He admired the first two volumes of Mikhail Sholokhov’s The Quiet Don, but he had a low opinion of Sholokhov’s later work.
He read Rider Haggard with real interest. He read and reread Sherlock Holmes. And there was a series—Geografgiz—of popular-science books about animals that he greatly enjoyed. One book from this series, about a man-eating black panther, was in his hospital room during his last days. I read to him from it one evening, and the following morning he said to me, “I dreamed of the panther. I felt real terror.”
***
In 1938 Mama exchanged the room in which we had lived with my father on Spaso-Peskovsky Street for rooms in a two-story wooden house in Lianozovo, a dacha village not far from Moscow. The house had a large garden, with bushes and thickets big enough to hide in. Part of the garden was turned over to flower and vegetable beds. My mother grew a variety of vegetables, including cucumbers and tomatoes. She also grew flowers. For some reason I particularly remember her snapdragons and tobacco plants.
There was also a parking place for an M-1 looked after by one of our neighbors, a professional driver; he would sometimes lie on the grass beneath it and carry out repairs. I thought the smell of gasoline and leather was quite wonderful.
Above us lived the family of an artillery commander. After the Soviet occupation of the Baltic States and western Ukraine in 1939, he was posted somewhere close to the Soviet frontier. His son used to visit him there and come back with wonderful toys; we all felt envious. Once, in 1940, Grossman was sent to one of the Baltic states with Aleksandr Tvardovsky to write an article about one of the Soviet divisions there, and he brought me back similar toys—a little tank, and a toy pistol that flashed and let out puffs of smoke.
Grossman’s mother, Yekaterina Savelievna, spent two summers with us in Lianozovo, and his daughter, Katya, also stayed with us sometimes; I remember her as tall and thin. Many of Grossman’s friends also used to visit us there.
Somewhere on the outskirts of Lianozovo was a dacha belonging to Marshal Voroshilov, the People’s Commissar for Defense. When we went for walks in the forest, serious-looking figures in plain clothes would sometimes make us turn back just as we reached some particularly picturesque spot.
The path from the railway station to our house led through dense forest, and we often picked mushrooms on the way. We would cut hazel branches and use them to hold back the long grass and bushes so we could see the mushrooms more easily. Grossman had a Swiss penknife with a red handle and a red leather case; I think he had been given it by his mother. He often used to decorate our hazel sticks, carving little circles and squares on them. We would collect pieces of bark and he would make them into little boats or other small toys for me. As well as spending our summers in Lianozovo, we sometimes went there in winter to ski.
In summer Grossman used to wear a tyubeteika (a central Asian skull cap), a white shirt, white tussah-silk trousers, and sandals on bare feet. Before the war he was stout, and he walked with a stick. He looked older than his thirty-five years. The young women used to address him as “Uncle,” even though he was only slightly older than they were—young enough to have been one of their admirers.
Grossman and my mother never said a word to us about their fears, or about any of the terrible experiences they had gone through. I remember those years before the war as a happy time, the happiest time of my life. But my brother was almost certainly less happy.
***
Grossman had a touching love for the animal world. For many years we had fish in small aquariums. At one time we kept a very aggressive squirrel, and we had a number of cats and dogs over the years. Grossman was especially fond of a white poodle named Lyubka, who lived with us for about twelve years. During her last days she could hardly move, and we used to carry her out in our arms “for a walk.” We buried her opposite our apartment.
Grossman loved going to the zoo; he went several times a year. Once he spotted a porcupine quill lying on the ground. He climbed over the fence of the porcupine’s little enclosure and picked it up. I just stood and watched. To this day the porcupine quill lies on his writing desk in my daughter’s apartment in Moscow, along with his inkwell and penholder—Grossman often wrote not with a fountain pen but with a simple dipping pen.
***
Grossman was not—as has sometimes been said—gloomy and unsociable. It is simply that his last years brought him little to celebrate. He did, nevertheless, greatly enjoy convivial meals, and one or another of his friends would call on him almost every day. They would tell jokes and sometimes they would sing together. He would read aloud his stories, or extracts from his longer works.
