The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman

With love and admiration to

YEKATERINA VASILIEVNA ZABOLOTSKAYA

Who inspired Grossman and preserved his precious testimony

First published in the USA in 1996 by The Free Press

under the title The Bones of Berdichev

This edition published in Great Britain by

PEN & SWORD MILITARY

An imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

47 Church Street

Barnsley

South Yorkshire

S70 2AS

Copyright © Study Center Vasily Grossman 2012

ISBN 978 1 78159 001 0

ISBN 9781781594049 (epub)

ISBN 9781781594056 (prc)

The right of John Garrard and Carol Garrard to be identified as Authors

of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is

available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in

any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying,

recording or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission from the Publisher in writing.

Printed and bound in England

By CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

Pen & Sword Books Ltd incorporates the Imprints of Pen & Sword Aviation,

Pen & Sword Family History, Pen & Sword Maritime, Pen & Sword Military,

Pen & Sword Discovery, Wharncliffe Local History, Wharncliffe True Crime,

Wharncliffe Transport, Pen & Sword Select, Pen & Sword Military Classics,

Leo Cooper, The Praetorian Press, Remember When,

Seaforth Publishing and Frontline Publishing

For a complete list of Pen & Sword titles please contact

PEN & SWORD BOOKS LIMITED

47 Church Street, Barnsley, South Yorkshire, S70 2AS, England

E-mail: [email protected]

Website: www.pen-and-sword.co.uk

CONTENTS

Maps and Drawings

The Vasily Grossman Study Center

Introduction to the Second Edition

Additional Bibliography

Preface and Acknowledgments

Prologue: Berdichev: The Holocaust Begins

1. The Tsar's Stepchildren Enter the Promised Land

2. False Starts

3. Walking a Tightrope

4. Free at Last: The Battle of Stalingrad

5. Back to Berdichev

6. Speaking for Those Who Lie in the Earth

7. War and Freedom

8. Buried Alive

9. Lazarus

Epilogue: The Bones of Berdichev

Appendix: Translated Archival Documents

Partial List of Jews Shot to Death by Germans During the Occupation of Berdichev (1941–1944)

Notes

Bibliography

Index

MAPS AND DRAWINGS

Barbarossa June 22–September 30, 1941

Einsatzgruppen Routes, 1941

Wehrmacht Approach Map to Assembly Area for Kiev Assault

Execution at Zhitomir

Map of Berdichev and environs, showing massacre sites

Ukrainian Variety Evening (German poster)

Grossman's summons to the Lubyanka (February 1938)

Typescript of Vsyo techet (Forever Flowing), showing Grossman's heavy emphasis on the word Iuda (Judas) in discussions of types of traitor in Soviet society

Grossman's diagram and notes on the atomic bomb

CIA map showing location of regional nuclear weapons storage site near Berdichev (1960s)

This wolfhound century has hurled itself upon my shoulders, But I have no wolfish blood running in my veins.

—OSIP MANDELSHTAM

The time of Hitler arrived; a wolfish century. It was a time when people lived like wolves, and wolves lived like people.

—VASILY GROSSMAN

Do not rejoice in his demise, you men, for though the world stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again.

—BERTHOLD BRECHT

In the cruel and terrible time in which our generation has been condemned to live on this earth, we must never make peace with evil. We must never become indifferent to others or undemanding of ourselves.

—VASILY GROSSMAN

THE VASILY GROSSMAN STUDY CENTER

THE PIER GIORGIO FRASSATI Cultural Center of Turin, headed by Professor Michele Rosboch (University of Turin), founded the Vasily Grossman Study Center on February 1, 2006.

The Center was born from the experience of a multimedia exhibit and of an international conference both entitled Life and Fate: The Novel of Freedom and the Battle of Stalingrad, realized together in Turin during the months of December 2005 and January and February 2006.

On that occasion, Professor Vittorio Strada (University of Venice) proposed the building of a network that would maintain the links between the many scholars involved (from various Italian universities as well as from the United States, Russia, France, Israel, and England) and that could sustain research and other initiatives regarding the works and the thought of Vasily Grossman, as well as studies generally related to World War II and a deeper understanding of the twentieth century (with special attention to the theme of rights and freedoms in relation to totalitarianism).

Under the scientific direction of Professor Giovanni Maddalena (University of Molise), the Grossman Study Center is committed to cultivate and maintain the network of relationships that has already been created, to collect materials and writings by and about Grossman from any country and language, and to coordinate researches on Grossman as well as promoting the works of the Russian writer. This promotion includes sharing the Turin exhibit in other cities in Italy and around the world.

Thanks to the work of many people coordinated by the executive director Dr. Pietro Tosco (university of Verona), during the last six years the portable exhibit about Grossman has been shown in many cities in Italy and Russia (including Moscow and Saint Petersburg), Buenos Aires, Jerusalem, Münich, New York City, Oxford, Washington D.C.

At the same time, the Center organized many seminars and lectures around the world and collected almost the whole first and second literature at the Center. This huge collection is going to be digitalized in the next year (2012) so that it will be available for any scholar on the website.

In 2007 the Center published the proceedings of the first international conference: Il romanzo della libertà [The novel of freedom], edited by G. Maddalena and P. Tosco, Soveria Mannelli (CT): Rubbettino.

In 2009 the Center organized the Second International Conference, Vasily Grossman between ideologies and eternal questions, held in Turin in February 19–21, 2009. The proceedings of this second conference have been published with the title L'umano nell'uomo. Vasilij Grossman tra ideologie e domande eterne, edited by P. Tosco, Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino.

The Center owns the international copyright to this book, which was donated to it by Professor John Garrard and his wife Carol. The Italian edition was published in 2009 as Le Ossa di Berdicev: La Vita e il Destino de Vasilij Grossman, by Marietti 1820, Genoa/Milan. It won the 2009 Giovanni Comisso Premio for biography/history. In 2010 the Spanish translation was published as La Vida y el Destino de Vasily Grossman, by Encuentro, Madrid. (For fuller details, see the Additional Bibliography, page xxviii.)

INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION

IN MARCH of 1989, the distinguished Russian critic Benedikt Sarnov, in a conversation in his Moscow apartment, asked John Garrard to write a biography of Vasily Grossman, a name we had never heard. He said that Grossman was a great writer, but the Soviet authorities had consigned his works to a black hole.¹

In June of 1990, after Inside the Soviet Writers' Union was finished, we proposed this to our editor at The Free Press, Joyce Seltzer. She replied, A biography is either about a famous person, or written by a famous person. No one has heard of Vasily Grossman, and you are unknown academics. Nearly twenty years have passed since the publication of The Bones of Berdichev: the Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman, and while we remain unknown academics, the reputation of Vasily Grossman has grown internationally.

