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Vasily Grossman | |
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| Born | Iosif Solomonovich Grossman (1905-12-12)12 December 1905 Berdichev,Kiev Governorate,Russian Empire |
| Died | 14 September 1964(1964-09-14) (aged 58) Moscow,Soviet Union |
| Occupation | Writer, journalist |
| Nationality | Soviet Union |
| Period | 1934–1964 |
| Subject | Soviet history World War II |
| Notable works | Life and Fate Everything Flows [de] |
| Spouse | |
Vasily Semyonovich Grossman (Russian:Васи́лий Семёнович Гро́ссман; 12 December (29 November,Julian calendar) 1905 – 14 September 1964) was aSoviet writer and journalist. Born to a Jewish family inUkraine, then part of theRussian Empire, Grossman trained as achemical engineer atMoscow State University, earning the nicknameVasya-khimik ("Vasya the Chemist") because of his diligence as a student. Upon graduation, he took a job in Stalino (nowDonetsk) in theDonets Basin. In the 1930s he changed careers and began writing full-time, publishing a number of short stories and several novels.
At the outbreak of theSecond World War, Grossman was engaged as awar correspondent by theRed Army newspaperKrasnaya Zvezda; he wrote first-hand accounts of the battles ofMoscow,Stalingrad,Kursk, andBerlin. Grossman's eyewitness reports of a Naziextermination camp, following the discovery ofTreblinka, were among the earliest accounts of a Nazi death camp by a reporter.
There is some dispute over the extent of the state repression Grossman endured after the war. While he was never arrested, his two major literary works (Life and Fate andEverything Flows [de]) werecensored byNikita Khrushchev's government as unacceptablyanti-Soviet. At the time of Grossman's death fromstomach cancer in 1964, these books remained unreleased. Hidden copies were eventually smuggled out of the Soviet Union by anetwork of dissidents, includingAndrei Sakharov andVladimir Voinovich, and first published in the West in 1980, before appearing in the Soviet Union in 1988.
Born Iosif Solomonovich Grossman inBerdychiv, Ukraine, Russian Empire, into anemancipatedJewish family, he did not receive a traditionalJewish education. His father Semyon Osipovich Grossman was a chemical engineer, and his mother Yekaterina Savelievna was a teacher of French.[1] A Russian nanny turned his nameYossya into RussianVasya (adiminutive ofVasily), which was accepted by the whole family. His father hadsocial-democratic convictions and joined theMensheviks, and was active in the1905 Revolution; he helped organise events inSevastopol.[2] From 1910 to 1912, he lived with his mother in Geneva after his parents had separated.[1] After returning to Berdychiv in 1912, he moved to Kiev in 1914 where, while living with his father, he attended secondary school and later the Kiev Higher Institute of Soviet Education.[2] Young Vasily Grossman idealistically supported the hope of theRussian Revolution of 1917.[2]
In January 1928, Grossman married Anna Petrovna Matsuk; their daughter, named Yekaterina after Grossman's mother, was born two years later.[2] When he had to move to Moscow, she refused to leave her job in Kiev, but in any case, she could not get a permit to stay in Moscow. When he moved to Stalino, she certainly did not want to go; she had started having affairs.[1] Their daughter was sent to live with his mother in Berdychiv.
Grossman began writing short stories while studying chemical engineering atMoscow State University and later continued his literary activity while working running chemical tests at a coal-mining concern in Stalino in theDonbas, and later in a pencil factory.[1] One of his first short stories, "In the Town of Berdichev" (В городе Бердичеве), drew favourable attention and encouragement fromMaxim Gorky andMikhail Bulgakov. The filmCommissar (directorAleksandr Askoldov), made in 1967, suppressed by theKGB and released only in 1988, is based on this four-page story.
In the mid-1930s Grossman left his job and committed himself fully to writing. By 1936 he had published two collections of stories and the novelGlyukauf, and in 1937 was accepted into the privilegedUnion of Writers. His novelStepan Kol'chugin (published 1937-40) was nominated for aStalin prize, but deleted from the list by Stalin himself for allegedMenshevik sympathies.[3]
Grossman's first marriage ended in 1933, and in the summer of 1935 he began an affair with Olga Mikhailovna Guber, the wife of his friend, the writerBoris Guber. Grossman and Olga began living together in October 1935, and they married in May 1936, a few days after Olga and Boris Guber divorced. In 1937 during theGreat Purge Boris Guber was arrested, and later Olga was also arrested for failing to denounce her previous husband as an "enemy of the people". Grossman quickly had himself registered as the official guardian of Olga's two sons by Boris Guber, thus saving them from being sent to orphanages. He then wrote toNikolay Yezhov, the head of theNKVD, pointing out that Olga was now his wife, not Guber's, and that she should not be held responsible for a man from whom she had separated long before his arrest. Grossman's friend,Semyon Lipkin, commented, "In 1937 only a very brave man would have dared to write a letter like this to the State's chief executioner." Astonishingly, Olga Guber was released.[4]
WhenNazi Germanyinvaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Grossman's mother was trapped in Berdychiv by the invadingGerman Army, and eventually murdered together with 20,000 to 30,000 other Jews who had not evacuated. Grossman was exempt from military service, but volunteered for the front, where he spent more than 1,000 days. He became awar correspondent for the popularRed Army newspaperKrasnaya Zvezda (Red Star). As the war raged on, he covered its major events, including theBattle of Moscow, theBattle of Stalingrad, theBattle of Kursk and theBattle of Berlin. In addition to war journalism, his novels (such asThe People are Immortal [Народ бессмертен]) were published in newspapers and he came to be regarded as a legendary war hero. The novelStalingrad was begun during the war and finished in 1952. After a struggle with censors over the book's content, the novel was published in the journalZnamya. It was later renamedFor a Just Cause (За правое дело) and heavily edited in republications released after Joseph Stalin's death.[5] A new English translation, with added material from Grossman's politically risky early drafts, was published in 2019 under the original title,Stalingrad.[6] In December 2019 the book was the subject of the seriesStalingrad: Destiny of a Novel inBBC Radio 4'sBook of the Week.[7]
