GROSSMAN, Vasily (Semenovich)

Nationality: Russian. Born: Berdichev, Ukraine, ca. 12 December 1905. Education: Moscow University (now Moscow M. V. Lomonosov State University), 1924-29, degree in chemistry 1929. Family: Married 1) Anna Petrovna Matsuk in 1928 (divorced), one daughter; 2) Olga Mikhailovna. Career: Industrial safety engineer and chemical engineer, Donbass mines, until 1932; professional writer, 1932-64. World War II correspondent, Krasnaya zvezda newspaper, Moscow, 1941-45; contributor of sketches and short stories to periodicals, including Krasnaya zvezda, Literaturnaya gazeta, and Novy mir.Award: Received Banner of Labor decoration for his writings, 1955. Died: 14 September 1964.

Publications

Novels

Glück auf. 1934.

Stepan Kolchugin. 1937.

Yunost Kolchugina. 1939; as Kolchugin's Youth, 1946.

Narod bessmerten. 1942; as The People Are Immortal, 1943; as No Beautiful Nights, 1944.

Za pravoe delo. 1955.

Vse techet. 1970; as Forever Flowing, 1972.

Zhizn' i sud'ba. 1980; as Life and Fate, 1985.

The Sistine Madonna. 1989.

Short Stories

Staryi uchitel'. 1962.

Osenniaia buria. 1965.

Dobro vam! 1967.

Play

Esli verit' pifagoreitsam [If You Believe the Pythagoreans]. 1946.

Other

Rasskazy. 1937.

Stalingrad: Sentyabr' 1942-yanvar' 1943 [Stalingrad: September 1942-January 1943]. 1943.

With the Red Army in Poland and Byelorussia (First Byelorussian Front, June-July, 1944 (English translation). 1945.

Gody voiny. 1946; as The Years of War (1941-1945), 1946.

Povesti i rasskazy. 1950.

Povesti, rasskazy, ocherki. 1958.

Na evreiskie temy: Izbrannoe v dvukh tomakh. 1985.

Editor, with Ilya Ehrenburg, Chernaia kniga: O zlodeiskom povsemestnom ubiistve evreev nemetsko-fashistskimi zakhvachikami vo vremenno-okkupirovannykh raionakh Sovetskogo Soiuza i v lageriakh unichtozheniia Pol'shi vo vremia voiny 1941-1945. 1980; as The Black Book: The Ruthless Murder of Jews by German-Fascist Invaders throughout the Temporarily Occupied Regions of the Soviet Union and in the Death Camps of Poland during the War of 1941-1945, 1981.

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Critical Studies:

Stalingrad Vasiliia Grossmana by Semen Lipkin, 1986; The Bones of Berdichev—The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman by John and Carol Garrard, 1996.

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Soviet Ukrainian Jewish writer Vasily Semenovich Grossman, one of the greatest chroniclers of the Holocaust, was born, it is believed, in the Ukrainian town of Berdichev. Although Berdichev, situated to the west of Kiev, was significant for the invading German armies because of its strategically placed rail and road links, its much greater importance lay in the fact that it was known as the Jewish capital of the area, having been a crucial center of Judaism and retaining at the time of the Nazi invasion a population that was more than 50 percent ethnically Jewish. The town fell completely into German hands on 17 July 1941; witnesses, however, confirm that the mass extermination of the Jewish population of Berdichev commenced some 10 days earlier.