Some of this is due to an unexpected historical serendipity: the Soviet Union had erased Grossman; now the Soviet Union itself collapsed. For a brief Camelot moment, the archives of the secret police opened. But aside from this gift from history, much of the credit must go to the Center for the Study of Vasily Grossman and the Battle of Stalingrad in Torino, Italy. They put together two international conferences on Grossman and a travelling exhibit which has been all over the world. They have opened the field of Grossman studies globally, and it is to them we have donated this book's international copyright and all royalties. Other people, chiefly in England, have also put enormous effort into bringing this writer to the West. Robert Chandler has made excellent translations into English of virtually all of Grossman's works. And in September of 2011, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a thirteen-hour dramatization of Life and Fate which put Grossman's novel on the bestseller lists for Britain.²

However, within Grossman's own country, an enormous silence still obtains. We await a complete edition of his works in Russian. He remains, as he said on his deathbed to his good friend Anna Berzer, buried alive in Russia and Ukraine, the successor states to the USSR.³ Why the silence? And why has the silence persisted now that the USSR is gone and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union no longer rules?

Grossman ended the war a decorated lieutenant colonel in the Red Army and its most celebrated frontline correspondent for Red Star, its newspaper. But after the war he got into trouble with the authorities, and finally became a non-person. He found it virtually impossible to publish new works; the state pulled from library shelves and pulped his earlier books. That silence persists even after the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991. Though the Communist Party no longer censors everything, the new Russia and sovereign Ukraine still ignore him.

Grossman told the unpalatable truth about the conduct of the Great Patriotic War, or Barbarossa as Hitler termed it: the Wehrmacht invasion on June 22, 1941. That war, fought largely on their own territory, led to the deaths of more Red Army soldiers and more Soviet citizens than all other European combatants combined. While Grossman was thoroughly patriotic during the war—he wrote to his father of his pride in being part of our Red Army—he also knew that his beloved soldiers had been the victims not only of German contempt, but their own command's callousness. The wounds of that war still bleed—the skewed demographic of the generation who fought it illustrates that. So many husbands, brothers, fathers died; some needlessly, and some ingloriously. Better to keep silent until the entire wartime generation has passed away, and perhaps also their children.

This official silence about Grossman's war reportage still obtains at the great memorial complex at Volgograd to the Battle of Stalingrad. Here Grossman spent hours on the front lines during the street fighting between the outnumbered and outgunned Stalingrad garrison and the entire might of the German Sixth Army. When the enormous memorial was opened in 1967, Grossman's words from his famous piece, In the Line of the Main Drive, published in Red Star, and republished in Pravda, are quoted. In concrete letters six feet high engraved on the wall leading up the hill of Mamaev Kurgan are words Grossman put in the mouth of a German soldier: They are attacking us again; can they be mortal?

Inside the great dome crowning the hill, next to the enormous statue of Mother Russia calling all her sons to battle, is the Red Army soldier's answer: Yes, we were mortal indeed, and few of us survived, but we all carried out our patriotic duty before holy Mother Russia. Here Grossman's words are tooled in gold around the base of the dome. A guard of soldiers stand at attention before the giant hand holding a torch coming out from the floor, honoring the mass grave of Red Army soldiers who lie beneath.

Yet the monument conceals the identity of these soldiers and the name of the man who wrote these words. In the Line of the Main Drive is Grossman's tribute to Colonel Gurtiev's 308th Siberian Division, one of only two divisions fighting in Stalingrad after the middle of September 1942 that was neither promoted to Guards status nor awarded a unit citation. Almost certainly, this was a punishment division, one of the dreaded shtrafbaty, from which only four out of a given 100 men emerged alive.⁴

To this day guides at the memorial either do not know or refuse to say that these are the words of Vasily Grossman, once a famous combat correspondent for Red Star, and that they honor the 308th Siberian Division.⁵

The same failure to tell the whole truth typifies the Soviet and post-Soviet treatment of the war. Far from being a heroic leader during the war, Stalin issued two orders that crippled the Red Army. Ni shagu nazad! (Not one step back! # 227, issued July 28, 1942), forbade retreat. This denied Russian troops freedom to maneuver, thus condemning hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers first to encirclement, then, after the last shell had been expended and the last rations eaten, to the choice between surrender or annihilation.

Stalin's other order declared that all Soviet POWs were Predateli Rodine, traitors to the Motherland, (# 270, issued August 16, 1941). The consequences for Red Army soldiers were catastrophic. Truly, the Ivan was part of the army of the damned.

We cite a vicious decision, made by the Central Committee of the Communist Party, to actually bomb prison camps containing their own soldiers!⁶ The Central Committee had found out that many Red Army soldiers were simply surrendering when surrounded by larger German units.

The entire topic of World War II still carries enormous emotional freight in both Russia and Ukraine, and officials still tell half-truths and outright lies. Grossman, on the other hand, was the great teller of truth about the war from both the perspective of the ordinary Red Army soldier at the front and the civilian living under occupation.

For example, what happened to Soviet soldiers after they became prisoners of the Germans? True to their racist mentality, the Germans categorized them by ethnicity. Jewish soldiers were stripped, discovered to be circumcised and immediately shot. Russians were singled out for especially vicious treatment, to be starved and worked to death in slave labor camps. But Ukrainian Red Army POWs and other Soviet ethnicities qualified for release from prison camps. A crucially important German document, dated February 1, 1942, entitled Entlassungen (released men), is a table showing that 280,108 Soviet POWs had been released since invasion day, June 22, 1941. Not a single released soldier was Russian—indeed, the document states that Russians do not qualify (nicht q.v.) However, of the 280,108 released men, fully 270,095 were Ukrainian.⁷

Communist propaganda had declared that all Soviet peoples suffered equally at the hands of the Germans: united in their hatred of the invaders, they worked together to throw them out. Grossman knew this was not true. In fact he called the Germans' stratification of all the occupied peoples of Western Europe and the USSR the ladder of slavery in his short story, The Old Schoolmaster (Stary uchitel). On the top rung sat the Danes, and on the penultimate rung the Ukrainians. But Russians were on the bottom rung; the Germans, who called themselves the Herrenvolk, the master race, named Russians as Untermensch (subhuman). The Jews do not even make it onto the ladder, for the Germans did not consider them as human beings.

