Vasily Grossman

Grossman, WWII-time photo

Vasily Semyonovich Grossman (alternatively spelled Vassily, Vasiliy, Russian language: Василий Гроссман), December 12 1905 – September 15 1964, was a prominent Soviet-era writer and journalist.

Biography

Born Iosif Solomonovich Grossman in Berdichev, Ukraine into a Jewish family, he didn't receive a Jewish education, and knew only a few Yiddish words. 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 Grossman idealistically supported the 1917 Russian Revolutions.

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 famous Commissar (movie) (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 privileged Writers Union of the USSR. 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.

When the Great Patriotic War broke out in 1941, his mother was trapped and eventually murdered in Berdichev, together with 20,000 to 30,000 other Jews. Grossman was exempt from the army 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 (The 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 is 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 into In Just Cause (За правое дело) is based on his own experiences during the siege.

Grossman's documentary descriptions of ethnically cleansed Ukraine and Poland, the opening of 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 Treblinka Hell (Треблинский ад, 1944) was disseminated at the Nuremberg Trials as a document for the prosecution.

The post-war state suppression of the Black Book shook him to the core and he began to question his own loyal support of the 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 as Nazi police. Then in 1948 the Soviet edition of the book was scrapped completely. The poet Semyon Lipkin, his friend, believes it was Stalin's anti-Semitic 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."

Because of the state persecution, only a few of the author'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 post-Stalinist "Thaw period" underway, Grossman wrote to Khrushchev: "What's 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 the author that his book would not be published for at least two hundred years.

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. Grossman died in 1964, not knowing whether his novel would ever be read by public.

It was published in 1980 in Switzerland, thanks to fellow dissidents: Andrei Sakharov secretly photographed draft pages preserved by Lipkin, and the writer Vladimir Voinovich managed to smuggle the films abroad. With the impending collapse of the Soviet regime, the book was finally published on Russian soil in 1989.

In 1998, Solzhenitsyn expressed his "great respect" for Grossman's "patient, persistent work, its wide sweep".

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)

Publications

ISBN 1860460194 Life and Fate
ISBN 0810115034 Forever Flowing (European Classics)
ISBN 0896040313 Black Book: The Ruthless Murder of Jews by German-Fascist Invaders Throughout the Temporarily-Occupied Regions of the Soviet Union and in the Death Camps of Poland
ISBN 6301884345 Commissar the movie
Grossman's publications in Russian at lib.ru

References

ISBN 0684822954 The Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman by John Gordon Garrard, Carol Garrard
ISBN 085496830X Vasiliy Grossman: The Genesis and Evolution of a Russian Heretic by Frank Ellis

Biography

Quotes

See also

Publications

References