In the poem "I Saw It!" ("Ia eto videl!"), composed in January 1942 and published shortly thereafter, Selvinsky depicted the aftermath of the mass execution, in November–December 1941, of thousands of Jews at the so-called Bagerovo anti-tank ditch outside the Crimean city of Kerch. According to the research of Maxim D. Shrayer, Selvinsky's "I Saw It!" was the first literary text about the Shoah to reach a nationwide audience. In late 1943 Lieutenant Colonel Selvinsky was summoned to Moscow, punitively dismissed from the army, and subjected to repressions. Especially devastating was the February 10, 1944 resolution of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, "About I. Selvinsky's Poem 'To whom Russia sang a lullaby….'" In April 1945, Selvinsky's status was finally restored, and he was allowed to return to the frontlines. One of the principal Soviet literary witnesses to the Shoah, Selvinsky treated the topic of the mass extermination of Jews by the Nazis and their accomplices in two other works of 1942, "Kerch" and "A Reply to Goebbels," and in other wartime poems. Selvinsky's long poem Kandava (1945) unfolds around a nightmare in which he imagines himself and his wife "somewhere in Auschwitz/or Maidanek." Through a combination of personal bravery and political navigation, Selvinsky weathered the storms of Stalinism. He remained a proud Jew during the most antisemitic of the Soviet years and despite direct official ostracism. Shortly before his death, Selvinsky published the autobiographical novel O My Youth (1966), where Jewish themes figured prominently. Selvinsky died in Moscow in 1968. A poetic virtuoso of high caliber, Selvinsky holds a prominent place in the history of modern Russian poetry and in the history of Jewish literature and Shoah literature. Selvinsky's uneclipsed literary achievements include the epic poem The Lay of Ulyalaev and the novel in verse Fur Trade (1928). References Vera S. Babenko. Voina glazami poeta: Krymskie stranitsy iz dnevnikov i pisem I. L. Sel’vinskogo. Simferopol’: Krymskaia Akademiia gumanitarnykh nauk; Dom-muzei I. L. Sel’vinskogo, 1994. Aleksandr Gol'dshtein. "O Sel’vinskom." Zerkalo 15-16 (2000). * Iakov Khelemskii. "Kurliandskaia vesna." In O Sel’vinskom: vospominaniia, edited by Ts. A. Voskresenskaia and I. P. Sirotinskaia, 125-175. Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1982. Maxim D. Shrayer. "Ilya Selvinsky." In An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Dual Identity in Prose and Poetry, 1801-2001, 2 vols., edited by Maxim D. Shrayer, 1: 226-227. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2007. Maxim D. Shrayer. "Selvinskii, Ilia