Friends and relatives would come around every Sunday. Most often, at least from the mid-1950s, we would see two of Grossman’s oldest friends, Faina Abramovna Shkol'nikova and Yefim Abramovich Kugel (described with great warmth in Grossman’s autobiographical story “Phosphorus”), along with Nikolay Mikhailovich Sochevets (my maternal uncle, on whom Grossman based the hero of Everything Flows). We would all do a crossword together. Yefim Abramovich would say, “A four-letter word beginning with K,” “A seven-letter word beginning with N,” and so on. Uncle Kolya would be standing by the bookshelf leafing through a book, or working on one of the remarkably lifelike little animals he used to mold from clay. His eyesight was extremely poor and he was usually looking somewhere else, “seeing” the clay not with his eyes but with his hands. Faina Abramovna would always be smoking; Grossman would be making jokes or teasing us. When it was time for our main meal, we would have vodka and wine, and I would often be sent out to buy ice cream.
There were three other old friends Grossman saw a great deal: Semyon Tumarkin, Aleksandr Nitochkin, and Vyacheslav Loboda, who preserved the original manuscript of Life and Fate. And there was the poet Semyon Lipkin, who wrote an important memoir about Grossman. He and Grossman used to meet several times a week, and they often went out for walks lasting several hours.
Translated by Robert Chandler, with the author
Chronology
1881 Alexander II assassinated by members of The People’s Will (Narodnaya Volya) terrorist organization.
1891 Beginning of construction of Trans-Siberian Railway.
1905 The wave of mass political unrest known as the 1905 Revolution leads to the establishment of the Duma (a parliament) and a limited constitutional monarchy. Birth of Vasily Semyonovich Grossman.
1910–12 Grossman and his mother live in Geneva.
1914–19 Grossman attends secondary school in Kiev.
1917 Tsar Nicholas II abdicates after the February Revolution. Workers’ soviets (councils) are set up in Petrograd and Moscow. Lenin and his Bolshevik Party seize power in the October Revolution.
1918–20 Russian Civil War, accompanied by the draconian economic policies known as War Communism. Although there were many different factions, the two main forces were the Red Army (Communists) and the Whites (anti-Communists). Foreign powers also intervened, to little effect. Millions perished before the Red Army, led by Leon Trotsky, defeated the Whites in 1920. Smaller battles continued for several years.
1921 After an uprising in March 1921 by sailors at the naval base of Kronstadt, Lenin made a tactical retreat, introducing the at-least-relatively liberal New Economic Policy (NEP), which lasted until 1928. Many of the more idealistic Communists saw this as a step backward. The NEP was not, however, accompanied by any political liberalization.
1924 Death of Lenin. Petrograd is renamed Leningrad. Stalin begins to take power.
1928–37 The first and second of Stalin’s Five-Year Plans bring about increased production of coal, iron, and steel.
1928 Grossman marries Anna (usually known as Galya) Matsuk and publishes his first newspaper articles.
1929 Collectivization of agriculture begins. Grossman graduates from Moscow State University and starts work as an engineer in the Donbass region.
1930 Birth of Grossman’s daughter, Yekaterina Vasilievna (Katya).
1931
Grossman returns to Moscow, where he works in a pencil factory. Grossman and Galya are divorced.
1932–33 Between three and five million peasants die in the Terror Famine in Ukraine.
1933 Hitler comes to power in Germany. Grossman’s cousin Nadya Almaz is arrested in Moscow.
1934 Founding of Union of Soviet Writers. Grossman publishes “In the Town of Berdichev” and the novel Glyukauf, about the life of the Donbass miners.
1935 Mussolini invades Ethiopia. Grossman’s mule (the hero of “The Road”) takes part in the campaign.
1936 Grossman marries his second wife, Olga Mikhailovna Guber.
1936–38 Approximately half the members of the Soviet political, military, and intellectual elite are imprisoned or shot. Roughly 380,000 supposed kulaks and 250,000 members of various national minorities are killed. The period from September 1936 until November 1938 is known as the Great Terror, or Yezhovshchina—after Nikolay Yezhov, then head of the NKVD (the Soviet secret police).
1937 Grossman is admitted to the Union of Soviet Writers.
1937–40 Publication, in installments, of Grossman’s second novel, Stepan Kolchugin.
1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is signed. Beginning of Second World War.
1939–41 Death of 70,000 mentally handicapped Germans in the Nazis’ euthanasia program.