In Life and Fate Grossman attempted to describe how this ladder condemned specifically Russian Red Army POWs to a horrific death. In one episode, based on a true story, he describes how a Ukrainian peasant woman, Khristya Chunyak, is sheltering Semyonov, a Russian POW. Semyonov fears she may ask a neighbor to call a German patrol or the Ukrainian police … When he asks, Aren't you afraid to keep me here, Aunt Khristya?, Grossman deliberately has her respond in indirect speech: She shook her head and said there were a lot of freed prisoners in the countryside—though of course they were mostly Ukrainians who'd come back to their own homes. But she could say Semyonov was her nephew …⁸

By concealing Semyonov's Russian identity and pretending he is Ukrainian, Khristya saves his life. Speaking of the Germans' brutal treatment of Ukrainian peasants, Khristya says, They don't treat us like human beings … And some of our own police from the village are just as bad (p. 560). Grossman tried to slip the cleavage between Ukrainian and Russian Red Army POWs into his novel, but this fact did not accord with Communist propaganda. Aunt Khristya's statements about freed prisoners who were mostly Ukrainian and Semyonov's fear of being captured by a German patrol or the Ukrainian police are some of the most explosive sentences in the entire novel, and one of the reasons it could not be published inside the Soviet Union. The treatment of Russian Red Army POWs constitutes a second genocide—one which has been undertreated by historians of World War II.

Of course, the first genocide was that committed against Jewish civilians: from babies to the elderly, they were to be exterminated and Ukraine declared judenfrei (Jew free). Here the muscle of the 270,095 released former Red Army soldiers of Ukrainian ethnicity would be crucial. Some simply went back to their farms. But some of these men became the police Semyonov fears and Aunt Khristya declares to be just as bad as the Germans. It was the dreaded Politsai—wearing a German armband or uniform, carrying a German paybook and weapon, and obeying German orders—who patrolled and governed large areas of the Occupied Soviet Union.

This leads to the enormous and complex topic of Soviet collaboration. When the Red Army began to retake occupied Soviet territory, the NKVD followed to document losses in both civilian lives and property. Stalin was preparing his reparations bill to present to Germany. This enormous archive (filling dozens of reels of microfilm) is entitled The Extraordinary State Commission to Investigate the Crimes Committed by the Fascist-German Invaders and Their Accomplices (Vneocherednaya gosudarstvennaya komissiya po rassledovaniyu zlodeyanii nemetsko-fashistskikh zakhvatchikov I ikh posobnikov). Israeli researchers were able to spend six months in the secret police archives photocopying those portions which deal with the murder of individuals.⁹

The Commission, headed by NKVD officers, moved from town to town. For Berdichev, the actual record was found in a regional Party archive in Zhitomir, Ukraine. Its raw eyewitness testimony is irrefutable evidence that Ukrainian Politsai aided and abetted the Germans in the murder of over 30,000 Jewish inhabitants of that single town.¹⁰

Given that the murder of his own mother in this massacre was the defining moment in the conversion of Vasily Grossman, writer on the sidelines trying to get along in the Soviet system, to Vasily Grossman, fearless frontovik (one who searches out the front line), this was a truth which Grossman could not conceal. But the collaboration by former Red Army soldiers with German masters in the murder of Soviet Jews was an indigestible lump in the belly of Soviet propaganda.

Stalin had unwittingly ordered the NKVD to document what we term the Holocaust, the murder of all Jews from babies to elderly. Once he saw the eyewitness testimony, Stalin then ordered the NKVD to conceal this truth and again trumpet that all Soviet ethnicities suffered equally. The NKVD obligingly wrote an executive summary which submerges the Jewish identity of the civilian victims at Berdichev, and concealed the Ukrainian identity of the collaborators. However, they left the actual sworn testimony itself—which directly contradicts their summary—intact.

John Garrard translated and published extracts from the eyewitness testimony, juxtaposed against the lies stated in the executive summary in the same article which published the German table of Released Soviet POWs.¹¹ In a concentrated microcosm of the whole, the eyewitness Doichik states that Ukrainian Politsai were stationed around mounds after the shootings. They carried shovels. The next morning a little girl crawled out alive; a Ukrainian Politsai split her skull with his shovel and threw her dead body back onto the mound of corpses, then shoveled on more dirt.

The NKVD executive summary simply lies: it changes the Ukrainian ethnicity of the murderer to German, and changes the timing of this event to the shooting itself, rather than the next morning. (The drunk German shooting squad was then sleeping off the schnapps.) In fact, the eyewitness testimony states that for three days Ukrainian Politsai continued to be stationed with their shovels around the pits to brain anyone who crawled out. And the earth continued to move for three days.

Grossman interviewed Doichik, and he used this horrific incident in Life and Fate, changing the identity of the little girl into that of an adult woman, Natasha Karasik, who has the mentality of a child. He also softened the event by eliminating the Politsai and his shovel. Instead, she climbs out of the pits, wrings blood from her undergarment, and wanders back to her town, which is unnamed but is clearly Berdichev. Natasha Karasik herself is one of Grossman's relatives, and she was with his mother when the two women were forced into the Berdichev ghetto and then murdered. We include a picture of the original of Natasha Karasik in our biography.¹²

Just as the entire subject of Ukrainian collaboration in the murder of their Jewish neighbors was verboten in Soviet times, it is still an explosive topic. Several reviewers accused us of being unfair to Ukrainians as a people.¹³ Certainly not all Ukrainians collaborated, and of the twenty or so survivors of the 30,000 Jews in Berdichev, each one was saved through the heroic action of a Ukrainian person who risked death and the death of their own entire family for sheltering a Jew.

Given how complex and sensitive this subject is, we decided to donate all archival materials we had uncovered to a major research library where they would be freely available to other scholars or interested parties. John Garrard's translation of The Berdichev Town Commission Report was donated to Yad Vashem in Israel. All other archival materials we donated to Harvard University's Houghton Rare Book and Manuscript Library. They comprise the John and Carol Garrard Collection, which is part of the Andrei Sakharov Archive. The Houghton offers fellowships of $1,500.00 per month to qualified researchers who wish to use its collections.¹⁴

Although trying to write about wartime collaboration in the Occupied Soviet Union was one of the factors which condemned him to being a non person by the Soviet regime, there is another battle over Vasily Grossman and his place in Russian literature. Something ugly happened to Vasily Grossman in his last years: he himself was betrayed to the KGB by someone very close to him. The crux of the matter comes down to the history of Grossman's final work, Vsyo techet (John Garrard translated the title as Forever Flowing; the latest, and excellent, translation by Robert Chandler titles it Everything Flows.) Grossman had begun the work in 1955, then set it aside to work on Life and Fate. After the arrest of Life and Fate, he picked it up sometime in 1962 to add truly subversive material to it.

