Василий Семенович Гроссман

Words in Print: Vasily Semyonovich Grossman (Василий Семенович Гроссман) – Book Review of “Life and Fate” (1987 Harper & Row Edition, with cover illustration by Christopher Zacharow), The New York Times, March 9, 1986

Almost a year and a half after the Collins Harvill publication of Life and Fate, Harper & Row released a paperback version of the novel with a striking cover illustration by Christopher Zacharow. The image depicts German and Soviet military helmets conjoined at their bases to form a symbolic guard tower – with the diminutive silhouette of a guard within – overlooking the electric fence of a concentration camp or anonymous camp in the gulag.

Zacharow’s composition is a simple and bold representation of the ideological parallels shared by totalitarian political and social systems, even as those systems are at war with one another.

But even with that, a nearly-glowing patch of light – in an otherwise darkened bluish-grayish-greenish sky – appears above the distant horizon of Zacharow’s painting.

Sunset or sunrise?

I would like to think the latter.

(Especially in this summer of the year 2020.)

Ronald Hingley’s extensive New York Times review of Life and Fate covers the novel and its author in terms of history, biography (Grossman’s biography, that is), the book’s social and cultural genesis as a work of literature – in both the Soviet Union and the “West” – in terms of its quality as literature, and (as noted by H.T. Willetts in his 1985 review). Hingley also notes the centrality of the Jewish identity of some of the protagonists, particularly that of Viktor Shturm, in terms of the book’s plot and message. (Or, messages, for they are several: overlapping, complementing, and reinforcing one another.) His review concludes with a brief excerpt from the book; I’ve included extracts of two other passages to enhance this post.

Given the novel’s significance and fame, I’d long wondered if it was ever serialized as a radio program or television mini-series. The answer – which I discovered upon creating this post – is emphatically “yes” (yes!) on both counts.

In 1981, BBC Radio 4 serialized Life and Fate as a 13-part series, produced and directed by Alison Hindell. Apparently still available at the BBC and last broadcast in September of 2011, the episodes are entitled:

Abarchuk
Journey
Novikov’s Story
Anna’s Letter
Fortress Stalingrad
Lieutenant Peter Bach
Krymov in Moscow
Viktor and Lyuda
Vera and Her Pilot
Viktor and the Academy
Krymov and Zhena – Lovers Once
A Hero of the Soviet Union
Building 6/1 – Those Who Were Still Alive

The cast – based on episode titles – included Sara Kestelman, Janet Suzman, Kenneth Branagh, and David Tennant.

In October of 2012, a 12-episode television mini-series of Life and Fate was produced in the Russian Federation, by Sergey Ursulyak. Available through Amazon Prime Video (19 5-star reviews), the episodes, ranging in length between 36 and 49 minutes and available with English-language subtitles, comprise:

On the Front
A Sea of Red Tape
Time for Love
Breakthrough Looms
Inside House Number 6
Fading Hopes
All Seems Lost
Fallout
In Moscow
Persecution
Suspicion and Influence
Requiem for Stalingrad

You can view and read a review of the series at the YouTube Stalingrad Battle Data channel, which includes this notable comment:

“The film raises fundamental questions behind each individual story, but almost always it comes down to this one: how to remain humane in inhumane conditions, oppressed from all sides, with enemies in front as well as behind you.

This is simply one of the very best cast, acted and directed series on WWII and the Soviet era in general. Excellently played and directed, it’s not only a very good war film, it’s a very good film in absolute. It’s also an exploration of human nature, most characters having a deep personality and expressing it just fine.”

(Well, now that I’ve finished the latest season of The Expanse, I have something new to look forward to…)

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Stalingrad and Stalin’s Terror

LIFE AND FATE
By Vasily Grossman
Translated by Robert Chandler
880 pp New York Harper & Row $22.50

By Ronald Hingley

The New York Times Book Review
March 9, 1986

Cover illustration of Harper & Row edition by Christopher Zacharow (Marian C. Zacharow). You can view a full view of the painting – it’s quite striking – at Fine Art America, the version above having been cropped to conform to the proportions of the book’s cover.

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(Vasiliy Grossman, in a wartime portrait on the book jacket of The Years of War.)

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AN important novel written in the Soviet Union will almost certainly prove unpublishable there, but it will usually find its way to the West sooner or later. In the case of Vasily Grossman’s “Life and Fate” this has happened much later rather than sooner. Grossman’s novel was completed in I960. In other words it was written at about the same time as Boris Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago,” the work with which the practice of smuggling out illicit writings began 30 years ago.

“Life and Fate” hinges on the closing phase of the Battle of Stalingrad in the bleak winter of 1942-43, when the Soviet Army held and then routed the German invader on the Volga. But the action is by no means confined to that river. It also ranges through Soviet and German-occupied Eastern Europe, giving detailed vistas of front and rear, depicting mass atrocities and penal procedures on both sides. The text is nearly 900 pages and the named characters are legion.

Grossman’s faults are the usual faults Socialist Realists as exemplified in hundreds of run-of-the-mill Soviet works of fiction published over the last half century. The extraordinary thing is to find this puddingy and conformist technique employed by an author who has so triumphantly rejected the political conformism that is supposed to go with the technique. And the novel indeed does triumph in the end, defects and all, stodge or no stodge. It triumphs through the high seriousness of Grossman’s grand theme and through his compelling historical, moral and political preoccupations.

Notable among these is his faith in erratic, spontaneous, unscripted human kindness, as preached from inside a German death camp by a certain Ikonnikov, one of those saintly, philosophizing half-wits so beloved of Russian fiction writers. Such (as it were) extracurricular kindness is seen as an ineradicable human characteristic. It is presented as the sole guarantee that victory need not go in the end to the world’s great cruel ideologies, among which Ikonnikov does not hesitate to include Christianity alongside Marxism and Nazism. The thesis may sound trite, but Grossman illustrates it poignantly.

The prehistory of the book goes back to 1943, when Grossman began work on an earlier, widely forgotten novel entitled “For a Just Cause.” That book hinges on the opening phase of the Battle of Stalingrad, it was published in Moscow in 1952, and Grossman conceived it as the first part of a double-decker work of which “Life and Fate” was to form the second. As things worked out, it was not until 1980 that “Life and Fate” first achieved full publication in Russian, in Lausanne, Switzerland. And only now do we at last haw it in English translation.