1941 Hitler invades the Soviet Union. Leningrad is blockaded and Moscow under threat. Grossman starts work as a war correspondent for Red Star (Krasnaya zvezda), the Red Army newspaper.
1941–42 An estimated two million Jews are shot in western areas of the Soviet Union. Grossman’s mother is one of approximately 12,000 Jews killed in a single day at the airport outside Berdichev.
1941–44 Two and a half million Polish Jews are gassed in Chelmno, Majdanek, Bełzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz.
1942 Publication of Grossman’s novel The People Immortal.
1942–43 The Battle of Stalingrad was the first important German land defeat of the war. Grossman spends nearly three months in the thick of the fighting.
1944 Between April and June, 436,000 Hungarian Jews are gassed at Auschwitz, in only fifty-six days.
1945 End of Second World War.
1946 Nuremberg Trial of the Nazi leadership. In the Soviet Union, Andrey Zhdanov tightens control over the arts. Grossman’s play If You Believe the Pythagoreans is fiercely criticized.
1948 Destruction of the plates for the Soviet edition of The Black Book, a documentary account of the Shoah in the Soviet Union and Poland, compiled by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman between 1943 and 1946.
1951 Death of Andrey Platonov. Grossman gives the main speech at his funeral.
1952 Secret trial of members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Publication in Novy mir of Grossman’s novel For a Just Cause.
1953 Publication of article in Pravda in January about the Jewish “Killer Doctors.” Preparations continue for a purge of Soviet Jews. For a Just Cause is attacked in Pravda and elsewhere. Death of Stalin on March 5. On April 4, official acknowledgment that the case against the “Killer Doctors” was fabricated.
1954 For a Just Cause is published as a book.
1955 Grossman sees Raphael’s Sistine Madonna on exhibit in Moscow before it is returned to the Dresden Art Gallery.
1956 Millions of prisoners are released from the camps. Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress marks a high point in the more liberal period known as the “Thaw.”
1957 A Russian dog, Laika (her name means “Barker”), travels into space on Sputnik 2.
1958 Publication abroad of Doctor Zhivago. Under pressure from the Soviet authorities, Pasternak declines the Nobel Prize.
1961 The KGB confiscates the manuscript of Life and Fate.
1962 Publication of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
1964 Fall of Khrushchev. Grossman dies on September 14, of lung cancer.
1970 Publication in Frankfurt of an incomplete Russian edition of Everything Flows.
1974 Solzhenitsyn deported after publication in the West of The Gulag Archipelago.
1980 Life and Fate is published in Russian, for the first time, in Lausanne.
1985 Mikhail Gorbachev comes to power. Beginning of the period of liberal reforms known as perestroika; the next few years see the first publication in Russia of Grossman’s Life and Fate and Everything Flows, and of important works by Krzhizhanovsky, Platonov, Shalamov, Solzhenitsyn, and many others.
1991 Collapse of the Soviet Union.
Notes
PART ONE: The 1930s
* abroad to study: John and Carol Garrard, The Bones of Berdichev (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 31 and 376.
* an uprising in Sebastopol: Fyodor Guber, Pamyat'i pis'ma (Moscow: Probel, 2007), 7. The Garrards suggest that Grossman’s father, Semyon Osipovich, was active in the Jewish Labor Bund, but this is no more than a supposition, based on the fact that Geneva was, at the time, a center for Bund activities.
* lost his interest in science: He was quick, a decade later, to grasp the importance of nuclear physics; one of his notebooks for 1944 includes a diagram of a nuclear chain reaction [Guber, 39]. It is not for nothing that Grossman chose to make Viktor Shtrum, the central figure of Life and Fate and in many respects a self-portrait, into a physicist.
* found in her possession: See Garrard, 109. Serge had been arrested for a second time two months before this, in February 1933. He may have been the first person to refer to the USSR as a “totalitarian” state.
* in Astrakhan: After spending three years in exile in Astrakhan, Nadya was given another three-year sentence, this time in a labor camp in the far north. She returned to Moscow in 1939. See Guber, 20; and Garrard, 112 and 129–30.
* Glyukauf: this is derived from the German Glück auf (“Luck up!” or “Good luck!”), a phrase used to greet a miner just brought up to the surface.
* Literaturnaya gazeta: See A. Bocharov, Vasily Grossman (Moscow: Sovetsky pisatel', 1990), 11. This excellent monograph is an expanded version of a study first published in 1970.