The facts are these: on October 25, 1962, D. Polikarpov (head of the Culture Department of the Union of Soviet Writers), reported to the Central Committee of the Communist Party that Grossman has not only failed to draw appropriate conclusions from our conversations with him, but becomes very angry and expresses hostile views on Soviet society.¹⁵

The following day, October 26, 1962, the head of the KGB himself, V. Semichastny, gave a report headed Top Secret—Sovershenno sekretno. In it, Semichastny informs the Central Committee that Grossman had learned nothing from the seizure of his novel Life and Fate. Indeed, he had written another anti-Soviet work (referring to Forever Flowing).¹⁶

Semichastny then makes two very ominous statements: he expresses the fear that Grossman might try to smuggle this manuscript abroad to the West. Secondly, he concludes with the statement, Copies of excerpts from Grossman's manuscript are attached.

How does the head of the KGB know of Grossman's intentions? And how did he obtain excerpts from Grossman's manuscript?

We must be very careful here in assigning responsibility or naming names for this betrayal, for betrayal it is. We do have Grossman's NKVD and KGB files, thanks to the cooperation of his daughter, Yekaterina Vasilievna Korotkova-Grossman. She obtained them for us during the brief period in 1992 when under the Russian equivalent of a freedom of information act family members could get the file of any dead relative.

The files reveal that Grossman himself, though he made certain compromises to stay alive in Stalin's USSR, was no spy, no informant, and no traitor to his friends or his family. But the file does not tell us who supplied the excerpts of Forever Flowing to the KGB.

Grossman had by this time gone back to his wife, Olga Mikhailovna, after a two-year period in which he lived with Madame Yekaterina Vasilievna Zabolotskaya, the wife of a Russian author who was also one of Grossman's friends. Also living with Grossman in the apartment with Olga Mikhailovna was her adult son by her first marriage, Fyodor Guber, and his wife Irina and baby daughter.

At this point, there is no definitive evidence. When we asked Semyon Lipkin directly who was the traitor, he responded that he did not know.

When we asked the same question of Grossman's daughter, she responded with an extraordinary statement (May 1, 1993, personal interview, Moscow). She said that precisely around this time Olga Mikhailovna came to her asking advice. Her son Fyodor told her that he had heard Grossman reading from Forever Flowing. He was frightened, and suggested to his mother that in order to protect themselves, they send a joint letter to the authorities, claiming to have no knowledge of what was in this work. Olga Mikhailovna asked Yekaterina Vasilievna if she should sign this letter. The daughter replied It would be a crime. Olga Mikhailovna thereupon refused Fyodor Guber's request to send a joint letter.

At this point, there is a break in the chain of evidence. The Soviet legal code penalized anyone who knew but did not tell of anti-Soviet behavior. This placed terrible pressures upon family and friends.

Someone close to Grossman did hand these extracts over to the KGB, and Grossman knew he had been betrayed. In the typescript of the novella, he discusses four types of Judas—for betrayal was at the heart of the Soviet system. Indeed, the USSR relied upon its citizens to spy upon each other, and rewarded them for their tattling—whether the miscreant was guilty of a chance phrase or word, or was writing a work which contained materials directly assaulting Lenin, Stalin, and the entire Soviet system. The typescript shows that in very heavy black letters, much heavier and darker than his usual handwritten corrections, Grossman wrote the word Iuda in his discussion of the fourth Judas: "He is an inhabitant of the communal apartments; he is an average worker; he is a kolkhoz (collective farm) activist. But whatever type of person he was, his face is always the same, whether he is young or old, whatever his appearance, whether he is a formal knight—you can always recognize him right away. He is a bourgeois …" This coded description tells us Grossman knew who betrayed him, though he does not name the Judas.

But the fate of the manuscript of Forever Flowing does say something: Grossman thereupon concealed from his wife and her son that he still possessed it. We know this because he gave it in secret to Yekaterina Vasilievna Zabolotskaya, the woman he loved and with whom he had lived an idyllic two years before each returned to their respective spouses. Grossman's trust in Madame Zabolotskaya endured to the last moments of his life. Grossman took the only copy of his work, a 200 page manuscript/typescript to the Pervogradskaya hospital where he died. Madame Zabolotskaya told us he asked her to hide it, preserve it, and someday try to get it published in the West. It was this desire to publish it in the West, a desire which could only have been known by very few people, which so alarmed the head of the KGB on October 26, 1962.

Madame Zabolotskaya kept this secret for almost thirty years. Then, in 1989, in the full bloom of Gorbachev's glasnost (openness) and perestroika (reconstruction), she gave it to the Soviet journal Oktyabr, to be published.¹⁷ In March of 1992, during an interview inside her Moscow apartment, Madame Zabolotskaya gave the entire manuscript to John Garrard, asking him to fulfill Grossman's request to her on his deathbed that it be deposited in the West, and published in the West. As her frail, white hands placed the bundle in his lap, she said, And now, I have kept my promise (I vot ya sderzhala svoyo obeshchanie).

We were thus able to use the original manuscript/typescript for our biography, and John Garrard did a full analysis of it in Slavic and East European Journal.¹⁸ After we had finished and submitted the manuscript of The Bones of Berdichev to our publisher, we were offered $2,000 for it by Harvard University. On our next trip to Moscow, we took it back. We sat down with Madame Zabolotskaya and her two adult children, to tell them we could sell it in her name, and bring her back the money. She looked down at her lap, clasped her hands, and replied, "Nyet, ya ne khochu dratsya s Fedey" (No—I don't want to fight with Fedya, i.e., Fyodor Guber). Her two adult children stated that as Grossman gave the manuscript to her, it was hers to bequeath. We therefore donated the manuscript and all its rights along with all other archival materials to the same John and Carol Garrard Collection housed in the Andrei Sakharov Archive at Harvard University's Houghton Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Vasily Grossman is a major writer; ours was the first biography which used previously closed Soviet archives, but it will not be the last.¹⁹ We can only urge that anyone else who possesses archival materials do the same. Grossman suffered from Soviet censorship all his career; it would be a travesty if, now, private censorship should restrict access to all the sources for his life and works.

Finally, what is our assessment of Vasily Grossman, the writer? It must be admitted that for the Western reader, the sheer length of his masterpiece, Life and Fate, and its hundreds of named characters, some of whom are historical, is intimidating. For the Western reader, the best way to approach getting to know him is to read some of his shorter pieces, which have now been eloquently translated by Robert Chandler. (See the Additional Bibliography, page xxxii.) These will introduce the reader to Grossman's gritty dialogue and mastery of physical description.

