- Person
- Vasily Grossman
- Lived
- 1905–1964
- Field
- Novelist & war correspondent
- From
- Soviet
The story
Vasily Grossman wrote Life and Fate during the 1950s as the sequel to his Stalingrad novel For a Just Cause. Set during the battle and spanning the front, the home front and both Nazi and Soviet camps, it dared to suggest that Nazism and Stalinism were mirror images of each other. Around October 1960 he submitted it to the journal Znamya.
Very soon afterwards, KGB officers raided his apartment and took the typed manuscript, his notebooks, drafts, carbon paper and even typewriter ribbons. What they did not know was that Grossman had prudently left copies with friends. One was kept by the poet Semyon Lipkin. Another, Grossman's original manuscript, was hidden by Lyolya Klestova, a friend from his university days. The friends kept them safe for years, even after Grossman died of cancer in 1964.
In 1974 Lipkin arranged for his copy to be put onto microfilm. The physicist Andrei Sakharov secretly photographed pages, and the satirical writer Vladimir Voinovich smuggled the film out of the country. At first the novel attracted little attention in the West. Then two scholars, Shimon Markish of the University of Geneva and Efim Etkind in Paris, undertook the painstaking work of reading and retyping the text from the poor-quality film.
Life and Fate was finally published in Russian in 1980 by the Swiss publishing house L'Age d'Homme. It appeared in English in 1985, and in the Soviet Union in 1988, in the magazine Oktyabr and as a book, after Mikhail Gorbachev introduced glasnost. When further original manuscripts emerged, a fuller text followed in 1989.
Thanks to the courage of his friends, the book that the Soviet state tried to destroy survived to become one of the most admired novels of the twentieth century. Robert Chandler's widely praised English translation of 2006 brought it to a vast new readership, and in 2011 BBC Radio 4 broadcast an eight-hour dramatisation starring Kenneth Branagh and David Tennant.
Why it matters
The rescue of Life and Fate preserved a masterpiece of moral witness against totalitarianism that has since reached readers worldwide.
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.
- Vasily Grossman asked Khrushchev for 'freedom for my book'After the KGB confiscated Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman wrote to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, insisting he was 'requesting freedom for my book'.
- 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.