- Person
- Vasily Grossman
- Lived
- 1905–1964
- Field
- Novelist & war correspondent
- From
- Soviet
The story
Vasily Grossman had been one of the Soviet Union's most celebrated war writers, but in the 1950s he wrote something far more dangerous. Life and Fate, set during the Battle of Stalingrad, portrayed the war as a struggle between two comparable totalitarian states and told how ordinary people had to fight both the invaders and the tyranny of their own government. Around October 1960 he submitted it to the journal Znamya.
The response came quickly. KGB officers raided his apartment and seized the manuscript, the carbon copies, his notebooks, the typists' copies and even the typewriter ribbons. The book was, in effect, arrested while its author remained free.
Grossman refused to accept this quietly. He wrote directly to Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, asking for his novel to be discussed with editors rather than with agents of the KGB. He asked what point there was in his being physically free when the book to which he had dedicated his life was under arrest. He was not renouncing it, he wrote; he was requesting freedom for his book.
On 23 July 1962 the Communist Party's chief ideologist, Mikhail Suslov, met him and told him that the novel, if published, could do the Soviet Union even more harm than Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. A story later spread that Suslov said it could not appear for two hundred years; more recent research into notes of the meeting has cast doubt on this, and Grossman's translator Robert Chandler has said he regrets repeating it. Either way, the appeal failed. Grossman died of cancer on 14 September 1964, never knowing whether the book would be read.
His stand became part of the novel's legend. Friends had hidden copies, and Life and Fate was published in Switzerland in 1980 and in the Soviet Union in 1988, during glasnost. The critic Robert Gottlieb later called it the most impressive novel written since the Second World War.
Why it matters
Grossman's appeal to Khrushchev stands as a powerful example of a writer defending freedom of expression against state censorship, and his book's survival vindicated it.
About Vasily Grossman
Red Army correspondent who wrote one of the first accounts of a Nazi death camp, then the novel Life and Fate, so dangerous to the Soviet state that the KGB “arrested” the manuscript.
More about Vasily Grossman
- Vasily Grossman reported from the front for over 1,000 daysRejected for combat, Vasily Grossman became a correspondent for the Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda and spent more than 1,000 days at the front, from Moscow and Stalingrad to Berlin.
- Vasily Grossman helped compile The Black BookWith Ilya Ehrenburg, Vasily Grossman helped compile The Black Book, a documentary record of the Nazi murder of Jews in the occupied Soviet Union.
- Vasily Grossman bore witness to the Ukrainian famineIn his late novel Everything Flows, Vasily Grossman condemned the Soviet state and wrote of peasants effectively sentenced to death by starvation, a classic testimony to the Holodomor.
- Friends saved Vasily Grossman's 'arrested' Life and FateAfter the KGB seized Life and Fate, copies kept by friends survived. Andrei Sakharov photographed pages and Vladimir Voinovich smuggled the film abroad; it was published in 1980.
- Vasily Grossman wrote one of the first death-camp reportsVasily Grossman's 1944 essay 'The Hell of Treblinka' was among the first accounts of a Nazi death camp and was used as prosecution evidence at the Nuremberg trials.
- Vasily Grossman's brave letter freed his wife in the TerrorIn 1937 Vasily Grossman became guardian of his wife Olga's two sons and wrote to NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov on her behalf. A friend called it great bravery. Olga was released.
Sources
- Vasily Grossman Wikipedia
- Heroic Witness Claremont Review of Books
- Life and Fate Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.