Grossman’s script was never made into a film; it is not to be confused with Aleksandr Askol'dov’s The Commissar, based on the same story. Made in 1967, The Commissar was banned for two decades but won two international prizes on its release in 1988. Curiously, just as Life and Fate was more thoroughly banned than any other Soviet book, so The Commissar may have been more thoroughly banned than almost any other Soviet film. Askol'dov was told that the only copy had been destroyed. In the Gorbachev era, however, it was discovered that workers in a film archive had preserved a copy. What made The Commissar so unacceptable was, no doubt, its final sequence (not, of course, corresponding to anything in Grossman’s original story) about the Shoah.
All the above—the importance of the repetition of “Nu, Tatarin!,” the differences between story and script, the reaction of contemporary critics—is summarized from an article by Yury Bit-Yunan to be published in 2010 by Voprosy literatury.
* his professional career: At one point in “A Tale About Love,” a long story written in 1937, a film director and a scriptwriter talk about their joint project. They agree that Chekhov’s “The Steppe”—a story in which almost nothing appears to happen—is “real art.” In the context of Soviet literature from the 1930s, this discussion is startling.
“In the Town of Berdichev”
Written in 1934; first published in Literaturnaya gazeta (April 2, 1934).
* pointed Budyonny helmet: Semyon Budyonny (1883–1973) was a hero of the Russian civil war. His name was given to a helmet worn by Red Army soldiers between 1918 and 1921.
* voluntary working Saturdays: There was a Soviet tradition of voluntary working Saturdays (subbotniki). Lenin himself participated in the first all-Russian subbotnik (May 1, 1920), helping to clear building rubble from the Kremlin. These days soon ceased to be voluntary—if ever they were.
* the Jewish nation: Yury Bit-Yunan suggests that Grossman is alluding to a story told by Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov: a wicked woman is cast, after her death, into a lake of fire. Her guardian angel remembers that she once gave a spring onion to a beggar. God tells the angel to try pulling her out of the lake with that onion. The angel almost succeeds, but the woman realizes that other sinners have caught hold of her and are hoping to be pulled out themselves. She kicks out and yells, “It’s my onion, not yours!” The stem of the onion breaks, and the woman falls back into the lake.
* the July days: This refers to a period during July 1917 when soldiers and industrial workers spontaneously demonstrated against the Provisional Government. The Bolsheviks eventually tried to provide leadership, but the demonstrations were repressed. Kerensky was appointed prime minister and the Bolsheviks temporarily lost much of their influence.
* footcloths: Lengths of cloth wound around the foot and ankle—more common in Russia, until the middle of the twentieth century, than socks or stockings. By the 1950s, however, they had largely disappeared—except in labor camps and the army.
* Bald Hill: Hills with this name—and there are many Bald Hills in Russia and Ukraine—were associated with witches and their sabbaths.
* the same story each time: Simon Petlyura (1879–1926) was the leader of a Ukrainian nationalist movement that was at its most powerful during 1918 and 1919. Anton Denikin (1872–1947) commanded the White armies in the south of Russia during the Civil War. And there were many other bands of anarchists, criminals, lawless peasants, etc.
* the Bund: The Jewish Labor Bund was a secular Jewish Socialist party in the Russian empire, active between 1897 and 1920.
"A Small Life”
Written in 1936; first published in Dobro vam! (Moscow: Sovetsky pisatel', 1967).
* Central Rubber Office: Vera Ignatyevna works at Rezinosbyt, which was responsible for the distribution of rubber products throughout the Soviet Union.
* Air-Chem Defense Society: The Society for the Promotion of Defense, Aviation, and Chemistry (Osoviakhim or Obshchestvo sodeistviya oborone i aviatsionno-khimicheskomu stroitel'stvu) was a “voluntary” civil-defense organization, described by Stalin as vital to “keeping the entire population in a state of mobilized readiness against the danger of military attack, so that no ‘accident’ and no tricks of our external enemies can catch us unawares.” Founded in 1927, it sponsored clubs and contests throughout the USSR; by the early 1930s it had around twelve million members.
* Mostorg Department Store: A portmanteau word, derived from the words for “Moscow” and “trade.”