Before tackling Life and Fate, the reader would do well to read two crucial chapters, Verdun on the Volga, and The Entombment of 6th Army, found in Alan Clark's wonderful Barbarossa: The Russian–German Conflict, 1941–45. These deal with precisely the hundred days of street-fighting at Stalingrad. In these crucial months, from September to November 18, 1942, the Stalingrad garrison, under the command of General Vasily Chuikov, was outnumbered ten to one by the Wehrmacht's Sixth Army. They were also outgunned: the Sixth Army had three Panzer divisions compared to Chuikov's park of forty operational tanks. Yet these few men held off the entire Sixth Army. The heroism of the Stalingrad defenders can hardly be overstated: Germany ultimately occupied 99 per cent of the city, yet the Red Army still held on, while the Sixth Army gradually saw all its divisions, including its reserves, sucked into the meatgrinder.

Westerners are accustomed to seeing the grainy black and white footage of the long lines of German prisoners—over 90,000—who snaked across the snow after the final German surrender on February 1, 1943. Now they look pathetic; but during the street-fighting inside the city, they held the initiative and the advantage of overwhelming superiority in manpower and firepower. Zhukov had ordered General Chuikov to buy him time to build up his counter-offensive. Chuikov did so; he told his commanders that time is blood, an order Grossman repeats in his Stalingrad notes. And so it was.²⁰

The last of the Germans' five offensives, begun on November 11, petered out on November 17 when both sides were physically spent. Chuikov was almost out of food as well as bullets when Zhukov finally launched his counter-offensive on November 19, 1942. In a two-pronged advance, he successfully surrounded about 330,000 men, of whom 220,000–230,000 were Germans, the rest Germany's satellites. In ninety-six hours Zhukov completed his encirclement: on November 22, the two Red Army wings met at the bridge of Kalach, and cut off the German supply line. Though the Germans fought on, they were doomed. Zhukov's timing is justly celebrated as a brilliant military stroke, but it is also illustrative of how ruthlessly Stavka, the Soviet supreme command, sacrificed the Red Army soldier.

While the novel's timeframe is the crucial hundred days of the street-fighting, it opens out to describe events happening simultaneously in the vast Soviet Union, from Occupied Ukraine, to Moscow, all the way to the Far East to the camps of the Gulag. And Grossman pulls into his narrative events which actually occurred earlier. The most important is the murder of the Jews of Berdichev, which the documents tell us occurred September 15–16, 1941—that is, a full year earlier than the time of the novel. Further, Grossman embeds essay-capsules in the work, which speak of events following the war, including the uprisings in the Gulag in the 1950s. Robert Chandler got it right in his own Introduction to the novel, like any great epic, it occasionally shatters its own frame (p. xxiii).

There still remains the question of how well the novel coheres as a narrative. Properly speaking, Life and Fate is a continuation of Grossman's earlier novel, For a Just Cause, but there is no English translation of For a Just Cause. (It was first published as Za pravoe delo by the journal Novy mir, nos. 7–10, 1952. It was later republished inside the USSR in the mid-1950s.) Even standing alone, Life and Fate tells the story of many different people at this time, and their stories often seem tenuously connected. It takes a careful reader indeed to remember that Semyonov, the Russian POW being sheltered by Khristya Chunyak, was once in the same division as the political commissar Krymov, whose career at the Stalingrad battle and his subsequent arrest by the NKVD consume many pages. And it is hard to remind oneself that Krymov is the former husband of Yevgenia Shaposhnikova, who is the sister of the wife of Victor Shtrum, the chief protagonist of the novel, and Grossman's own alter ego. Yevgenia gives up her engagement to handsome Colonel Novikov, in charge of a tank brigade which will spearhead one wing of the Zhukov counter-offensive, to be loyal to Krymov after he has been sent to the Lubyanka. The threads of the battle—its strategy, its soldiers, and their loved ones back in the rear—do cross each other, but they are stretched very thin.

What was Grossman's purpose in showing so many lives which seem related to each other only tangentially. Grossman himself answered this question when he wrote to Khrushchev seeking the return of his manuscript. (See appendix for full text.) He stated that his purpose in writing his book was … a response to the inner needs of Soviet people; it contains no lies or slanders, only truth, pain, love for human beings. Grossman then was not interested in narrative coherence. His truth was that in an immense country experiencing invasion and occupation, with a titanic battle taking place which would decide the outcome of the war, there would be a wide spectrum of responses. Human beings themselves are incredibly varied, and each individual consciousness comprises a unique world.

Perhaps he tried to do too much, but he was trying to give a multiplicity of responses to what he termed this cruel and terrible time in which we live. These are human beings poised on a cliff, at the extreme edges of existence in the Gulag and on the front lines of Stalingrad. And these are also human beings back in the rear; a woman cleaning her chandelier in a Moscow now safe from occupation, and NKVD guards who never go near the front beating up soldiers in the Lubyanka prison. Many of these people never meet—or meet only in passing. Yet they impact on each other's lives.

Grossman hinted at his methodology in the inner monologue of Sofia Levinton, a Jewish doctor, as she walks to the gas chamber. She remembers a conversation with a friend in which she said, If one man is fated to be killed by another, it would be interesting to trace the gradual convergence of their paths. At the start they might be miles away from one another … and yet eventually we are bound to meet, we can't avoid it … (p. 550). The man destined to murder her is the guard at the door of the gas chamber, and Sofia knows him at once: There he was; they had met at last! (p.550). Grossman describes his childish, mindless, drunken smile as he clubs Sofia with his iron pipe, contemptuously dismissing her, Easy now, you filthy Yid! (p. 551). Grossman here imaginatively reconstructs the Treblinka gas chamber, and describes the Ukrainian guard nicknamed Ivan the Terrible by the camp slave laborers. Grossman had written the first eyewitness account of a Nazi death camp in The Hell of Treblinka (Treblinsky ad), which he published in the journal Znamya in 1944. It was introduced at the Nuremberg trials of leading Nazis as evidence. Somehow, two parallel lives intersect.

Life and Fate then does not have a symmetrical structure, for neither does life nor fate. Its people are living in a country whose very existence is being threatened, and however they behave, they do not have the luxury of knowing how the war will turn out. Thus, a great many of Grossman's characters are last seen poised on a cliff. His central protagonist, Victor Shtrum, has been asked to sign one of those joint Soviet denunciation letters. In his last interior monologue, Victor decides he will not, for he is thinking of his dead mother: Well then, we'll see, he said to himself. Maybe I do have enough strength. Your strength, Mother … (p. 841). The ellipsis which follows this line is a concentrated projection of Grossman's architecture—incompletion is its structural feature. Is Shtrum's refusal final? Perhaps here Grossman is projecting onto Shtrum his own guilt for having signed such a letter, and regretting it thereafter.