What of the relations between these two linked novels? Subplots and major characters straddle them, though not to the extent of making the sequel impenetrably obscure to those ignorant of the predecessor. Closely linked-in this way, the two works yet offer a sharp contrast in political attitude. It is a contrast between the conformism of the earlier volume and the militant nonconformism of the later.

“For a Just Cause” was only another sample of Socialist Realist (that is, caponized) fiction, and it was even described as a potential Stalin Prize winner. True, the first published version came under attack and had to be rewritten. But that happened even to the most orthodox of Stalinist authors. And Grossman’s revised text was soon appearing in the Soviet Union. Its author never became what is now known as a dissident. Nor did he ever stray far from favor with authority. He served on the presidium of the Soviet Writers’ Union for 10 years until his death in 1964. He also won an official decoration, the Banner of Labor, for his writings.

THUS, the news that he was working on a sequel to “For a Just Cause” in the late 1950s would have been unlikely to create a stir in the Soviet Union or anywhere else. All that could be expected was another gelded fictional brontosaurus like its predecessor, the umpteenth such carcass to litter the landscape of officially approved Soviet literature. Who was to suspect that there was another, a secret, Grossman, a Grossman painfully aware that his own Government was responsible for a large share of the appalling sufferings that assailed Europe during his middle life? Here, it turns out, was a loather of totalitarianism in both its guises, the Stalinist no less than the Hitlerite. “Life and Fate” is a passionate onslaught against state-sponsored political terror.

Having finished the novel, Grossman even dared to offer it for Soviet publication, only to have it piously rejected as anti-Soviet by the journal to which it had been submitted. Then two K.G.B. officers burst into the author’s home and removed every shred of paper and other material – including used typewriter ribbons – with any conceivable bearing on “Life and Fate.” Brooding on his loss and disinclined to re-create half a million words from memory, the author implored the party leadership to order the return of his typescript. His answer came from the ideological satrap Mikhail Suslov: there could be no question of publishing the novel for another 200 years. That is a telling tribute to its credentials, both as a work of art and as a politically heretical text.

When Grossman died a year or two later, he could have no reason to suppose that his most inflammatory product would ever see the light of day. Yet a microfilm of his text somehow survived – these things do happen in Russia – and was eventually spirited abroad.

In portraying Hitlerite and Stalinist totalitarianism as closely resembling each other, the novel is not unique among Soviet-banned works. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has made a similar point, just as he has also tended to agree with Grossman in suggesting that Lenin rather than Stalin was the true founder of Soviet-style totalitarianism. But Grossman deploys these important arguments with a force and slant all his own.

His book is also remarkable for the attention given, by an author himself Jewish, to the Jewish situation. The hero is a Soviet Jewish nuclear physicist. Soviet persecution of Jews is a major theme – a shade anachronistical, for attitudes more characteristic of the Soviet Union in the late 40s are here attributed to the war period. But all that is nothing, of course, compared with the pages on the sufferings of Jews caught up in Hitler’s “final solution.” For example, the reader of “Life and Fate” enters a gas chamber and breathes in an asphyxiant, the notorious gas Zyklon B. You need a steady nerve to read parts of this novel.

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The fate of many of them seemed so poignantly sad
that to speak of them in even the most tender, quiet, kind words
would have been like touching a heart torn open
with a rough and insensitive hand.
It was really quite impossible to speak of them at all..

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Grossman also pictures the horrors of the Soviet death camps and takes the reader inside the unspeakable Lubyanka Pitson in Moscow. His account of Soviet life – penal, military and civilian – is encyclopedic and unblinkered. On the military side it embraces adventures in an encircled strongpoint in Stalingrad – artillery bombardments, air raids, hand-to-hand fighting, the relations between commanders and military commissars and life in the army on the move and in the rear areas. Then there are the experiences of civilians – in the provinces, in evacuation to the temporary wartime capital, Kuibyshev, and in Moscow itself. Love affairs, divorces, the problems of acquiring a ration card or a residence permit – they are all here, the tragic and the trivial side by side.

In is all enormously impressive too, but the level is decidedly uneven. And there is so very, very much of everything. One wonders, not for the first time, why Russian authors are so relentlessly committed to fictional gigantism. One cynical explanation is that they are perverted for life because they are paid by the page and not on the basis of sales. A less cynical explanation puts it all down to their wish to emulate Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” But when Robert Chandler, the workmanlike translator of “Life and Fate,” calls it, in his preface, “the true ‘War and Peace’ of this century,” I incline to cavil, though I can see why he thinks so. For example, Grossman does vie with Tolstoy in embracing so many events and personages of historical importance: Stalin, Hitler, Eichmann and not a few real-life Soviet generals are among his minor characters. But his chronological range is far more restricted than Tolstoy’s. Then again, Tolstoy’s great novel has itself been criticized as loosely shaped. But it does at least have a shape of sorts – more so, anyway, than Grossman’s sprawling work. This book has little in the way of compelling plot line, while samples of narrative skill are all too sparse. A little suspense here, the occasional surprise there, the odd humorous or sarcastic touch: it doesn’t add up to much in the way of vibrancy.

Above all Grossman lacks Tolstoy’s flair for characterization, as do so many other modern Russian fiction writers. Whether we think of the endless minor figures in the novel, introduced so lavishly as to put even “War and Peace” in the shade, or of the handful of major male heroes, or of the comparably featureless Lyudmilas, Yevgenias and Alexandra Vladimirovnas – everywhere we find the inability to breathe full conviction into the printed word. The man can make residence permits, army rations, booze-ups in dugouts, gas chambers and mass graves credible. What a pity, then, that he can’t do the same for human beings. Yes, yes, he does hand out various physical characteristics, a ginger-colored mustache here, a twitching right eye there. But his brain children largely tend to be stillborn.

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Disposition of Soviet and German forces during Battle of Stalingrad, as an explanatory map in Harper & Row 1987 paperback edition of Life and Fate.

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This is true even of the novel’s main character, the nuclear physicist Viktor Shtrum. Here is a politically ambivalent figure given to dropping indiscreet remarks. His star seems ascendant when he makes a crucial discovery in theoretical physics, but he soon becomes the target for an anti-Semitic witch hunt at his institute. Only at the last moment, when he seems firmly marked as concentration camp fodder, is he unexpectedly rescued by one of Stalin’s famous deus ex machina telephone calls. This redeems Shtrum’s position. But it also – more significantly – effects his ideological seduction from the status of political waverer to that of enthusiastic pillar of the scientific establishment. Perhaps Grossman is here apologizing, through his hero, for his own many accommodations with the literary establishment, which so richly rewarded him. In the light of such speculations Shtrum’s dilemmas become considerably more fascinating than Shtrum himself.

