Vasily Grossman
Vasily Grossman with the Red Army in Schwerin, Germany (1945)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Vasily Semyonovich Grossman (first name alternatively spelled as
Vassily or Vasiliy, Russian: Василий Семёнович Гроссман,
Ukrainian: Василь Семенович Гроссман), December 12, 1905 –
September 14, 1964, was a prominent Soviet-era writer and
journalist.
Early life and career
Born Iosif Solomonovich Grossman in Berdychiv, Russian Empire
(today in Ukraine) into an emancipated Jewish family, he did not
receive a traditional Jewish education. A Russian nanny turned
his name Yossya into Russian Vasya (a diminutive of Vasily),
which was accepted by the whole family. His father had
social-democratic convictions and joined the Mensheviks. Young
Vasily Grossman idealistically supported the Russian Revolution
of 1917.
Grossman began writing short stories while studying at Moscow
State University and later continued his literary activity
working as an engineer in the Donbass. One of his first short
stories, In the town of Berdichev (В городе Бердичеве), drew
favorable attention and encouragement from Maxim Gorky and
Mikhail Bulgakov. The movie Comissar (director Aleksandr
Askoldov), made in 1967, suppressed by the KGB and released only
in October 1990, is based on this four-page story.
In the mid-1930s Grossman left his job as an engineer and
committed himself fully to writing. By 1936 he had published two
collections of stories, and in 1937 was accepted into the
privileged Union of Writers. During the Great Purge some of his
friends and close relatives were arrested, including his
common-law wife. For months he petitioned the authorities to
release her, which happened in 1938.
War reporter
Vasily Grossman with the Red Army in Schwerin, Germany
(1945)When Nazi-Germany invaded the Soviet-Union in 1941 and the
Great Patriotic War broke out, Grossman's mother was trapped in
Berdychiv by the invading German army, and eventually murdered
together with 20,000 to 30,000 other Jews who did not evacuate
Berdychiv. Grossman was exempt from military service, but
volunteered for the front, where he spent more than 1,000 days.
He became a war reporter for the popular Red Army newspaper
Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star). As the war raged on, he covered its
major events, including the Battle of Moscow, the Battle of
Stalingrad, the Battle of Kursk, and the Battle of Berlin. In
addition to war journalism, his novels (such as The People are
Immortal (Народ бессмертен)) were being published in newspapers
and he came to be regarded as a legendary war hero. The novel
Stalingrad (1950), later renamed For a Just Cause (За правое
дело), is based on his own experiences during the siege.
Grossman's descriptions of Nazi ethnic cleansing in German
occupied Ukraine and Poland, and the liberation by the Red Army
of the Nazi-German Treblinka and Majdanek extermination camps,
were some of the first eyewitness accounts —as early as 1943—of
what later became known as the Holocaust. His article The Hell
of Treblinka 1944) was disseminated at the Nuremberg War
Crimes Tribunal as evidence for the prosecution.
Conflict with the Soviet regime
Grossman participated in the assembly of the Black Book, a
project of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee to document the
crimes of the Holocaust. The post-war suppression of the Black
Book by the Soviet state shook him to the core, and he began to
question his own loyal support of the Soviet regime. First the
censors ordered changes in the text to conceal the specifically
anti-Jewish character of the atrocities and to downplay the role
of Ukrainians who worked with the Nazis as police. Then, in
1948, the Soviet edition of the book was scrapped completely.
The poet Semyon Lipkin, Grossman's friend, believed it was
Joseph Stalin's post-war antisemitic campaign that cracked
Grossman's belief in the Soviet system:
In 1946... I met some close friends, an Ingush and a Balkar,
whose families had been deported to Kazakhstan during the war. I
told Grossman and he said: "Maybe it was necessary for military
reasons." I said: "...Would you say that if they did it to the
Jews?" He said that could never happen. Some years later, a
virulent article against cosmopolitanism appeared in Pravda.
Grossman sent me a note saying I had been right after all. For
years Grossman didn't feel very Jewish. The campaign against
cosmopolitanism reawoke his Jewishness.
Grossman also criticized collectivization and political
repressions of peasants that led to Holodomor tragedy. He wrote
that "The decree [about grain procurement] required that the
peasants of the Ukraine, the Don and the Kuban be put to death
by starvation, put to death along with their little children"
Because of state persecution, only a few of Grossman's
post-war works were published during his lifetime. After he
submitted for publication his magnum opus, the novel Life and
Fate (Жизнь и судьба, 1959), the KGB raided his apartment. The
manuscripts, carbon copies, notebooks, as well as the typists'
copies and even the typewriter ribbons were seized.
With the "Thaw period" underway after the death of Stalin,
Grossman wrote to Nikita Khrushchev: "What is the point of me
being physically free when the book I dedicated my life to is
arrested... I am not renouncing it... I am requesting freedom
for my book." The Politburo ideology chief Mikhail Suslov told
Grossman that his book could not be published for at least three
hundred years:
I have not read your novel but I have carefully read the
reviews of your manuscript, responses to it, which contain many
excerpts from your novel. Look how many quotes from them I have
written down....Why should we add your book to the atomic bombs
that our enemies are preparing to launch against us? . . . Why
should we publish your book and begin a public discussion as to
whether anyone needs the Soviet Union or not?
Life and Fate, as well as his last major novel, Forever
Flowing (Все течет, 1961), were considered a threat to the
totalitarian regime, and the dissident writer was effectively
transformed into a nonperson. Forever Flowing, in particular, is
unique in its quiet, unforced, and yet horrifying condemnation
of the Soviet totalitarian state, a work in which Grossman,
liberated from worries about censors, spoke honestly about
Soviet history. Grossman died of stomach cancer in 1964, not
knowing whether his novels would ever be read by the public.
Legacy
Memorial plaque in Donetsk where Grossman lived and worked in
the 1930sLife and Fate was published in 1980 in Switzerland,
thanks to fellow dissidents: physicist Andrei Sakharov secretly
photographed draft pages preserved by Semyon Lipkin, and the
writer Vladimir Voinovich managed to smuggle the photographic
films abroad. Two dissident reserchers, professors and writers,
Efim Etkind and Shimon Markish retyped the text from the
microfilm, with, of course, some mistakes and misreadings due to
the bad quality. The book was finally published on Russian soil
in 1988 after the policy of glasnost was initiated by Mikhail
Gorbachev. The text was again published in 1989, because after
the first publication some original manuscripts had emerged from
the oblivion. Forever Flowing was published in the Soviet Union
also in 1989.
Life and Fate is considered to be an autobiographical work.
Robert Chandler, the novel's English translator, has written in
his introduction to the Harvill edition that its leading
character, Viktor Shtrum, "is a portrait of the author himself,"
reflecting in particular his anguish at the murder of his mother
at the Berdichev Ghetto. Chapter 18, a letter from Shtrum's
mother, Anna, has been dramatized for the stage and film The
Last Letter (2002), directed by Frederick Wiseman, and starring
Catherine Samie. Chandler additionally suggests that the
character of Shtrum is based on the physicist Lev Landau.
Some critics have compared Grossman's novels to Leo Tolstoy's
monumental prose.