"A Young Woman and An Old Woman”
According to one Russian edition, this was written 1938–40; another edition gives 1940–62. It is one of four stories that Grossman entrusted in 1961 to his friend Anna Berzer, the fiction editor at Novy mir. Berzer managed to publish it in the September 1964 issue of the journal Moskva; Korotkova remembers Berzer showing Grossman the proofs in the hospital, hoping this might cheer him up. How much of the story Grossman wrote in the late 1930s and how much in the early 1960s is unclear. Most of his stories, however, are based on recent experience, and during the 1930s Grossman spent several summer vacations in elite government houses of recreation similar to the one described here. It seems likely that he began the story in the 1930s, realized that the subject matter made it unpublishable, and so waited until the time of Khrushchev’s “Thaw” before completing and attempting to publish it.
* All-Union People’s Commissariat: “People’s Commissariat” was the term used between 1918 and 1946 for a government ministry. There were People’s Commissariats for each constituent republic and also for the Soviet Union as a whole; the latter were known as All-Union People’s Commissariats.
* Kuntsevo: This village on the bank of the Moscow River first became a summer resort for Muscovites during the nineteenth century. In the 1930s Stalin and other members of the political elite had dachas there.
* long ZIS’s—beige, green, or black: The M-1 was, at the time, a new model. ZIS is an acronym for Zavod imeni Stalina (Factory named after Stalin).
* thorn apple: Datura stramonium—a powerful narcotic, usually considered too poisonous to eat.
* our wheat’s all burning!: Compare: “And while they were still transporting the grain, there was dust wherever you went. It was like clouds of smoke—over the village, over the fields, over the face of the moon at night. I remember one man going out of his mind. ‘We’re on fire!’ he kept screaming. ‘The sky is burning! The earth is burning!’” [Vasily Grossman, Everything Flows (New York: NYRB Classics, 2009), 125.]
* Nevraev: His name means “not a liar.”
* “try to get their hands on our Motherland!” said Gagareva: In 1939 Japan and the Soviet Union fought a brief, undeclared war. Japan was defeated at the Battle of Khalkhin Gol. This is probably why Japan later chose not to ally with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union.
* twenty-one minutes late: During the 1930s workers were penalized harshly for absenteeism or for being more than twenty minutes late for work.
PART TWO: The War, the Shoah
* an ancient and peaceful town: Vasily Grossman, Sobranie sochinenii, (Moscow: Vagrius, 1998) vol. 3, p. 203.
* defenders of Stalingrad: A. Bocharov, Vasily Grossman (Moscow: Sovetsky pisatel', 1990), 112.
* one of their comrades in arms: John and Carol Garrard, The Bones of Berdichev (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 162. See also Yekaterina Korotkova, “Yanvarskiye kanikuly,” Raduga (May–June 2009): 142.
* until they were in tatters: Frank Ellis, Vasiliy Grossman (Oxford: Berg, 1994), 48. There are similar accounts by people who first read Grossman’s articles in Leningrad during the Siege [Bocharov, 132].
* his own experience of the battle: E-mail from Jochen Hellbeck, May 5, 2008.
* whom we had nicknamed Zhuchka: Korotkova, 144. Zhuchka is a name given to dogs—and to women seen as garrulous or bad-tempered.
* ready to talk to him: See David Ortenberg, Letopistsy pobedy (Moscow: Politizdat, 1990), 42–55, especially 51–53.
* the required
article: see Yekaterina Korotkova, “O moyom ottse,” Sel'skaya molodyozh' (March 1993): 49.
* in September 1941: The genocide of European Jews began when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. Four special SS formations known as Einsatzgruppen (a typically Nazi euphemism meaning “special task force”) advanced with the forward units of the Wehrmacht. Their task was to combat what Hitler called “Judaeo-Bolshevism” by murdering Jews, Communist Party officials, and Red Army political commissars. Along with local collaborators, the Einsatzgruppen rounded up Jews, drove them to nearby ravines, swamps, and forests, and shot them dead. There were two main waves of these massacres: August to December 1941, and the summer of 1942. Approximately two million Jews were murdered. Mordecai Altshuler writes that “the Nazi authorities viewed the annihilation of the Jews within the USSR’s original boundaries with particular urgency, since they regarded them as the mainstay of the Bolshevik regime.” [Mordecai Altshuler, “The Unique Features of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union,” in Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and the Soviet Union, Yaacov Ro'i, ed. (Ilford, UK: Frank Cass, 1995), 175.]
