Person

Vasily Grossman

Vasily Grossman

Soviet Jewish writer and war correspondent (1905–1964), author of Life and Fate, the KGB-suppressed novel of the Battle of Stalingrad now widely ranked among the twentieth century’s major works of Russian fiction.

Grossman was born in Berdychiv, then part of the Russian Empire and, from 1922, the Soviet Union. He rose to fame reporting from the front at Stalingrad, though Life and Fate, despite its setting, is not principally a war novel. His mother was killed in the Nazi massacre at Berdychiv in 1941 — a town of roughly 50,000 people, some 40,000 of them Jewish, with 80 synagogues — and she recurs, fictionalised, throughout the book; Grossman later wrote her two unsent letters, nine and twenty years after her death. In 1961 the KGB seized the manuscript, his notes, and his typewriter ribbons, searching unsuccessfully for hidden copies (in one case digging up a friend’s garden). Grossman had secretly kept copies with other friends, and the novel was eventually smuggled to Switzerland, published there in 1980, and only reached Soviet readers in 1988. He died in 1964 believing the book was lost for good.

In the wiki

  • Russ Roberts on Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate — Russ Roberts and Tyler Cowen devote a full bonus episode to Life and Fate in place of a conventional interview, tracing Grossman’s biography, his modelling of the novel on War and Peace and Chekhov’s short stories, his treatment of fascism and Communism as structurally similar but not morally equivalent systems, his account of the psychology of confession under interrogation, and his autobiographical fictionalisation of his own mother and his marital and professional struggles through the physicist Viktor Shtrum. Both speakers single out the novel’s ‘senseless kindness’ passage and its unexpected chapter on artificial intelligence as evidence of Grossman’s reach beyond his own moment.

See also