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But an invisible force was crushing him.
He could feel its weight, its hypnotic power;
it was forcing him to think as it wanted, to write as it dictated.
This force was inside him;
it could dissolve his will and cause his heart to stop beating;
it came between him and his family;
it insinuated itself into his past, into his childhood memories.
He began to feel that he really was untalented and boring,
someone who wore out the people around him with dull chatter.
Even his work seemed to have grown dull,
to be covered with a layer of dust;
the thought of it no longer filled him with light and joy.
Only people who have never felt such a force themselves
can be surprised that others submit to it.
Those who have felt it, on the other hand,
feel astonished that a man can rebel against it even for a moment
– with one sudden word of anger,
one timid gesture of protest.

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THANKS are due to Robert Chandler for providing a clear account of the novel’s history. Too often illicit Soviet writings are dumped in front of the Western reader with the bare title, author’s name and translator’s name, and the customary blurb comparing the contents to Tolstoy, Chekhov, Shakespeare or whomever – that is all. But about material emanating from such a fuzzy context we badly need hard information, and we get that kind of information here.

Mr. Chandler’s long labors have made available a work that substantially justifies his own description of it as “the most complete portrait of Stalinist Russia we have or are ever likely to have.” It is, at very least, a significant addition to the great library of smuggled Russian works by Pasternak and his many successors, works written in the Soviet Union but destined almost exclusively for the un-Kremlinized reader.

Everyone Remembered 1937

Scientific research in the country had been discussed by the Central Committee. When Shcherbakov had proposed a reduction in the Academy’s budget, Stalin had shaken his head and said: “No, we’re not talking about making soap. We are not going to economize on the Academy.” Everyone expected a considerable improvement in the position of scientists… A few days later an important botanist was arrested, Chetyerikov the geneticist. There were various rumours about the reason for his arrest… Since the beginning of the war there had been relatively little talk of political arrests. Many people, Viktor among them, thought that they were a thing of the past. Now everyone remembered 1937: the daily roll-call of people arrested during the night, people phoning each other up with the news….

Viktor remembered the names of dozens of people who had left and never returned: Academician Vavilov, Vize, Osip Mandelstam, Babel, Boris Pilnyak, Meyerhold, the bacteriologists Korshunov and Zlatogorov, Professor Pletnyov, Doctor Levin.

Was all this going to begin again? Would one’s heart sink, even after the war, when one heard footsteps or a car horn during the night?

How difficult it was to reconcile such things with the war for freedom!

From “Life and Fate”

Ronald Hingley’s most recent books are “Pasternak,” a biography, and “Nightingale Fever,” a study of four 20th-century Russian poets.

Suggested Readings

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

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

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

Grossman’s Life and Fate to be Serialised by the BBC, at Russian Books

Grossman’s War: Life and Fate, at BBC

Life and Fate: vivid, heartbreaking, illuminating and utterly brilliant, at The Guardian

Life And Fate: probably the best Stalingrad movie so far, at Stalingrad Battle Date

Life and Fate, at Internet Movie Database

Words in Print: Vasily Semyonovich Grossman (Василий Семенович Гроссман) – Book Review of “Life and Fate”, December 19, 1985

Not long after the appearance of Elaine Feinstein’s review of Life and Fate, the novel was reviewed by H.T. Willetts – albeit, I don’t know the name of the publication in which this review actually appeared. (Veritably: Oops!) Mr. Willetts’ review also pertained to the Collins Harvill’ edition of the book.

Like Elaine Feinstein, Mr. Willetts’ focuses on the historical, social, and political context of the work’s creation and eventual publication, while taking special note of the personal and moral quandaries faced by the novel’s central characters, particularly the physicist Viktor Shtrum. He also notes how Grossman combines individuation of his protagonists with a multi-faceted depiction of (for instance) the battle for Stalingrad.

The photograph which appears in this post – not from Willett’s original review! – provides a good view of Grossman while serving as a correspondent in the Soviet Army. Though I have no information about the date and location of the image, the demolished buildings behind in the background- one of which carries a sign ending in the letters “…rie, 10” suggest that the photo was taken within Germany in 1945. The image is evidently one of a set of two (or more?) such photos taken at the same moment; you can view its counterpart at my blog post for Elaine Feinstein’s 1985 review of Life and Fate.

You may find interest in Grossman’s military award citation for The Order of the Red Star (Ordenu Krasnaya Zvezda – Ордену Красная Звезда), dated 9 December 1942, which is available at Heroic Feats of the People (Podvig Naroda- Подвиг Народа). This citation specifically mentions Grossman’s works “The People are Immortal,” “The Battle of Stalingrad”, “Stalingrad Crossing”, and “Stalingrad Story”.

Here’s the citation:

You can read an English-language translation of the award citation here.

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Overwhelming images of war

FICTION
H.T. Willetts
LIFE AND FATE By Vasily Grossman
Translated by Robert Chandler
Collins Harvill. £15

December 19, 1985

(Photograph accompanying Zelda Gamson’s essay of May 23, 2015 “The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman“, at Jewish Currents.)

Life and Fate is the richest and most vivid account to be found of what the Second World War meant to the Soviet Union. Like all Soviet “epics”, ‘it is a mosaic – but not a bitter one. Grossman does not, as Ehrenburg did in the thirties, drag in new characters and invent gratuitous episodes because he cannot keep the story going. His characters are all connected, closely or by a long and intricate chain of circumstances, with the central figures, the Shaposhnikov sisters: we meet husbands, ex-husbands, children, ex-lovers … but also the politicos and commanders on whom the fate of their kin and friends depends … and the German officers and epauletted torturers who have many of their kin and friends under their paws. The scene shifts, back and forth, rapidly, but never confusingly, from the Stalingrad front to the reserve armies in the rear, to the evacuees in Kuibyshev, to those privileged to return from Kuibyshev to Moscow, to a German POW camp, to a Jewish ghetto, a Jewish column en route from the death camps, to Auschwitz, even, for a brief glimpse, to a frightened Hitler at his field HQ after the Stalingrad reversal.

