram Shandy. In Sterne’s novel, legal and contractual definitions which seek to eliminate all ambiguity are, like Uncle Toby’s fortifications, a temptation for the forces of entropy: instead of shielding the characters from the intrusions of chance, they expose Tristram to serio-comic catastrophes. In Ulysses disambiguation is not a defensive but an offensive weapon (“Unsheathe your dagger definitions”; 238). In both cases, but particularly in Ulysses, the valorization of ambiguity in discourse is parallel to structural ambiguities that give rise to diametrically opposite readings. Ambiguity emerges not just as a matter of narrative rhetoric but as a feature of the creative impulse behind the story worlds, and as a challenge to the ethics of reading.

This Introduction to the special issue devoted to Anatoly Kuznetsov, author of Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel, dwells on the different aspects of the book’s importance, surveys the life of the author as intertwined with the history of this book, suggests a way of reading his other work in the light of Babi Yar, and notes the contributions of the articles collected in this issue.