Berdichev and a French-speaking mother
Vasily Grossman was born Iosif Solomonovich Grossman on December 12, 1905, in Berdichev, a largely Jewish town in Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire. His family was Jewish but thoroughly assimilated, and he received no traditional Jewish education. His father, Semyon Osipovich Grossman, was a chemical engineer with social-democratic convictions who had joined the Mensheviks and taken part in the revolution of 1905. His mother, Yekaterina Savelievna, taught French. A Russian nanny turned the boy’s Jewish pet name, Yossya, into the Russian Vasya, and the whole family adopted it; Vasily he remained.
His parents separated, and from 1910 to 1912 he lived with his mother in Geneva. Back in Ukraine, he went to secondary school in Kiev, living with his father. Like many young people of his generation he welcomed the revolution of 1917 with idealistic hope. The bond with his mother, however, would shape everything he later wrote.
Vasya the chemist
Grossman followed his father into science, studying chemistry at Moscow State University, where his diligence earned him the nickname Vasya-khimik, “Vasya the Chemist.” After graduating he went to work at a coal-mining concern in Stalino (now Donetsk) in the Donbas, running chemical tests, and later at a pencil factory. He married Anna Petrovna Matsuk in 1928; their daughter, Yekaterina, was born in 1930, but the marriage soon broke down, and the child was largely raised by Grossman’s mother in Berdichev.
All the while he was writing. His story “In the Town of Berdichev” about a pregnant Red Army commissar left with a poor Jewish family during the Civil War, won encouragement from Maxim Gorky and Mikhail Bulgakov; decades later it became the basis of Aleksandr Askoldov’s film Commissar, made in 1967, suppressed, and released only in 1988. In the mid-1930s Grossman left engineering to write full time. He published story collections and the mining novel Glyukauf, was admitted to the Union of Soviet Writers in 1937, and saw his novel Stepan Kolchugin nominated for a Stalin Prize, until Stalin himself struck it from the list for alleged Menshevik sympathies.
Courage in the Terror
In 1935 Grossman began living with Olga Mikhailovna Guber, the wife of his friend the writer Boris Guber, and they married in 1936. During the Great Purge of 1937 Boris Guber was arrested, and Olga too was arrested for failing to denounce her former husband. Grossman had himself registered as guardian of her two sons, saving them from state orphanages, and then did something almost unheard of: he wrote to Nikolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD, arguing that Olga was now his wife and could not be held responsible for a man she had left before his arrest. His friend Semyon Lipkin remarked that in 1937 only a very brave man would have written such a letter to the state’s chief executioner. Olga was released.
A thousand days at the front
When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Grossman was exempt from military service and rejected for combat on health grounds. He became instead a correspondent for Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star), the Red Army’s newspaper, and spent more than a thousand days at the front. He reported from the defence of Moscow, from the ruins of Stalingrad, where he lived among the soldiers in the shattered city, from Kursk, and finally from Berlin. Soldiers read his dispatches avidly, and his short novel The People Immortal (1942) made him one of the best-known writers of the war. His biographers have argued that he witnessed more combat than any other correspondent of the Second World War.
His mother had stayed in Berdichev. The Germans took the town in July 1941, and on September 15, 1941, the Einsatzgruppen and their helpers shot more than ten thousand of its Jews at pits outside the town; tens of thousands died there in all. Yekaterina Grossman was among them. When the Red Army retook Berdichev in January 1944, he went to the killing site.
The Hell of Treblinka
As the Red Army advanced through Ukraine and into Poland, Grossman saw the mass graves of Babi Yar and Berdichev and entered the sites of the Majdanek and Treblinka camps. Treblinka had been razed by the SS after a prisoners’ revolt, but Grossman interviewed escaped Sonderkommando prisoners, local villagers and captured guards, and reconstructed how the camp had worked. His essay “The Hell of Treblinka” published in the journal Znamya in November 1944, was among the earliest accounts by any reporter of a Nazi extermination camp. It was circulated at the Nuremberg trials as evidence for the prosecution. Writing with an engineer’s precision, he described the earth of Treblinka refusing to keep its secret, throwing up bones, teeth and scraps of clothing. Some details came secondhand from survivor testimony, and his estimate of three million victims was far too high, historians now put the toll at roughly 750,000 to 880,000, but the essay brought the reality of the death camps to readers across the Soviet Union and beyond.