Places are as solidly realized as people – above all war-shattered Stalingrad (Grossman was there throughout as a war correspondent). I shall never forget this utterly convincing and startlingly vivid picture of the (semi-barbaric) life of soldiers and workers among the rubble and the wrecked machines. We attend conferences at HQs (even Army HQs, with unloving portrayals of famous generals like Chuikov and Eremenko), but military operations are seen mostly at micro-level: from the snipers’ outposts, or the forward tanks in the great counterattack – the only vantage points from which the realities of war can be felt. In another extraordinary feat of descriptive writing the construction and equipment of Auschwitz are described in careful, dispassionate detail, as though what was before us was the building of a canning plant in a very superior Soviet “production novel” of the thirties. The effect is flesh-creeping – and the climax, with the plant in use, and its operatives individualized, is overwhelmingly macabre.

The novel owes much of its tragic power to Grossman’s understanding of the ambivalence of patriotism. He sees many resemblances between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany – and the most fateful was the capture and perversion of patriotic feeling by unscrupulous politicians. This theme is fascinatingly developed in his account of relations between the real soldiers and the political officers at the front. Here is the supreme irony: the Soviet regime survived because it let patriotism, simple Russian patriotism, have its head – then took control of it, and perverted it to other purposes. No book except Gulag has so enlarged my understanding of the way in which the regime distorts ordinary human relations – and the extent to which the regime was produced and is sustained by banal and venal human selfishness and callousness.

A by-product of Stalinist nationalism was the anti-semitism which received tacit, then more explicit official encouragement as the war drew to its end. It is in this context that we see Grossman’s greatest triumph over the temptations of his material. The atomic physicist, Shtrum is almost destroyed by a tidal wave of official anti-semitism, but plucked to safety by Stalin in person, who knows that atomic physics and anti-semitism both have their (limited) uses. Grossman handles Shtrum’s story with irony and compassion. Nobly, even self-destructively (to his family’s exasperation), defiant while he is persecuted, Shtrum, once “vindicated”, tries to shut his mind to doubt and enjoy his success.

No more powerful war novel has come from any country for many years past.

Suggested Readings

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

Epstein, Joseph, The Achievement of Vasily Grossman – Was he the greatest writer of the past century?, Commentary, May, 2019

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

Words in Print: Vasily Semyonovich Grossman (Василий Семенович Гроссман) – Book Review of “Life and Fate”, The New York Times, November 22, 1985

Here’s Elaine Feinstein’s New York Times’ review of Vasily Grossman’s magnum opus Life and Fate, as published by Collins Harvill in 1985. I believe that the Collins’ edition of the book was the work’s first English-language publication.

Notice that Feinstein doesn’t address aspects of the work as literature (all books, regardless of the author, have their merits, idosyncracies, and foibles), instead focusing on the novel more in terms of its historical context – “history” history, and, literary history – and the characters who appear in its many pages.

The photograph which appears in this post – certainly not in the original book review! – provides an emblematic view of Grossman during his service as a correspondent in the Soviet Army. Though I possess no information about the picture’s date and location, the demolished buildings in the background – on one of which appears a sign ending with the letters “…rie, 10” suggest that the photo was taken in Germany. The image is evidently one of a set of two (or more?) such photos taken at the same moment; you can view its counterpart at my blog post for H.T. Willett’s 1985 review of Life and Fate.

In terms of Grossman’s military service, you may find interest in his military award citation for The Order of the Red Star (Ordenu Krasnaya Zvezda – Ордену Красная Звезда), dated 9 December 1942, which is available at Heroic Feats of the People (Podvig Naroda- Подвиг Народа). This document specifically mentions Grossman’s works “The People are Immortal,” “The Battle of Stalingrad”, “Stalingrad Crossing”, and “Stalingrad Story”.

The citation also appears below:

The English-language translation of the award citation can be found here.

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From Workplace and Battlefield

Elaine Feinstein
VASILY GROSSMAN
Life and Fate
Translated by Robert Chandler
880pp. Collins. £15.
0002614545

November 22, 1985

(Photograph accompanying Alexander Anichkin’s blog post of January 31, 2011 “Grossman’s Life and Fate to be Serialised by the BBC“, at Tetradki – A Russian Review of Books.)

Through the narrative of Evgenia Ginzburg, the camp stories of Shalamov, and the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam, we have learnt a good deal of what it meant to live in Stalin’s Russia during the years, of the Terror; but the Great Patriotic War, in which Hitler was turned back at Stalingrad, has largely remained sacred in our imagination. The books in which .Solzhenitsyn attempts most stridently to persuade us that the fight against Communism was, even at that point, more vital to our civilization than the struggle against Nazism, have never seemed to be his best. This extraordinary novel by Vasily Grossman is set precisely at the historical moment when the, outcome of the house-to-house fighting, at the height of the struggle, is still in doubt. And as the book fans out to follow the fortunes of an extended family network, it poses a terrible question. Could any military victory mean much, given what we now know men and women are capable of doing to one another? It is important to understand that this question is asked by a man altogether inside the Soviet world; a writer discovered by Gorky, working alongside Ehrenburg; a man who understands contemporary science well enough to set a figure recalling Lev Davidovich Landau, a genius of theoretical physics, at the heart of his book; a man who came to think of himself as a Jew only with the death of his mother at German hands.

As it stands, the book is a sprawling giant, which might well have been re-worked by the author if his manuscripts had not been confiscated when he submitted the novel for publication. (He died in 1964.) It remains as remarkable a document of the conflicts of daily working lives under political and moral stress as we are likely to be given. Grossman is a writer untouched by Modernism. Essentially (since Socialist Realism always took the nineteenth-century novel as its pattern) he invites comparison with Tolstoy throughout his book. Unlike most writers who Warrant that comparison through the sheer scope of their material, Grossman occasionally shows a delicacy of local observation and a quality of insight which genuinely recall War and Peace. There is a particular freshness in the letter from Anna Semyovna, dismissed with other Jews from her hospital post and herded into a ghetto, hurt most by the thought of ending her life far away from her son. Not every character that enters the battlefield has the same vitality. The strength of Grossman’s work, however (and this is an overwhelmingly powerful novel), lies in his understanding both the multiplicity of human bitterness and the occasional miracles of kindness.

