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Vasily Grossman

 
Russian History Encyclopedia: Vasily Semenovich Grossman
 
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(1905 - 1964), one of the most important Russian novelists of the twentieth century who became increasingly disillusioned with the Soviet system.

Vasily Grossman was born in 1905 in the town of Berdichev in Ukraine. He spent the years from 1910 to 1914 in Switzerland with his mother and attended high school in Kiev. He received a degree in chemical engineering from Moscow University in 1929 and worked in various engineering jobs until becoming a full-time writer in 1934. He published his first news article in 1928 and his first short story in 1934 and became a prolific writer of fiction during the 1930s. He published a long novel about the civil war entitled Stepan Kolchugin between 1937 and 1940. In 1938, his wife was arrested, but Grossman wrote to Nikolai Yezhov and achieved her release.

During World War II, Grossman served as a correspondent for Red Star (Krasnaya Zvezda) and spent the entire war at the front. His writing during the war years was immensely popular, and his words are inscribed on the war memorial at Stalingrad (now Volgograd). He also began writing short stories, which were collected in titles such as The People are Immortal. However, from that perspective, he also began to doubt the abilities of the systems that organized the war effort.

Grossman's postwar projects were often challenging to the Soviet system, and several were not published until long after their completion. Beginning in 1943, Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg began to collect personal accounts of the Holocaust on the territories of the Soviet Union, entitled the Black Book of Russian Jewry. Grossman became the editor of the collection in 1945 and continued to prepare it for publication. The printing plates were actually completed, but in 1946, as anti-Semitism began to increase and Josef Stalin turned against the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, they were removed from the printing plant. The book would not be published in any part of the former USSR until 1994.

His postwar fiction about the war generated intense criticism from Soviet officials. His novel For a Just Cause (Za pravoye delo), published in 1952, led to attacks for its lack of proper ideological focus. His most contemplative piece about the war, Life and Fate (Zhizn i sudba) was arrested by the KGB in 1961. Although they seized Grossman's copy of the manuscript, another had already been hidden elsewhere and preserved. Often compared to Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, the novel bitterly attacks Stalin and the Soviet system for failures. He focuses on the suffering of one family at the hands of large forces outside of their control. In it he touches upon the Gulags, the Holocaust, and the repressions that accompanied the heroism of ordinary Soviets. After twenty years, it was smuggled out of the Soviet Union on microfilm and published in the West. His last novel, Everything is in Flux (Vse techet), is an angry indictment of Soviet society and was distributed only in Samizdat.

On his death from cancer in 1964, Grossman disappeared from public Soviet literary discussions, only reappearing under Mikhail Gorbachev. In retrospect, Grossman's writing has been acknowledged as some of the most significant Russian literature of the twentieth century.

Bibliography

Ehrenburg, Ilya, and Grossman, Vasily. (2002). The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry, tr. David Patterson. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

Garrard, John, and Garrard, Carol. (1996). The Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Grossman, Vasily. (1985). Life and Fate, tr. Robert Chandler. New York: Harper & Row

—KARL E. LOEWENSTEIN

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Wikipedia: Vasily Grossman
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Vasily Grossman
Born December 12, 1905(1905-12-12)
Berdychiv, Russian Empire
Died September 14, 1964 (aged 58)
Moscow, USSR
Occupation writer, journalist
Notable work(s) Life and Fate (novel)

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.

Contents

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)
In uniform as a war reporter

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[1] 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" [2]

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?[3]

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 1930s

Life 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.[4][5]

Notes

  1. ^ (Russian) Треблинский ад (Tryeblinski ad)
  2. ^ Robert Conquest (1986) The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-505180-7.
  3. ^ Under Siege, by Keith Gessen. Published in the New Yorker on March 6, 2006; accessed July 11, 2007.
  4. ^ Tolstoy Studies Journal: Ellis, Frank. "Concepts of War in L.N. Tolstoy and V.S. Grossman." Volume II, 1989, pp. 101-108.
  5. ^ Biography of Grossman (PDF) by Gregory Freidin, Stanford University

Quotes

  • ...there is no higher happiness than to be able to crawl on one's stomach, out of the camp, blind, one's legs amputated, and to die in freedom, even if only ten yards from the cursed barbed wire.
  • ...only one form of retribution is visited upon an executioner — the fact that he looks upon his victim as something other than a human being and thereby ceases to be a human being himself, and thereby executes himself as a human being. He is his own executioner... (Forever Flowing)
  • "Man never understands that the cities he has built are not an integral part of Nature. If he wants to defend his culture from wolves and snowstorms, if he wants to save it from being strangled by weeds, he must keep his broom, spade, and rifle always at hand. If he goes to sleep, if he thinks about something else for a year or two, then everything's lost. The wolves come out of the forest, the thistles spread and everything is buried under dust and snow." (Life and Fate)

See also

Sister project Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Vasily Grossman

Publications

References

  • The Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman by John Gordon Garrard, Carol Garrard (ISBN 0-684-82295-4)
  • Vasiliy Grossman: The Genesis and Evolution of a Russian Heretic by Frank Ellis (ISBN 0-85496-830-X)
  • A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941-1945 by Anthony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova (Pantheon, 2006 - ISBN 0-375-42407-5 ) - Based on Grossman's notebooks, war diaries, personal correspondence and articles.

External links


This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

 
 

 

Copyrights:

Russian History Encyclopedia. Encyclopedia of Russian History. Copyright © 2004 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Vasily Grossman".  Read more

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