In the novel's last pages, the scene switches again. An unnamed Russian officer (the clues identify him as Major Byerozkin, who commanded a regiment during the street-fighting) stands with his wife in a still forest, in silence. The author sees in the silence … both a lament for the dead and the furious joy of life itself (p. 871). Grossman foresees a happy ending for these two lives, two of the hundreds of lives who have been through the last one hundred days. Many of those parallel lives end tragically and horrifically. Fate casts down; its capriciousness allows others to survive. Grossman gives to a minor character, Alexandra Vladimirovna (the mother of Shtrum's wife) an interior monologue which states his central theme: fate alone has the power to pardon and to chastise … But those who call themselves human beings will live as human beings and die as human beings, the same as those who have already perished; and in this alone lies man's eternal and bitter victory over all the grandiose and inhuman forces that ever have been or will be … (p. 862).

Grossman's original audience was Soviet Russia. He tried to return to them a measure of the truth about the Great Patriotic War. But just as his insights into human nature apply to us, his truth about the war with Germany is something we in the West need to hear as well. Like all nations, we see war through the prism of our own experience. Thus the war on the Eastern front is largely undiscovered territory to us. Yet Stalingrad is the battle which Winston Churchill called the hinge of fate. In his war diary, Grossman correctly predicted that the German summer offensive of 1942 would decide all questions and all fates. And so it proved, even for those of us in the West.

It was at Stalingrad that the fortunes of war decisively swung back on the Wehrmacht. Though there would be two more blood-soaked years before the Germans surrendered in May of 1945, the courage of the Stalingrad garrison bought time for a Soviet counter-offensive which changed the course of history. We ourselves will never meet those soldiers, yet they profoundly affected our fate. Had Germany won, we in Great Britain and the United States would be living in a form of accommodation with a Nazi Europe. These men were not saints, but they, like Grossman himself, were men of courage. We owe it to him and to them to learn their story.

Acknowledgements to the Second Edition

The authors thank Rupert Harding, commissioning editor at Pen & Sword Books, for his efforts to republish this book, and Sarah Cook, our editor, for her tireless and patient work with us.

NOTES

1. At the time of this request, we had not heard of Vasily Grossman, nor of Life and Fate. Benedikt Sarnov had partnered with the writer Vladimir Voinovich to photocopy Grossman's manuscript right there in the Sarnov kitchen. The photocopying equipment was provided by Dr. Andrei Sakharov, who as a distinguished member of the Russian Academy had access to it. It was Vladimir Voinovich who courageously brought the two microfilms of the manuscript to the West. John Garrard had earned the trust of Soviet intellectuals because he had been part of the chain of individuals who smuggled letters and photographs to Dr. Sakharov from his family in the West, when Sakharov himself was under house arrest in what was then called Gorky. Benedikt Sarnov also mentioned that since John had near-native Russian, thanks to his military training at the Joint Services School for Linguists at Cambridge University, he would be able himself to translate the archival documents that Grossman's friends, namely Semyon Lipkin and Mme Ekaterina Vasilievna Zabolotskaya, possessed. It must be remembered that in March of 1989 the USSR still existed, and in spite of Gorbachev's openness and reconstruction the writ of the KGB still ran.

2. The CD of the BBC Radio 4 dramatization is commercially available from AudioGo, which can be found online at: http://www.audiogo.co.uk, or specifically at http://www.audiogo.co.uk/audiobook/23844/life-and-fate-the-complete-series. The radio broadcast was juxtaposed against an academic symposium and public forum on Life and Fate organized by Mark Damazer, Warden of St. Peter's College, Oxford University, and Patrick Finney of Aberystwyth University in Wales. We thank BBC4 Radio, and particularly Mark Burman and Robert Ketteridge of the BBC, for inviting us to speak at the forum.

3. The Russian word is zamurovan, related to immured in English, which effectively describes Grossman's claustrophobic sense of having been walled up while still breathing. Anna Berzer relates this episode in her memoirs, Proshchanie (Moscow, 1990), p. 251.

4. We analyze this memorial fully, a masterpiece of obfuscation captured in stone, on pp. 311–312. See the photograph of the interior of the dome, among those between pp. 246 and 247. We thank Leonid Finkelstein, a former distinguished BBC Russian Service correspondent, for permission to use his excellent photograph.

5. That this is still true today was confirmed by BBC correspondent Mark Burman at the BBC4 Conference on Vasily Grossman and Life and Fate held at St. Peters College, Oxford University, September 9, 2011.

6. The Central Party Archive was open for a brief time in 1992–93, when it was renamed The Russian Center for Custody and Research of the Documents of the Most Recent History. The document showing the original decision is located at Fond 17, opis 125, delo 52, pp. 72ff. Our original citation is found on p. 400, fn. 34 to chapter 7.

7. Most of the remaining non-Ukrainian POWs were Estonians (4,204); Volksdeutsche (Soviet citizens of German ethnicity), 1,475; Rumanians (1,088); and Latvians (1,052.) There were also three (!) Turkmen. John Garrard published a copy of this document in his article, The Nazi Holocaust in the Soviet Union: Interpreting Newly Opened Russian Archives (East European Jewish Affairs, vol. 25, no. 2, 1995/1350-1674/3-40). A photocopy of the original is found on p. 36 of the article. The original is in the Bundesarchiv-Militararchiv in Freiburg, Germany (BA-MA), WilD/33, p. 94. We thank the staff for their kind cooperation in obtaining this document, and their permission to publish it.

8. Life and Fate, translated by Robert Chandler, New York Review Books, New York, 2006, pp. 560–561. (All subsequent references are to this edition.)

9. Yad Vashem negotiated an agreement with Moscow's Central State Archive of the October Revolution to copy selections from the Commission's reports and documents, as well as German materials captured by Soviet troops. A complete set of everything filmed was deposited in Yad Vashem itself, and a second set was deposited in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

10. The Berdichev Town Commission Report was discovered and published in Russian by Ster Yelisavetsky, in his book Berdichevskaya tragediya (The Berdichev Tragedy, Kiev, 1991). John Garrard donated his own translation into English to Yad Vashem.

11. Garrard, The Nazi Holocaust, East European Jewish Affairs, vol. 25, no. 2, 1995/1350-1674/3-40.

12. See pp. 203–204 for Grossman's powerful treatment of the massacre, as rendered through the innocent eye of this mentally retarded woman.