At the centre of the book, the mathematician Viktor Shtrum (to whom Grossman has given much of his own experience) lives with his wife Lyudmila. He cannot help reproaching her for her coldness towards his Jewish mother, just as she cannot help resenting his indifference towards her son from an earlier marriage. Lyudmila’s bitterness is fixed forever when her son dies at the front on a surgeon’s table. When she meets the surgeon, she recognizes his need for the comfort of her forgiveness. The sensitivity of such understanding is never extended to her husband.

For all his brilliance, Shtrum is at risk inside the laboratory; his wife refuses to share either his triumphs or his humiliations. When he is emboldened by nomination for a Stalin Prize to telephone a superior who usually ignores him, only to find he has been excluded from an evening entertainment, she taunts him with having got off on the wrong foot. And when he is explicitly accused of “dragging Science into a swamp of Talmudic abstractions”, the only person he can turn to is his colleague Chepyzhin, a character clearly based on the Cambridge-trained physicist, Kapitza, who refused to take part in any research relating to nuclear fission.

Chepyzhin’s grounds for such a refusal, in Grossman’s interpretation, go to the heart of human weakness. Viktor’s colleagues are not wicked or stupid, but they cannot be trusted. As Chepyzhin puts it: “You said yourself that man is not yet kind enough or wise enough to lead a rational life.” Of the many memorable episodes, few are more moving than the sudden intimacy of conversation between Shtrum and Chepyzhin, two men who take the risk of trusting one another and thereafter talk as greedily as “an invalid who can think of nothing but his illness”.

Not everyone is so fortunate. Betrayal is commonplace and there is always guilt. Mostovskoy, an Old Communist in a German POW camp, recognizes his own features in the face of his weary interrogator; and another Old Comrade discovers, in the Lubyanka, that innocence is no defence against torture. Grossman puts his deepest hopes into the mouth of an unhinged holy fool, Ikonnikov, who is executed because he refuses to take part in building an extermination camp. Grossman’s triumph is to make it seem irrelevant which monstrous State demanded that he should do so.”

Suggested Readings

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

Epstein, Joseph, The Achievement of Vasily Grossman – Was he the greatest writer of the past century?, Commentary, May, 2019

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

Words in Print: Vasily Semyonovich Grossman (Василий Семенович Гроссман) – Book Review of “Forever Flowing”, February 23, 1973

Another review of Forever Flowing, albeit I don’t know the publication in which this item actually appeared! Brief like Thomas Lask’s 1 April 1972 review in the New York Times, this anonymous reviewer focused upon the book from a literary – and thus not too complimentary – vantage point.

________________________________________

Synthesis with Slaves

VASILY GROSSMAN
Forever Flowing
Translated by Thomas P. Whitney
217 pp Andre Deutsch £ 2.25

February 23, 1973

(Photograph accompanying “Stalingrad“, by Vasily Grossman, at Granta, November 15, 2018.)

Vasily Semenovich Grossman was an important Russian writer, little known in the West, who was born in 1905, established himself as a novelist before he was thirty, and became famous during the Second World War for some impressive works of reportage and for a novel, The People Is Immortal, which rose above the prevailing level of social patriotism. Despite his considerable contributions to Soviet literature, however, he got into trouble towards the end of Stalin’s life, when his old play If One Believes the Pythagoreans and his new novel, For The Just Cause, were suppressed. After Stalin’s death he spent several years writing a bitterly subversive book called Everything Flows, which couldn’t possibly be published in Russia and was smuggled abroad after his death in 1964. It was published in Germany in 1970, and now appears here in a very stiff American translation.

The new title, Forever Flowing, is rather misleading. Grossman was of course quoting one of the old Heraclitan tags, which is repeated in the book, together with a grim parody of another instead of “You cannot step into the same river twice.” He says, “You cannot get into the same prison train twice.” The whole book, in fact, is permeated with the metaphysical ideas attributed to Heraclitus more than 2,000 years ago; and, while this destroys its literary quality, it gives it a special historical and philosophical interest.

Everything Flows is not really a novel – or rather, it begins as a novel, describing one of the “Returners” (возвращающиеся – vozvrashchayushchiesya) a man who has come back from the labour camps after thirty years and finds that everything has flowed, everyone has changed, and the revolutionary enthusiasm of the old days has turned into sour disillusion and narrow careerism; but it soon breaks down into a series of semi-fictional stories about various aspects of the Stalinist dictatorship which are never properly drawn together but are linked and eventually overshadowed by a long meditation on the meaning and purpose the phenomenon of Stalinism.

Grossman is remarkable among Soviet writers fur seeing this not as some kind of error in development or interruption of progress hut as an essential culmination of the whole course of Russian history. He sees Stalin as the true successor of Lenin, and Lenin as the destroyer of the liberty which had become possible for the first time in 1917. Lenin is indicted for creating a synthesis of “socialism and unfreedom”, which derives from the Tsarist tradition of progress plus serfdom, embodied above all by Peter the Great. This is a familiar theme in the West, but in Russia it is rank heresy, and it would be interesting to know in what circumstances Grossman came to such a conclusion.

Some of the stories have considerable power, especially those about Masha, the wife of an arrested man who is arrested in turn and suffers and dies in the camps, and about Anna, the Party activist who witnesses the Ukrainian famine at the beginning of the 1930s during the compulsory collectivization of the land. But the main story, about Ivan, the hero whose life has been ruined by the regime, is weak, and the whole hook leaves an impression of artistic confusion mixed with intellectual conviction of a disturbing kind.

Everything flows, and yet remains tile same: tyrannies rise and fall, but tyranny lasts forever. Grossman hints that liberty will come in the end, but it is hard to see how this fits into his scheme, and the terrible vision of Russia enduring perpetual slavery is the most striking feature of the hook. It is a pity that, in spite of the time he spent on it, Grossman didn’t manage to make it as good as it deserved to be.

Suggested Readings

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

Epstein, Joseph, The Achievement of Vasily Grossman – Was he the greatest writer of the past century?, Commentary, May, 2019.

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

Words in Print: Vasily Semyonovich Grossman (Василий Семенович Гроссман) – Book Review of “Forever Flowing”, The New York Times, March 26, 1972 [Daniel Maffia]

Here’s Irving Howe’s 1972 New York Times review of Vasily Grossman’s Forever Flowing, with artist Daniel Maffia’s accompanying illustration.

Maffia’s art juxtaposes a portrait of Grossman with the image of a train, the latter symbolic of the book’s opening pages, which describe the journey of protagonist Ivan Grigoryevich (if he is actually a protagonist, for he seems far more having been acted upon than acting) back to Moscow after his release from decades of imprisonment in the Gulag.