With Ilya Ehrenburg, Grossman also edited The Black Book, a vast documentary record of the murder of Soviet Jews compiled for the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee from letters, diaries and testimony.
Disillusion
The Black Book revealed what Stalin’s regime did not want said: that the Nazi genocide had targeted Jews above all and had been aided by local collaborators. Censors demanded that the Jewish identity of the victims be blurred, and in 1948 the Soviet edition was destroyed. Leading members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were arrested and later executed, and the “anti-cosmopolitan” campaign against Jews in Soviet cultural life began. Lipkin recalled that for years Grossman had not felt very Jewish, and had even once dismissed the idea that the state could deport Jews as it had deported Chechens and Balkars; the campaign against cosmopolitanism, Lipkin said, reawakened his Jewishness.
Grossman’s war novel Stalingrad appeared in 1952 only after a long struggle with the censors, and was later retitled For a Just Cause. He survived the last, antisemitic years of Stalin’s rule, the Doctors’ Plot was building when Stalin died in March 1953, but he was now a different writer. In the years that followed he wrote openly, at least in manuscript, about the Gulag and about the famine that collectivisation had inflicted on Ukraine. In Everything Flows he wrote that the decree on grain procurement required the peasants of Ukraine, the Don and the Kuban to be put to death by starvation, along with their little children, a passage now read as a classic literary testimony to the Holodomor.
Life and Fate
His masterpiece, Life and Fate, follows dozens of characters through the Battle of Stalingrad, soldiers in a besieged house, prisoners in the Lubyanka and in German camps, a Jewish doctor who chooses to die beside a child in a gas chamber rather than save herself. At its centre is the physicist Viktor Shtrum, a portrait of the author, who receives a final letter from his mother, written in a Ukrainian ghetto on the eve of her murder. Grossman dedicated the novel to his own mother. Most daringly, it sets Nazism and Stalinism side by side as mirror images, both crushing the individual in the name of the state.
In October 1960 Grossman submitted the novel to the journal Znamya. Soon afterwards KGB officers searched his flat and took the manuscript, the carbon copies, his notebooks, drafts, even the typewriter ribbons, the book was, in effect, arrested while its author remained free. Grossman appealed directly to Khrushchev, asking for freedom for his book. It was refused. He went on to write Everything Flows, an unsparing account of a man returning from thirty years in the camps, and An Armenian Sketchbook, about a journey to Armenia.
Death and resurrection of a book
Grossman died of kidney cancer in Moscow on September 14, 1964, not knowing whether his greatest work would ever be read. He was buried at the Troyekurovskoye Cemetery. Among his papers were two letters to his mother written on the ninth and twentieth anniversaries of her death, in 1950 and 1961.
Friends had kept copies of the novel. Semyon Lipkin preserved one; the physicist Andrei Sakharov secretly photographed pages; the writer Vladimir Voinovich helped smuggle the microfilm abroad. Life and Fate was published in Russian in Switzerland in 1980, in English in 1985, and in the Soviet Union in 1988 under Gorbachev’s glasnost. Robert Chandler’s 2006 English translation brought it a vast new readership, and critics now routinely compare it with War and Peace.
Legacy
Grossman’s work stands at the crossing of the two great catastrophes of twentieth-century Europe. As a reporter he was among the first to tell the world about the death camps; as a novelist he dared to say that the regimes of Hitler and Stalin shared a common logic. His Jewish identity, half-buried in an assimilated childhood, was reclaimed through grief for his murdered mother and through the antisemitism of the Soviet state. Life and Fate is now widely read as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, a defence of individual freedom and ordinary human kindness against the machinery of totalitarian power, written by a man who knew both machines from the inside.
Sources & further reading
Vasily Grossman, Wikipedia · Life and Fate, Wikipedia · Heroic Witness, Martha Bayles, Claremont Review of Books · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life 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.