13. We discovered, to our sorrow, that a man with whom we had been friends, a man who had personally been kind to us and indeed written a positive blurb for our earlier book Inside the Soviet Writers Union, the famous author Robert Conquest, assaulted our book in the New York Review of Books (July 11, 1996) stating that our gravest offense was our treatment of the behavior of Ukrainians, as a nation, in the Holocaust. Robert Conquest is the author of many fine books: Harvest of Sorrow, for which he was commissioned and paid by the émigré Ukrainian community, details the terror-famine visited upon Ukraine by Stalin and his henchmen. While the Soviet Union is gone, the official attitudes of independent Ukraine have not changed. Indeed, a recent documentary, Nazis/Skinheads: Hate and the Holocaust in Ukraine, prepared by Daniel Reynolds, a young Peace Corps volunteer who spent 2007–2008 in Ukraine, demonstrates that young people in Ukraine are totally unaware that some (certainly not all) Ukrainians of the World War II generation aided and abetted the Germans in the murders of their Jewish neighbors.

14. In this collection is the original typescript of a Berdichev survivor, Bronislava (Beti) Borisovna Livshits: her story illustrates the full spectrum of responses to occupation. Beti lived because a Ukrainian peasant woman pretended she was her daughter, and thought up an extraordinary stratagem how Beti might preserve that identity. Simultaneously, she names a Ukrainian teenage boy, Bronik Yavorsky, who threatened to turn her in to the Germans unless she would have sex with him. She also names the same two Ukrainian farmers, Zinchenko and Golub, who worked as bounty hunters for the Politsai, who are named by the other Berdichev massacre survivor, Naum Epelfeld. Epelfeld was only ten when the Germans occupied the town, and survived with his father, Alexander.

15. We originally cited this material in The Bones of Berdichev, pp. 291–295. These materials were first published in Trud (Labor), a Soviet trade union newspaper, October 3, 1992. Iz sekretnykh arkhivov. Zhizn I sudba. Kak pytalis unichtozhit rukopis romana, a zxaodno I somogo Vasiliya Grossmana. The materials are introduced and accompanied with brief annotations by Semyon Lipkin.

16. The only other thing Grossman was writing was "I Wish you Well!" (Dobro vam!), his account of his journey to Armenia, but this had already been passed by the censorship, and was accepted for publication by Novy mir. This eliminates Dobro vam! as the candidate for Semichastny's report.

17. Vsyo techet, Oktyabr, # 6. It created a sensation, as it contained the first direct attack upon Lenin, a hitherto untouchable figure.

18. John Garrard, The Original Manuscript of Forever Flowing: Grossman's Autopsy of the New Soviet Man, Slavic and East European Journal 38, no. 2 (1994): 271–289.

19. Already other scholars are working with the donation we made to the Houghton. Polly Zavadicker of UC Santa Cruz is working on a dissertation, and Pietro Tosco (who did the finding aid for the John and Carol Garrard Collection) is doing a book.

20. Antony Beevor, as editor, with Luba Vinogradova as his translator, are the authors of A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941–45 (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006). Beevor himself does not know the Russian language, but did a fine job in editing Grossman's diary entries, giving them explanatory titles to complement the collection of Grossman's articles published by the Soviet government in Russian and English in 1946 as Gody Voiny/The Years of War. Vinogradova's excellent translations bring the diaries to a much wider Western audience. The last sentence of A Writer at War reads: "Grossman himself may have been dragged down by the wolfhound century, but his humanity and courage have survived in his writing." The reader may note the final sentence of the first edition of this book, originally entitled The Bones of Berdichev: the Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman, and published in 1996, ten years prior to A Writer at War: "Still alive in his books, Grossman calls upon us to take up the burden of history and to make sure that the tragedies of the ‘wolfhound century’ are never permitted to return and haunt our descendants" (emphasis added). We note further that Mandelshtam's phrase of the wolfhound century forms one of the epigraphs to our earlier book, and is used at numerous points in our narrative. Antony Beevor does not acknowledge us as his source. Nevertheless, we thank him for his careful reading of The Bones of Berdichev: the Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman.

ADDITIONAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

BOOKS ON VASILY GROSSMAN

IN RUSSIAN:

Lanin, B., Idei otkrytogo obščestva v tvorčestve Vasilija Grossmana, 1997, Magistr, Moskva.

Ol'brych, V. Besedy o Vasilii Grossamane, 2002, Slavica Orientalia/Interkontakt-fond, Warszawa/Moskva.

Guber, F. Pamjat' i pis'ma. Kniga o Vasilii Grossmane, 2007, Probel, Moskva.

IN ITALIAN:

Maddalena, G. & Tosco, P. (eds), Il romanzo della libertà. Vasilij Grossman tra i classici del XX secolo, 2007, Rubbettino, Soveria Mannelli.

Garrard, J. & C., Le Ossa di Berdicev: La Vita e il Destino di Vasilij Grossman, Tradizione di Roberto Franzini Tibaldeo e Marta Cai. Marietti 1820, Genova-Milano, 2009. [Winner of the 2009 Giovanni Comisso Premio for best biography/history published in Italian in 2009. Subsequently translated into Spanish as La Vida y el Destino de Vasili Grossman, Traduccion, Lazaro Sanz Velazquez, Encuentro, Madrid, 2009.]

Tosco, P. (ed.), L'umano nell'uomo. Vasilij Grossman tra ideologie e domande eterne, 2011, Rubbettino, Soveria Mannelli.

PARTS OR CHAPTERS OF BOOKS ON VASILY GROSSMAN

IN RUSSIAN:

Lipkin, S., Žizn' i sud'ba Vasilija Grossmana (+ 2 pis'ma Grossmana), in Kvadgriga, 1997, Knižnyj sad – Agraf, Moskva, pp. 513–637.

Markiš, S., Vasilij Grossman, in Babel' i drugie, 1997, Gesharim, Moskva/Ierusalim, pp. 29–117.

Genzeleva, R., Vasilij Grossman, in Puti evrejskogo samosoznanija, 1999, Mosty kul'tury/Gesharim Moskva/Ierusalim, pp. 16–97.

Nemzer, A., V.S. Grossman. Nerasslyšnnaja bol', in Pamjatnye daty, 2002, Vremja, Moskva, pp. 362–378.

Ol'brych, V., Istoričeckoe bespamjatstvo – otličitel'naja čerta totalitarnogo sociuma (Ha primere tvorčestva Vasilija Grossmana i Jurija Družnikova), in (various authors), Istorija v zerkale literatury i literaturovedenija, 2002, Slavica Orientalia, Warsaw, pp. 303–315.