While Grossman’s better known and far lengthier Life and Fate features characters fully “fleshed out” in terms of names and identities (personal history, life experiences, and relationships with family and friends) could the strikingly generic Russian name “Ivan Grigoryevich” – consisting solely of a given name and patronymic, thus lacking any connotation of nationality – have been an effort to create within one character a literary template for universal themes of freedom and justice?

Having read both novels, I find a comparison between them to be strikingly difficult because of dissimilarities in their length, literary structure, scope of action, and the disparity between the depth of character development in Life and Fate, versus the near one-dimensionality of characters in Forever Flowing. In addition, the books differ through Grossman’s focus within Life and Fate on the historical experience of the Jews of Russia (both civilian and military) within the context of the Second World War, against Forever Flowing’s universality, Jewish themes being apparent in only a single, searing, passage.

Yet, withall, I liked Forever Flowing more than Life and Fate, for despite the former’s lack of cohesion (Howe is entirely correct in his appraisal, “…he wrote out of so urgent a passion that he brushed aside the formal niceties of composition, these chapters have to be taken as set-pieces not well integrated with the plot.”) underlying themes are approached with a degree of directness and simplicity that is striking in effect and intensity.

Regardless and even because of their stylistic differences, both books are worthy of reading and contemplation.

________________________________________

A bold underground novel of the split Russian soul

Forever Flowing
By Vasily Grossman.
Translated from the Russian by Thomas P. Whitney.
247 pp. New York: Harper & Row. $6.95.

By IRVING HOWE

The New York Times Book Review
March 26, 1972

For two centuries now, under czars and commissars, Russia has given us the most brutal autocracy and brilliant literature. During the last 20 years its best writing has come from poets, novelists and essayists who cannot publish in their own country but whose work, in defiance of the bureaucratic fist, finds its way into the West

Some of these writings, like Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel, “The First Circle,” Andrei Sinyavsky’s essay, “On Socialist Realism,” and Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir, “Hope Against Hope,” are masterpieces. Their strength comes not merely from a high order of individual talent, but from the unconditional attachment to freedom that is the animating idea of Russian underground literature (samizdat). Indeed, at a time when some Western intellectuals have again yielded themselves to authoritarian dogmas and charismatic dictators, it is these brave writers of the East – not only Russians but also Poles like Leszek Kolakowski and Yugoslavs like Milovan Djilas – who best uphold the values of independence, freedom, dissent.

Vasily Grossman’s “Forever Flowing,” written shortly before his death in 1964, is another of these remarkable books, known only to a few friends (and no doubt the secret police). It is a novel portraying the experiences and reflections of a man who returns to Moscow after 30 years in the Siberian labor camps; it contains pungent discussions of political ideas; and it trembles with the vision of freedom. At least in this book, Grossman is not so good a novelist as Solzhenitsyn or smooth an essayist as Sinyavsky. Yet in one major respect his book seems the boldest to emerge from the suppressed literature of Russia: It is the first, to my knowledge, that comes to grips with the myth of Lenin.

Grossman’s career holds remarkable interest, precisely because for so long a time it was quite ordinary. He began to publish in the 30s, when a novella of his attracted the favor of Maxim Gorky. Other writings established him as a gifted novelist who was especially admired by Russian literary people for his style. Apparently a decent man, he tried to maintain his integrity and nurture his talent during the Stalin years without paying too great a price in shame. Neither heroic nor slavish, he remained silent when he had to, but meanwhile kept his mind alive, storing up explosive ideas and impressions.

In 1946 he published a play, “If You Believe the Pythagoreans,” that was denounced by the party-line critics, and then, during the anti-Semitic campaign against “homeless cosmopolites.” he was attacked again Konstantin Paustovsky, the distinguished Russian writer, privately told a friend in the West that in these years Grossman wrote a novel which he, Paustovsky, considered a masterpiece but that the manuscript was confiscated by the secret police and no copies were allowed to remain. Nevertheless, Grossman kept writing “for the drawer,” completing “Forever Flowing,” not a masterpiece but a notable book, in his final years.

What seems most striking about his career is that, in ways not entirely clear from a distance, a man like Grossman could experience a major intellectual and moral transformation over a period of time – by himself? together with friends? – in which the received ideology of the Communist state was discarded and the scorned, “obsolete” values of liberalism or social democracy became a cherished possession. Reading the pages of “Forever Flowing” with their glow of humane reflectiveness, one wonders: How did people like Grossman hack their way out of the ideological jungle in which circumstances had trapped them? How, in their enforced isolation, did they find a path, and by no means uncritically, to the best of Western thought? Whatever the answers, one is almost tempted after reading this book to accept Grossman’s view – a view not exactly encouraged by recent history – that there is a natural, indestructible striving toward freedom inherent in human nature.”

“Forever Flowing” begins in a familiar manner: a worn old man is on a westward-moving train to Moscow. Mocked by the louts and officials who share his compartment, he keeps his silence. Ivan Grigoryevich is returning from the camps to which, half a life earlier, he had been sent because of an impulsive student speech deviating from Communist orthodoxy. The figure of the returned prisoner is a central one in recent Russian writing: the victim, the survivor, the man who remembers.

Ivan visits his cousin and boyhood chum, Nikolai, a small-talented scientist who has toadied a little over the years and now lives in “a world of parquet floors, glass-enclosed bookcases, paintings and chandeliers.” One man well-fed, smug, and uneasy; the other gaunt, tormented and irritable. Ivan makes no accusations. It is his very silence that provokes Nikolai into self-defense: “I went through trials and tribulations,” though “of course I did not ring out like Herzen’s bell.” It is hopeless, a dialogue of the deaf. What can a man from the camps say to a man with an apartment?

Beyond these acrid, sharply-contoured opening chapters, “Forever Flowing” has little plot. Ivan visits Leningrad, meets Pinegin, a former colleague, now a dignified gentleman with a fine coat. “Don’t worry,” bursts out Ivan in anticipation of a rebuff,”… like you, I, too, have a passport.” Pinegin replies with dignity: “When I run into an old friend, I am not in the habit of making inquiries about his passport” It sounds good, a word of solidarity at last. Later, we learn it was Pinegin who had denounced Ivan.

