In 2006, Keith Gessen wrote about the complicated legacy of the Russian novelist Vasily Grossman.
In the terrible winter of 1938, just before the last of the Moscow show trials, the Soviet secret police arrested a woman named Olga Guber for having failed to denounce her anti-Soviet husband. It was an error. The husband she was to have denounced—the poet Boris Guber, arrested a year earlier—was no longer her husband. The novelist Vasily Grossman was her husband. Desperate, Grossman sent a carefully composed letter to Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the N.K.V.D.
“In the Town of Berdichev” was greeted with genuine enthusiasm. The fashionable novelist Ilya Ehrenburg, then in Paris, thought Grossman’s work reminiscent of Babel, and Babel himself was charmed by the story. Even Mikhail Bulgakov, unflappably haughty toward all things Soviet, seemed to like it. “Excuse me,” he said, “do you mean to say that something worthwhile can still be published?” That year, Russian literature entered the darkest period in its history.
Stalin was a magician, in his way, but one could not simply announce that the German armies weren’t there or order them shot in the basement of Lubyanka. Or, rather, oneorder them shot, that was just the thing to order, but they kept shooting back. When Grossman returned to Moscow from his trip to the front, his car dented by shrapnel after he had barely escaped the German capture of Orel, his editor immediately demanded to know why he hadn’t described the “heroic defense of Orel.
Grossman spent the next five months in the city, crossing between the east and west banks, and earning the trust of the soldiers who were fending off the Germans in brutal house-to-house fighting. He formed a deep attachment to the men; Beevor describes Grossman as experiencing a period of “spiritual idealization,” believing that the defenders of Stalingrad were saints. The men, in turn, seeing themselves described in Grossman’s articles in, became attached to him.
Early in the notebooks, you sense the extent to which Grossman had imbibed the spirit of Soviet internationalism. Babel, travelling through the same areas during the civil war, had been deeply moved by the traces he saw of Jewish culture; Grossman barely seems to notice. But after he returned through Ukraine, and especially after Warsaw, it was as if he had been seized with the need to list all the Jews he saw. “A cellar with Jews,” he writes. “Jews who have emerged from under the ground.
The novel begins with a description of the fighting at Stalingrad, still in the martial, residually Soviet tone of Grossman’s newspaper days. But then gradually the author seems to lose interest in the battles and the generals. There is a remarkable chapter about a woman who cannot get a residence permit in the city to which she has been evacuated. There is a chapter about a woman named Lyudmila Shtrum , who is jostled on the tram on her way to visit her wounded son in the hospital.
A critic once complained that Grossman’s characters are poorly drawn, just “names with problems.” In fact, they seem to be problems with bodies, their sufferings never merely verbal and never quite possible to explain. The heroes of this novel are weak, confused, misled people—and, whether they are old revolutionaries who commit crimes in the name of the Party or non-Party men who momentarily bow to its tremendous pressure, Grossman examines them with a remarkable lack of rancor.
What Grossman didn’t mention was that he had shown the manuscript to his friend Semyon Lipkin, wondering what Lipkin would cut to make it publishable. Lipkin read the thousand-page manuscript in awe. He thought the book was a revelation—and that, no matter what Grossman did, it could never be published. As Lipkin recalled the scene in his memoir, Grossman became angry and denounced him as a coward. They argued.
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