Vasily Grossman’s obituary, as it appeared in the New York Times in September of 1964. The item’s brevity stands in ironic contrast to the future impact and continuing legacy of Grossman’s literary oeuvre…
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VASILY GROSSMAN,
SOVIET NOVELIST
Writer of War Stories Dies
Criticized by Stalinists
Special to The New York Times
September 18, 1964
(Photograph accompanying book review “Perfection Is Always Simple“, of July 5, 2013, at Financial Times.)
MOSCOW, Sept. 17 – Vasily S. Grossman, the Soviet novelist and former war correspondent, I died Monday after a long illness. He was 58 years old.
Mr. Grossman was best known for his war novels based on his experiences as a front-line correspondent for the Defense Ministry newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda. He was repeatedly criticized in the postwar Stalinist period for a lack of party-minded orientation. He did little subsequent writing.
A graduate of the mathematics-physics faculty of the University of Moscow, Mr. Grossman worked for several years as an Industrial safety engineer before turning to professional writing in 1934.
His first novel, “Glueckauf,” published in that year, was based on his experiences in the Donets Basin coal mines. In the late nineteen thirties he wrote a major novel in three volumes, “Stepan Kolchugin,” dealing with the Bolshevik underground before the revolution.
In his wartime novel, “The People Are Immortal,” which is considered to be one of his best, the author avoided romantic eloquence and sought to stress the human side of soldiers in battle.
His play, “We Believed the Pythagoreans,” was attacked in the Soviet press in 1946 during a party crackdown on arts and literature.
A second novel of the war, “For the Just Cause,” which deals with the defense of Stalingrad, was criticized in 1952 for underemphasizing the role of the party in winning the war. A corrected edition appeared in 1956.
Suggested Reading
Aciman, Alexander, Book Review: Vasily Grossman, the Great Forgotten Soviet Jewish Literary Genius of Exile and Betrayal, Lives Inside Us All, Tablet, October 23, 2017
Capshaw, Ron, The Scroll: The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee Was Created to Document the Crimes of Nazism Before They Were Murdered by Communists – For the crime of acknowledging Jewish identity, the committee’s members were killed in a Stalinist pogrom, Tablet, November 29, 2018
Epstein, Joseph, The Achievement of Vasily Grossman – Was he the greatest writer of the past century?, Commentary, May, 2019
Eskin, Blake, Book Review: Eyewitness – A collection of Vasily Grossman’s shorter work offers a chance to reassess the Soviet master’s life and legacy. A conversation with Grossman translator Robert Chandler, Tablet, December 8, 2010
Kirsch, Adam, Book Review: No Exit: Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman’s indispensable account of the horrors of Stalinism and the Holocaust, puts Jewishness at the heart of the 20th century, Tablet, November 30, 2011
Vapnyar, Lara, Book Review: Dispatches – How World War II turned a Soviet loyalist into a dissident novelist. Plus: An audio interview with the editor of A Writer at War, Tablet, January 30, 2006
Taubman, William, Book Review: Life and Fate: A biography of Vasiliy Grossman, the Soviet writer whose masterpiece compared Stalin’s regime to Hitler’s, The New York Times Book Review, p. 16, July 14, 2019