* unpublished until 1988: The original text was first published in the journal Vek (Riga, 1988–89); until then the only Russian text available was a back-translation from Yiddish of the portion—a little less than half—that had been published in Eynikayt.
* long after Grossman’s death: The Russian text was first published in the 1980 (Jerusalem) edition of The Black Book. Much of the article is included, in English translation, in A Writer at War. Earlier historians have unwittingly exaggerated the number of Jews shot outside Berdichev. Dieter Pohl, in “The Murder of Ukraine’s Jews under German Military Administration and in the Reich Commissariat Ukraine,” states that 4,144 Jews were murdered, mostly in Berdichev, on September 4, and that, in the early hours of September 15, around 12,000 Jews from the Berdichev ghetto were shot at the airport outside the town [in Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower, eds., The Shoah in Ukraine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 35].
* a very small hardback book: A copy of this may have been given to the Soviet prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials. Bocharov states that a very small number of copies of The Black Book (which includes “The Hell of Treblinka”) were in fact printed, and that it was one of these that was given to the Soviet prosecutor, but we have been unable to find confirmation for this [Bocharov, 162].
* not to be published: See Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (Lincoln and Jerusalem: University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2009), 543. The complete Russian text of The Black Book was published in Israel in 1980, in Kiev in 1991, and in Vilnius in 1993. A separate volume, The Unknown Black Book (Neizvestnaya chornaya kniga), containing not only material from The Black Book but also material previously rejected for censorship reasons, was published in Moscow in 1993 and in the United States in 2008.
* to render my novel safe: Fyodor Guber, Pamyat'i pis'ma (Moscow: Probel, 2007), 64. “Render safe” is our translation of obezopasit'. Grossman’s reply was “Boris Nikolaevich, ya ne khochu obezopasit'svoi roman.”
* he should give Einstein: Semyon Lipkin, Kvadriga (Moscow: Knizhny Sad, 1997), 533.
* “...through Publishing Houses”: A fifteen-page document in which Grossman, evidently anticipating difficulties from the beginning, records all his official conversations, letters, and meetings to do with the novel [RGALI, fond 1710, opis' 2, ed. khr., 1].
* instigation of Stalin himself: Bocharov, 84. Korotkova remembers her father saying, “Stalin has a very particular attitude toward me. He does not send me to the camps, but he never awards me prizes.” That Grossman’s two previous novels should have incurred Stalin’s disapproval is not surprising. Stepan Kolchugin is largely about the generation of Old Bolsheviks that Stalin was to destroy in the Purges of 1937, and Grossman had publicly announced his intention to devote much of the novel’s (never-written) fourth volume to the Comintern, the internationalist organization that Stalin marginalized in the late 1930s and finally dissolved in 1943. According to Lipkin, Stalin referred to this novel about a young revolutionary as “Menshevik” [Lipkin, 520]; Lipkin does not explain how he knew Stalin’s opinion, but he might have heard it secondhand, perhaps from a writer such as Fadeyev who moved in higher circles. Grossman’s earlier The People Immortal is about the encirclement of a Soviet military unit. There were many such encirclements during the first months of the war, some involving the death or capture of hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers. In 1942 it was possible to write about such catastrophes; after the Soviet victories of early 1943, however, they became a taboo subject.
* anything else I have written: Guber, 67; and RGALI, fond 1710, opis' 2, ed. khr., 8.
* in October 1951: Guber, 67.
* new suggestions for the title: These included “On the Volga,” “Soviet People,” and “During a People’s War” [RGALI, fond 1710, opis' 2, ed. khr., 1]. The earlier title “Stalingrad” had been abandoned after Sholokhov’s indignant, and anti-Semitic, response to Tvardovsky when the latter tried to enlist his support: “Whom have you entrusted to write about Stalingrad? Are you in your right mind?” [Lipkin, 534.]
* in Literaturnaya gazeta: Natalya Gromova, Raspad (Moscow: Ellis Lak, 2009), 337.
* for a Stalin Prize: Anna Berzer, Proshchanie (Moscow: Kniga, 1990), 151.
* he was feeling badly sick: Lipkin, 543–44; see also Gromova, 346–50.