Ivan moves to a town in southern Russia, works as a laborer, meets a woman also worn out by suffering. She lived through Stalin’s campaign against the kulaks and the forced collectivization. They have a few moments together, not exactly of happiness, but of the peace that comes when people can at last speak with honesty. The woman dies. Ivan is again alone, with his thoughts and questions, “gray, bent and changeless.”

Woven through this simple story are linked segments of incident and passages of reflection. Two scenes are especially strong. One is an imaginary trial, perhaps running through Ivan’s mind, in which the informers who had sent millions to the camps are now arraigned. Each speaks freely, from his own motives, for his own skin. Especially forceful is “the well-educated informer”:

“Why are you determined to expose particularly those like us who are weak? Begin with the state. Try it! After all, our sin is its sin. Pass judgment on it! Fearlessly, out in the open. … And then explain one other thing, if you please. Why have you waited till now? You knew us all in Stalin’s lifetime. You used to greet us cordially then and waited to be received at the doors of our offices.”

The other scene, rich with Dostoevskian echoes, consists of Ivan’s recollections of a critical moment in prison. Next to him lay “the most intelligent of all the men I ran into. But his mind was frightening. Not because it was evil [but because] he refused to accept my faith in freedom.” This fellow-prisoner believed “in the law of the conservation of violence.” The history of life, he insisted, “is the history of violence triumphant. It is eternal and indestructible.” To Ivan the pain of these words seemed greater than the pain of the interrogator’s blows a few hours earlier. “They dragged me off again to interrogation … I felt relieved. I believed again in the inevitability of freedom.”

The chapters of intellectual reflection are meant no doubt to be taken as the thoughts of Ivan. But perhaps because Vasily Grossman could not properly finish his book or perhaps because he wrote out of so urgent a passion that he brushed aside the formal niceties of composition, these chapters have to be taken as set-pieces not well integrated with the plot. No matter; they are striking in their own right.

Grossman is fascinated by the paradox that runs through the whole Russian revolutionary movement How can it be that in the same people there exists a “meekness and readiness to endure suffering … unequaled since the epoch of the first Christians” together with “contempt for and disregard of human suffering, subservience to abstract theories, the determination to annihilate not merely enemies but those comrades who deviated even slightly front complete acceptance of the particular abstraction …”? Grossman finds his answer in the tradition of Russian messianism, a “sectarian determinism, the readiness to suppress today’s living freedom for the sake of an imaginary freedom tomorrow.”

In a powerful sketch of Lenin, he connects the revolutionary leader with this two-sided tradition: the gentle selfless man who loved music and showed tenderness toward friends, and the harsh politician who, in rage against heresies, laid the basis for the party-state dictatorship. This kind of revolutionary Grossman sees as a man who fancies himself a surgeon of history: “His soul is really in his knife.” Grossman’s Stalin reduced Leninism to its political essentials.

But Grossman does not stop there. Through a confrontation with those notions of a unique Russian destiny that course through the work of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as well as, less assertively, Solzhenitsyn, he performs a first-rate intellectual service. The great Russian writers, both the reactionaries and some revolutionaries, professed to find unique qualities in the Russian soul which they regarded as the last unsullied vessel of Christian purity; they sneered, too often and with disastrous results, at the liberalism of the West. All these prophets “failed to see that the particular qualities of the Russian soul did not derive from freedom, and that the Russian soul had been a slave for a thousand years.” And then a crucial passage:

“In the Russian fascination with Byzantine, ascetic purity, with Christian meekness, lives the unwitting admission of the permanence of Russian slavery. The sources of this Christian meekness, and gentleness, of this Byzantine, ascetic purity, are the same as those of Leninist passion, fanaticism, and intolerance.”

This is the voice of a “Westerner,” the kind of Russian intellectual who, alas, never has had enough influence in his own country. But now, after the ordeal of the past half-century, what Grossman wrote in the privacy of his study, perhaps without expecting that it would ever be published, takes on the strength of a central truth. It is, I think, the one supremely revolutionary idea: that without democratic freedoms no society, whether it calls itself capitalist or socialist, whether it has an industrialized or backward economy, can be tolerable

It is also the one permanently revolutionary idea, for no one can say with assurance that it will survive our century and every thoughtful man knows that it will always have a precarious life, its triumph never assured.

Suggested Readings

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

Epstein, Joseph, The Achievement of Vasily Grossman – Was he the greatest writer of the past century?, Commentary, May, 2019.

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

Words in Print: Vasily Semyonovich Grossman (Василий Семенович Гроссман) – Book Review of “Forever Flowing”, The New York Times, April 1, 1972

Subsequent to Irving Howe’s review of Forever Flowing in The New York Times, came a shorter, penetrating, astute review by Thomas Lask in the same newspaper. Different in approach from Howe, Lask’s analysis of Grossman’s book suggests that it was based upon a deep familiarity with the political history of the Soviet Union.

________________________________________

When Theories Are Made Flesh

By THOMAS LASK

FOREVER FLOWING. By Vasily Grossman.
Translated from the Russian by Thomas P. Whitney.
247 pages. Harper & Row. $6.95.

The New York Times
April 1, 1972

(Photograph accompanying Simon Willis’ essay of January / February 2013 “Art, Freedom, and Cognac“, at 1843 Magazine.)

In one of the powerfully conceived images in Vasily Grossman’s novel, the Russian state is described in physical terms as an entity of such great mass as to warp everything that comes within its orbit. How Russians were bent by that magnetic pull from their decency, their humanity is the substance of this novel. It isn’t, strictly speaking, a novel at all, even within the latitude granted that term. The characters, though distinctive, are types, examples in a dissertation on the post-revolutionary state.

There is no story to speak of, and what story there is, one of betrayal, imprisonment and release, is neither new nor unknown. But the form does not matter nor the old fashioned writing (if we judge the original by Thomas Whitney’s translation) nor such clumsy devices as the intrusion of the author to the forgetful exclusion of his main figure. “Forever Flowing” is not intended as blithe entertainment; it is the thoughts of a man who has seen much, wondering amid the ruins and shards of his life how they came about. As such it is as eloquent a memorial to the anonymous little man in the Stalinist state as “Dr. Zhivago” is to the artistic spirit in post-Czarist Russia and “The First Circle” to the scientific intelligentsia.

Enemy of the People

“Forever Flowing” is a look at the Soviet state from the very bottom, not from the bottom of society or the political spectrum, but from the place where all the lofty decisions from on high, all abstractly conceived theories, all high sounding resolves are translated into human endeavor and measured by human results. It is the place where all theories are made flesh. Grossman judges all theories by a simple rule: What happens to the people to whom they apply?