Grossman described Naziethnic cleansing in German-occupiedUkraine and Poland and the liberation by theRed Army of the German NaziTreblinka andMajdanekextermination camps. He collected some of the first eyewitness accounts—as early as 1943—of what later became known asthe Holocaust. His articleThe Hell of Treblinka (1944) was disseminated at theNuremberg Trials as evidence for the prosecution.[8]
Grossman interviewed formerSonderkommando inmates who escaped from Treblinka and wrote his manuscript without revealing their identities. He had access to materials already published.[9] Grossman described Treblinka's operation in the first person.[10] OfJosef Hirtreiter, theSS man who served at the reception zone of theTreblinka extermination camp during the arrival oftransports, Grossman wrote:[10]
This creature specialized in the killing of children. Evidently endowed with unusual strength, it would suddenly snatch a child out of the crowd, swing him or her about like a cudgel and then either smash their head against the ground or simply tear them in half. When I first heard about this creature—supposedly human, supposedly born of a woman—I could not believe the unthinkable things I was told. But when I heard these stories repeated by eyewitnesses, when I realized that these witnesses saw them as mere details, entirely in keeping with everything else about the hellish regime of Treblinka, then I came to believe that what I had heard was true".[10]
Grossman's description of a physically unlikely method of killing a living human through tearing-by-hand originated from the 1944 memoir of the Treblinka revolt survivorJankiel Wiernik, where the phrase to "tear the child in half" appeared for the first time. Wiernik himself never worked in theAuffanglager receiving area of the camp where Hirtreiter served, and so was repeating hearsay.[11] But the narrative repetition reveals that such stories were retold routinely. Wiernik's memoir was published inWarsaw as a clandestine booklet before the war's end, and translated in 1945 asA Year in Treblinka.[11] In his article, Grossman claimed that 3 million people had been killed at Treblinka, the highest estimate ever proposed, rather than the now widely-accepted 750,000 to 880,000; this was because of an error made by Grossman when he calculated the number of trains that could arrive at the extermination camp each day.[12]
Grossman participated in the compiling of theBlack Book, a project of theJewish 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 government. First the censors ordered changes in the text to conceal the specifically anti-Jewish character of the atrocities and to downplay the role ofUkrainians who worked with theNazis aspolice. Then, in 1948, the Soviet edition of the book was scrapped completely.Semyon Lipkin wrote:
In 1946... I met some close friends, anIngush and aBalkar, whose families had beendeported toKazakhstan 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 againstcosmopolitanism appeared inPravda. Grossman sent me a note saying I had been right after all. For years Grossman didn't feel very Jewish. Thecampaign against cosmopolitanism reawoke his Jewishness.
Grossman also criticizedcollectivization andpolitical repression of peasants that led to theHolodomor tragedy. He wrote that "The decree about grain procurement required that the peasants ofUkraine, theDon and theKuban be put to death by starvation, put to death along with their little children."[13]
Because of state persecution, only a few of Grossman's post-war works were published during his lifetime. After he submitted for publication hismagnum opus, the novelLife and Fate (Жизнь и судьба, 1959), theKGB raided his flat. The manuscripts, carbon copies, notebooks, as well as the typists' copies and even thetypewriter ribbons were seized. It has been said by many, including Grossman's translator, Robert Chandler (see, for example his introduction to Life and Fate[14] that thePolitburo ideology chiefMikhail Suslov told Grossman that his book could not be published for two or three hundred years. However, Chandler and Yury Bit-Yunan, inVasily Grossman: Myths and Counter-Myths, say that their research into the notes about that meeting of both Grossman and Suslov show that this was not the case, and in note 2 of that article, Chandler expresses regret for having made the claim.[15]
Grossman wrote toNikita 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." However,Life and Fate and his last major novel,Everything Flows (Все течет, 1961) were considered a threat to the Soviet power and remained unpublished. Grossman died in 1964, not knowing whether his greatest work would ever be read by the public.
Grossman died ofstomach cancer on 14 September 1964. He was buried at theTroyekurovskoye Cemetery on the edge of Moscow.
Life and Fate was first published in Russian in 1980[6] in Switzerland, thanks to fellow dissidents: the physicistAndrei Sakharov secretly photographed draft pages preserved bySemyon Lipkin, and the writerVladimir Voinovich smuggled thephotographic films abroad. Two dissident researchers, professors and writersEfim Etkind andShimon Markish, retyped the text from the microfilm, with some mistakes and misreadings due to the bad quality. The book was finally published in the Soviet Union in 1988 after the policy ofglasnost was initiated byMikhail Gorbachev. The text was published again in 1989 after further original manuscripts emerged after the first publication.Everything Flows was also published in the Soviet Union in 1989, and was republished in English with a new translation byRobert Chandler in 2009.Life and Fate was first published in English in 1985; a revised English translation byRobert Chandler was published in 2006 and widely praised, being described as "World War II'sWar and Peace.[6]
Life and Fate is considered to be in part an autobiographical work. Robert Chandler wrote 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 asThe Last Letter (2002), directed byFrederick Wiseman and starringCatherine Samie. Chandler suggests that aspects of the character and experience of Shtrum are based on the physicistLev Landau. The late novelEverything Flows, in turn, is especially noted for 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.
Some critics have compared Grossman's novels to the work ofLeo Tolstoy.[16][17]
Complete text, 14 chapters;see: chapter 7
{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
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