Documentary Aesthetics in the Long 1960s in Eastern Europe and Beyond by ClemensGünther and MatthiasSchwartz, eds. Studies in Slavic Literature and Poetics, Volume 67. Leiden: Brill, 2023. 330 pp. $139.00. ISBN 978‐90‐04‐53309‐7

During the 1960s, writers, filmmakers, and artists sought to replace compromised literary and artistic strategies with forms associated with authenticity, sincerity, and the authority of the witness.Documentary Aesthetics in the Long 1960s in Eastern Europe and Beyond presents a collection of thirteen essays examining various instances of documentary aesthetics in this period with an introduction written by the volume's editors, Clemens Günther and Matthias Schwartz.Contributors include emerging and established scholars from German, American, Swiss, Belgian, Russian, and Austrian universities.The introduction draws on Svetlana Alexievich's style of oral histories and testimonial literature to establish the collection's focus on documentary aesthetics in literature and films of the 1960s.Günther and Schwartz base their definition of documentary aesthetics on stylistic and discursive developments in post-Stalinist Soviet literature and literary discourse.The introduction next differentiates between documentary aesthetics in the 1960s and the earlier "literature of fact" and avant-garde literary theory from the 1920s.The volume's editors define the difference in terms of temporality: the earlier, avant-garde documentary approach focused on the present and the imagined future, whereas the documentary turn of the 1960s was part of a broader reexamination of the past.The introduction goes further and defines the international connections between Eastern European artists interested in documentary art and their contemporaries with similar interests in West Germany and the United States.Developing out of presentations at the international conference "'Firsthand Time.' Documentary Aesthetics in the Long 1960s," held at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin, January 16-18, 2020, seven of the thirteen chapters focus on literature, two on poetry, two on film, one on art, and one on theater; one chapter discusses both Alexander Kluge's films and literary texts.One of the key concepts discussed across several contributions to the volume refers to "ego-documents," a term developed by the Dutch historian Jacques Presser to define personal experiences and the perspective of historical actor-individuals in the form of self-narratives and self-testimonies.Günther and Schwartz organized the chapters into four thematically defined sections.The first group focuses on a selection of authors that utilized documentary strategies to investigate historical tragedies, featuring chapters by Franziska Thun-Hohenstein on the Soviet writer Varlam Shalamov, Natasha Gordinsky on the Soviet-Jewish author Aleksandra Brushtein, Tatjana Petzer on the Yugoslav-Jewish writer Danilo Kiš, and Gunther Martens on the German author and filmmaker Kluge.These authors present a range of formal and narrative strategies by combining fiction and nonfiction elements in literary texts such as Shalamov's Kolyma Tales (1954-early 1970s), Brushtein's autobiographical trilogy The Road Leads Off into the Distance (1955-59), Kiš's Early Sorrows (1969) and The Tomb of Boris Davidovich:

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