The precise place and date (probably 12 December 1905) of Grossman's birth cannot be documented with exact certainty, given the fact that no birth certificate has been traced; from photographs, letters, and other family evidence, however, it can be assumed that Grossman spent a significant part of his youth in Berdichev and that he retained a profound impression of the town as is demonstrated, for example, in certain of his fictional works and other writings. Grossman's parents were Jews, although they did not practice their faith. Grossman himself was never a practicing Jew; his own first name was Iosif, Vasily being an adopted name—and in a stark autobiographical note, written in 1947, Grossman remarks that his father, Semyon Osipovich, had been a chemical engineer and that his mother, Yekaterina Savelievna, had taught French. He also adds the date of his mother's death, 1941, mentioning briefly that she had perished in the Nazi-occupied territory of Berdichev. It is not known if Grossman's parents were married; he spent most of his early years in his mother's care and formed a great emotional attachment to her, together with enormous admiration for her personal qualities of dignity, courage, and generosity. Grossman, however, also maintained excellent communication with his father as is clearly revealed from their correspondence that lasted up to the latter's death in 1956. Until the end of his own life Grossman carried an enormous burden of guilt for having failed to act at a critical time in order to facilitate his mother's exit from Berdichev, where she died on 15 September 1941, one of the many victims executed in cold blood and thrown into a pit by the Germans. Grossman's subsequent bravery during the time spent with the Red Army at the front from 1941 to 1945 and especially his great valor and integrity while acting as war correspondent during the Battle of Stalingrad could be interpreted as his attempt to expiate in some way his sense of blame for his mother's death.

It was during his years as a chemistry student at Moscow University (1924-29) that Grossman began to feel drawn to literature. His early first marriage to Anna Petrovna Matsuk (Galya) in 1928 was not a success, but Grossman's only child, his daughter Yekaterina (Katya), was born in January 1930. Katya was, in fact, brought up by Grossman's mother. Grossman's second wife, Olga Mikhailovna, the former wife of Boris Andreyevich Guber, did not in later years provide Grossman with the spiritual help and comfort he needed; these qualities he was to find in his relationship with Yekaterina Vasilievna, wife of the poet Nikolai Zabolotsky, and it was to her that he entrusted important materials for safekeeping at the end of his life.

On graduation from Moscow University Grossman worked as an analyst in the Donbass mines until 1932. From these harsh experiences he created his early prose work Glück auf in 1934. Two further collections of stories then swiftly appeared, Happiness and Four Days. In 1937 Grossman joined the Writers' Union, and he spent the next three years working on a long novel, very much in the socialist realist mode, entitled Stepan Kolchugin. Grossman began forging his literary career during the years of the imposition of strict controls on writers, the so-called great terror and the purges, and, although he survived physically, events surrounding him and the fates of friends and family had an enormous impact upon him. His first truly successful short prose work, The People Are Immortal, was based on what he had witnessed at the front in 1941; Grossman's reputation as a writer, however, was firmly established by his war reporting from the Battle of Stalingrad. Some of these articles appeared in Pravda.

From 1946 until his death in 1964 Grossman himself was to suffer greatly at the hands of the Soviet literary establishment, many of his works being labeled as anti-Soviet. His only play, for example, If You Believe the Pythagoreans, which had been written before the war, was denounced, and the publication in 1952 of For a Just Cause, the first part of a long novel dealing with the Battle of Stalingrad, made matters even worse. It is likely that Grossman was only "saved" by Joseph Stalin's death in 1953. In the last 10 years of his life Grossman wrote Life and Fate, the sequel to For a Just Cause, and Forever Flowing, his powerful and insightful analysis of Vladimir Lenin and Leninism. The manuscript of Life and Fate was seized and "arrested" in February 1961 by the KGB and at a subsequent interview with Mikhail Andreyevich Suslov, chief ideologist of the Party, Grossman was told that the novel would see publication "only after 250 years." The novel was, in fact, smuggled abroad and published in Switzerland in 1980. Forever Flowing appeared in West Germany in 1970.

Grossman was little known to later Soviet and to Western readers before his main works were published (and others republished) during the glasnost years. Although his three long novels bear witness most eloquently to the atrocities of both Adolf Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia, many of his deeply held beliefs and his attempts to come to terms with the horrors he witnessed are poignantly expressed in a much shorter work, The Sistine Madonna, written in 1955 and not published until 1989.

—Margaret Tejerizo

See the essay on Life and Fate.