As he follows the results from the time of Lenin to that of the post-World War II leadership, he concludes that the state is a rapacious, relentless, soul-crushing adversary – an enemy of the people. Yet so powerful is the embracing magnetism of the state that the citizenry contrive at their own downfall. At the worst it allows the scum, the Yagodas and Berias to come to the top; at best it corrupts even the well-meaning and men of principle. The real saints are few and far between.

Ivan Grigoryevich has been given his freedom after 30 years in the Russian slave labor camps, and he returns to Moscow, to Leningrad, to once familiar places an old, gaunt, bent man. As he visits a cousin, encounters a comrade who had denounced him to the prosecutor, finds lodgings and a job for himself, Russia’s history, his own past and that of so many he knew boil and bubble in his mind. His reappearance disconcerts those he meets; they find their dormant consciences flickering to life, unpleasant memories floating to the top of their minds. Some had given in to base demands a little at a time only to find themselves so far in, it was as distasteful to turn back as to go on. Some had believed that they were working for the good of the state. Some were greedy, some were seduced by ambition or high office. The motives and the reasoning were always complicated, intertwined, rationalized. And as the author points out the thinking inside the camp was exactly the same as that of the world outside. The ideologies of the prisoners were as varied and ingenious as the men who had put them there. They were after all the same Russians.

Vasily Grossman, who died in 1964, was a novelist, playwright and war correspondent, whose work after World War II was so severely criticized that he never finished a novel about that war although part of it had already appealed in print. The present work occupied him for the last eight years of his life. It has not been published in Russia for reasons that will be clear to every reader.

Excesses of the State

One of them is that he goes beyond Stalin to Lenin when he comes to place the blame for the excesses of the Soviet state. He dismisses the human side of Lenin, his personal modesty, his courtesy, his love of music, his patience with a citizen, not because they are not true, but because they did not really count in guiding the revolution and in establishing the new state. These took intellectual arrogance, ruthlessness, insulting impatience with opposition and contempt for western notions of individual freedom. Those who shared Lenin’s gentler side, Bukharin, Rykov, Kamenev and Zinoviev, were crushed as mercilessly by Stalin as these qualities were eliminated from the body politic. Stalin, says the author, was Lenin’s true heir. The force that fashioned the revolution later guided the purges.

But an idea of even greater abhorrence to the Russian hierarchy as well, perhaps, to the Russian people, is the one that sees the Soviet state as a natural result of Russian history. The serf-like mentality of the Russian people has been a weight on the liberating spirit of the country for a thousand years. In a passage that shoots a sharp light into the discussion, Grossman argues that Lenin was chosen by the Russian people. He was their kind of leader.

In spite of all his pessimistic assessments, he contends that the spirit of freedom lives on in the Russian heart and that it will ultimately flower even in his native land. How this will come about in the light of all he has said is never made clear. Very likely it was Grossman’s last wan hope. By the time he died, perhaps there was nothing left.

Suggested Readings

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

Epstein, Joseph, The Achievement of Vasily Grossman – Was he the greatest writer of the past century?, Commentary, May, 2019.

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

Words in Print: Vasily Semyonovich Grossman (Василий Семенович Гроссман) – Obituary, The New York Times, September 18, 1964

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…

________________________________________

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

Epstein, Joseph, The Achievement of Vasily Grossman – Was he the greatest writer of the past century?, Commentary, May, 2019

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

The Years of War, by Vasiliy S. Grossman – 1946 [Unknown Artist]

The attached document – Vasiliy Grossman’s Commendation for The Order of the Red Star (Ordenu Krasnaya Zvezda – Ордену Красная Звезда) , dated 9 December 1942, was obtained from the Podvig Naroda (Подвиг Народа – Feats of the People) website. This document specifically mentions Grossman’s works “The People are Immortal,” “The Battle of Stalingrad”, “Stalingrad Crossing”, and “Stalingrad Story”. The English translation of the award citation can be found here.

Grossman’s experiences, recollections, and reporting during the Battle of Stalingrad formed a central basis for the setting and characters in his postwar novel, Life and Fate.

For a deeper understanding of the life and works of Vasiliy Grossman, I strongly recommend The Bones of Berdichev – The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman, by John Garrard and Carol Garrard (The Free Press, 1996), and A Writer At War – Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941-1945, by Anthony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova (Pantheon Books, 2005).

Forever Flowing, by Vasily Grossman – 1970 (1986) [Christopher Zacharow]

There is nothing more difficult than to be a stepson of time;

there is no heavier fate than to live in an age that is not your own.
Time loves only those it has given birth to itself:
its own children, its own heroes, its own labourers.
Never can it come to love the children of a past age,
and more than a woman can love the heroes of a past age,
or a stepmother love the children of another woman.

And so he asked: “I was right, wasn’t I?”

Lyudmilla shook her head. Decades of intimacy can also divide people.
‘Lyuda,’ said Viktor humbly,
‘people who are in the right often don’t know how to behave.
They lose their tempers and swear.
They act tactlessly and intolerantly.
Usually they get blamed for everything that goes wrong at home and at work.
While those who are in the wrong, those who hurt others,
always know how to behave.
They act calmly, logically and tactfully – and appear to be in the right.’’

Why had his life been so hard?

He had not preached nor had he taught –
he had remained exactly what he had been from his birth:
a human being.
The slope of the mountain opened before him.
From behind the pass the peaks of the oak trees showed.
In his childhood, he had gone there into the forest twilight,
and searched out the remnants of the vanished life of the Circassians –
the fruit trees gone wild,
the traces of the fences around their obliterated houses.
Perhaps his own home was still standing there just as changelessly
as the streets and the stream seemed changeless.
Here was one more bend of the road.
For a moment, it seemed to him as if an impossibly bright light,
brighter than any he had ever seen in his life,
had flooded the earth.
A few steps more and in this light he would see that home,
and his mother would come out to meet him, her prodigal son,
and he would kneel down before her,
and her young and beautiful hands would lie upon his gray,
balding head.
He saw the thickets of thorns and hops.
There was nothing left of the house nor of the well –
only a few stones that shone white in the dusty grass,
burned by the sun.
He stood there – gray, bent, and changeless.

(1955-1963)

Here are book reviews of Forever Flowing from 1972 by Irving Howe and Thomas Lask, and a further anonymous review from 1973.