* and Boris Pilnyak: See Semyon Lipkin, Kvadriga (Moscow: Knizhny Sad, 1997), 516. Babel apparently said, “Our Yid capital has been seen through new eyes.” Lipkin then quotes Bulgakov as saying, “Don’t say it’s really been possible to publish something worthwhile!” This has been understood to mean that he too admired the story, but it was probably no more than a polite response on Bulgakov’s part. An English translation of “In the Town of Berdichev” was included in John Lehmann’s New Writing 2 (Autumn 1936): 131–45. Five Soviet writers were represented in the first two issues of this journal: Grossman, Pasternak, and Sholokhov, and the now-lesser-known Ognev and Tikhonov.
* in danger himself: Grossman’s friends proved remarkably loyal. According to Fyodor Guber, who obtained access to his father’s NKVD file, “When questioned by the investigator about Vasily Grossman, my father replied, ‘Nothing compromising is known about Grossman.’ The other former members of Pereval gave similar answers.” [Gruber, 32.]
* the NKVD: The Soviet security service was renamed many times; the most important of its names and acronyms, in chronological order, are the Cheka, the OGPU, the NKVD, and the KGB.
* chief executioner: See Lipkin, 518. Tzvetan Todorov has written that “Grossman is the only example, or at least the most significant, of an established and leading Soviet writer changing his spots completely. The slave in him died, and a free man arose.” [Tzvetan Todorov, Hope and Memory (London: Atlantic Books, 2005), 50.] Impressive though this may sound, Todorov is mistaken: Grossman showed great courage and independence throughout his life.
* Olga Mikhailovna was released: For Grossman’s astutely phrased letter to Yezhov, see Garrard, 122–25 and 347–48. See also Guber’s afterword to the present volume.
* in the Ukraine in 1932–33: In August 1931, when the hunger was only just beginning, he had written a coded (his own word is “Aesopian”) letter about thi
s to his father [Garrard, 93–95].
* the Soviet government: Ibid., 348.
* I wish to triumph?: Lipkin, 516.
* then rejects again: A study of Grossman’s manuscripts suggests that he was aware of the delicacy of the ideological balancing act he was performing. The story ends with Vavilova abandoning her baby and rushing out to join some Red Army cadets as they march suicidally toward the advancing Poles. Magazanik and his wife, Beila, in whose home Vavilova has been lodging, are watching. The published version ends as follows:
Not taking his eyes off Vavilova, Magazanik said, “Once there were people like that in the Bund. Real human beings, Beila. Call us human beings? No, we’re just manure.”
Alyosha had woken up. He was crying and kicking, trying to get out of his swaddling clothes. Coming back to herself, Beila said to her husband, “Listen, the baby’s woken up. You’d better light the Primus—we must heat up some milk.”
The cadets disappeared around a turn in the road.
In the manuscript, however, there is one more sentence: “Beila sighed and said loudly, “A Tatar, an ignorant Tatar!” (The Russian is simply “Nu, Tatarin!”—a phrase that is oddly difficult to translate. In English we say “He/she is a real Tatar” of someone we see as fiercely disciplinarian; we do not use the phrase simply to indicate savagery. Adding the word “ignorant” seemed the only way to make the words sound plausible on both occasions.) Beila has already, once before, called her husband a Tatar—and so her words carry weight. As well as criticizing Vavilova for having abandoned her baby, Beila is criticizing her husband for appearing to condone Vavilova’s behavior. Evidently either Grossman or his editors decided that this ending was too dangerous. Grossman’s uncertainty about the story’s conclusion is still more clearly shown by the changes he introduced when, at some time between 1934 and 1939, he wrote a film script based on the story [RGALI, fond 1710, opis' 1, ed. khr., 95]. In the published story Vavilova is a fanatic; in the script she is a devoted mother who has little choice but to leave her baby for a short time. In the story—and only in the story—Grossman poses an important question with shocking sharpness. Soviet literature of the 1920s and ’30s contains many examples of people sacrificing a husband, wife, or parent, but only Grossman asked whether it is right for a mother to abandon her newborn child for the good of the cause. Contemporary critics were evidently ill at ease with this question. Even though the story was praised in Soviet journals, there was almost no serious discussion of the dilemma it poses.