* one timid gesture of protest: Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate (London: Vintage, 2006), 656.
* anti-Soviet essence of the book: In late 1952 For a Just Cause was also accepted by Sovetsky pisatel', the publishing house which, in 1956, brought out what, according to Lipkin, Grossman considered the most complete version of the novel [Lipkin, 153 and 164]. Guber, however, has said that Grossman did further revisions for the edition published by Sovetsky pisatel' in 1964 (and republished in 1989). The State Military Publishing House (Gosudarstvennoe voennoe izdatel'stvo) was often referred to either as Voenizdat or Voengiz.
* from Russian villagers: Bocharov, 107.
* a number of European languages: “The Hell of Treblinka” was translated into English, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Romanian, and Yiddish in 1945, and into Polish and Slovenian in 1946. There may have been other translations. Grossman’s article was also published in tandem with other accounts: with Simonov’s report on Majdanek, in German, in 1945; and with Jankiel Wiernik’s testimony, in Yiddish, in Buenos Aries in 1946.
"The Old Man”
First published in Red Star (February 8, 1942).
* Kamyshevakha!: Velika Kamyshevakha (Great Kamyshevakha) is a large village in the province of Kharkov.
* makhorka: The very coarsest, strongest tobacco.
* Poltava: Peter the Great’s victory over Sweden at the Battle of Poltava (1709) marked Russia’s emergence as a great power.
"The Old Teacher”
Written in 1943; first published in Znamya (July and August 1943).
* the Black Hundreds: A nationalist—and violently anti-Semitic—movement in early-twentieth-century Russia.
* Zhitomir: A town in western Ukraine, sixteen miles from Berdichev. On September 19, 1941, 3,145 Jews were shot just outside the town [Pohl, 35].
* Vinnitsa: An industrial town in central Ukraine. About half the population of 60,000 were Jews. The police chief might have been supervising preparations for a bunker being built there for Hitler’s easternmost headquarters, Werwolf, and he might have been playing a role in massacres of Jews. Around 15,000 Jews were massacred in Vinnitsa on September 19–20, 1941 [Pohl, 37], and there was a second massacre in April 1942. Hitler first flew to Werwolf in mid-July 1942 and remained there until October; he was also there during February and March 1943. In early summer 1943, the SS invited international forensic experts to observe as they exhumed 9,432 victims of NKVD Purges from 1937 and 1938. Whether Grossman was aware of this is unknown. The exhumation took place around the time that he was writing “The Old Teacher,” though the s
tory is set a year earlier, in the summer of 1942.
* “Was? Was?”: “What? What?”
* aber er ist Jud: “Here, a good doctor—but he is a Jew.”
* block warden: In most of the Reich and the occupied territories, a block warden was a low-level Nazi Party organizer. Here Grossman imagines the Germans as making do with whatever collaborators they could find.
* my campfire shines: A popular Russian song about friendship. The words are by the poet Arkady Polonsky (1819–98).
* to nach Haus or for to spazier: Going home or going for a walk.
* when it comes down to it, are essential: Becker is, of course, referring to the use of gas. Mobile vans were first used to gas large numbers of Jews in the Polish town of Chelmno, where at least 150,000 Jews were murdered between December 1941 and the summer of 1944. Nazi officials of every rank employed similar euphemisms with regard to the Shoah; transportation to the death camps, for example, was referred to as “resettlement.” The Final Solution is, of course, itself a euphemism. Claude Lanzmann has observed that the extermination of the Jews was “a nameless crime, which the Nazi assassins themselves dared not name, as if by doing so they would have made it impossible to enact.” [Claude Lanzmann, Shoah (Eureka, 1985), page 53 of the booklet accompanying the 2007 DVD of the film.]
* greatly slows down the work: Probably an inaccuracy. According to Altshuler, “Most of the mass killing of the Jews in the Soviet Union was accomplished by machine gun...The Einsatzgruppen units, trained and prepared for this type of assignment, almost always took charge of the mass killings.” Altshuler continues, “Apparently, the reaction of most of the local population to the mass killings varied from joy at their fate, through indifference, to passive identification with the victims. All these feelings, contradictory as they might be, could be experienced by the same people in different situations and at different times.” [Altshuler, 176–77.]