Ol'brych, V., Apokalipsis XX veka. O romane Žizn' i sud'ba Vasilija Grossmana, in (various authors), Desjat' lucčšich russkich romanov XX veka, 2004, Luč, Moskva, pp. 139–155.

Lazarev, L. Po zadaniju redakcii (vstreči s Annoj Achmatovoj, Il'ej Erenburgom, Vasiliem Grossmanom, Aleksandrom Tvardovskim), in Zapiski požilogo čeloveka, 2005, Vremja, Moskva, pp. 147–178

Lejderman N. & Lipoveckij, M., Roman Vasilija Grossmana Zizn' i sud'ba (1961), in Russkaja literatura XX veka, 2008, Akademija, Moskva, pp. 205–220.

IN ITALIAN:

Lami, G., Riflessioni su V.S. Grossman, in (various authors), Nel mondo degli Slavi. Incontri e dialoghi tra culture. Studi in onore di Giovanna Brogi Bercoff (2 vols), 2008, Firenze University Press, Firenze, II, pp. 341–351.

Tosco, P., L'istante e l'eterno: il tempo in Vita e destino di V. Grossman, in Immagini di tempo. Studi di Slavistica (edited by P. Tosco), 2010, QuiEdit, Verona, pp. 221–238.

V. Vujacic, Aleksandr Solženicyn e Vasilij Grossman: uno slavofilo e un occidentalista contro lo stato totalitaro sovietico, in Società totalitarie e transizione alla democrazia. Saggi in memoria di Victor Zaslavsky (edited by T. Piffer and V. Zubok), 2011, Il Mulino, Bologna, pp. 375–410.

ARTICLES ON VASILY GROSSMAN

IN RUSSIAN:

Guber, F., Iz archiva Vasilija Grossmana (Voprosy literatury, 1997, 4), 321–332

Lipkin, S., Istinnaja sila – dobrota (Dva pis'ma Vasilja Grossmana) (Voprosy literatury, 1997, 1), 270–273

Solženicyn, A., Priemy epopej. Iz ‘Literaturnoj kollekcii’ (Novyjmir, 1998, 1), 172–190

Soldatkina, Ja., Recenzija na R. Genzeleva, ‘Puti ebrejskogo samosoznanija: V. Grossman, I. Metter, B. Jampol'skij, R. Zernova’ (Literaturovedenie – referativnyj žurnal, 2000, 2), 162–170

Kasavin, I., Štrichi k obrazu. Individual'naja kul'turnaja laboratorija Vasilija Grossmana (Voprosy filosofii, 2000, 7), 13–36

Družnikov, Ju., Uroki Vasilja Grossmana (Čajka, 2001, 1)

Pasternak, B., Novootkrytye pis'ma k Ariadne Efron (Znamja, 2003, 11), 156–179

Solženicyn, A., Dilogija Vasilija Grossmana. Iz ‘Literaturnoj kollekcii’ (Novyj mir, 2003, 8), 154–169

Guber, F., … Ty budeš’ žit’ v toj knige, kotoruju ja posvjatil tebe (Voprosy literatury, 2005, 3), 59–67

Korotkova-Grossman, E., Neožidannyj Grossman (Literaturnyj al'manach, 2005/2006, 7–8, tom I), 151–153

Lazarev, L., ‘Pravda bezuslovnaja i čestnaja.’ Vasilij Grossman i tradicii russkoj klassiki (Novaja Evropa, 2006, 18), 153–160

Sarnov, B., Idejnaja i chudožestvennaja èvolucija Grossmana v processe ego raboty had romanami ‘Za pravoe delo’ i ‘Žizn’ i sud'ba’ (Novaja Evropa, 2006, 18), 143–152

Korotkova-Grossman, E., O moem otce (Korni, 2007, 34), 32–44

Kling, D., Povest’ V. Grossmana «Dobro vam!». Sposob povestvovania i koncepcija tvorčestva (Voprosy literatury, 2008, 4), 228–240

Rapoport, A., E.V. Korotkova-Grossman: ‘Iz protivostojanija s sistemoj otec vyšel pobeditelem’ (Lechaim, 2008, 5 (193)), 63–67

Korotkova-Grossman, E., Janvarskie kanikuly (Raduga, 2009, 5, 6), 135–148

Bit-Junan, Ju., O predelach dopustimogo. Krticheskaja rechepcija tvorchestva V. Grossmana 1930-ch godov (Voprosy literatury, 2010, n.4), pp. 155–177.

Bit-Junan, Ju. & Fel'dman D., Intriga i sud'ba Vasilija Grossmana (Voprosy literatury, 2010, n.6), pp. 153–182.

IN ITALIAN:

Lazarev, L., Vasilij Grossman: in nome della libertà e del bene (La Nuova Europa, 2005, 5 (323)), 4–15

Tosco, P., Il destino di Stalingrado (with an unpublished note of Grossman) (La Nuova Europa, 2010, n.3), pp. 96–101.

SOURCES IN ENGLISH

Garrard, J., The Nazi Holocaust in the Soviet Union: Interpreting Newly Opened Russian Archives (East European Jewish Affairs, vol. 25, no. 2, 1995/1350-1674), 3-40. [Editor's note: this article examines the Berdichev Town Commission Report compiled by the NKVD in 1944, and never subsequently published. John Garrard translated the entire report and donated his translation to Yad Vashem in Israel.]

Pirani, S., Unsung Genius among Great Modern Russian Novelists (Jewish Chronicle, 18 February 2000), page xii.

Slezkine, Y., The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), chapters 3 and 4.

Hellbeck, J., War and Peace for the Twentieth Century (Raritan, 26:4 (Spring 2007)), 24–48.

Shrayer, M.D., Vasily Grossman, in M.D. Shrayer (ed.), An Anthology of Jewish–Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Dual Identity in Prose and Poetry, 2 vols (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2007, 1), 539–541.

Murav, H., Violating the Canon: Reading Der Nister with Vasilii Grossman (Slavic Review, Fall 2008: 67(3)), 642–661.

The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization, ed. R. Brandon & W. Lower (Indiana University Press, 2008).

Weiner, A., Review of A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941–1945, trans. and ed. Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova (Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 10:2 (Spring 2009)), 387–97.

Budnitskii, O., The Intelligentsia Meets the Enemy: Educated Soviet Officers in Defeated Germany, 1945 (Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 10:3 (Summer 2009)), 629–82.

Clark, K., Ehrenburg and Grossman. Two Cosmopolitan Jewish Writers Reflect on Nazi Germany at War (Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 10:3 (Summer 2009)), 607–28.

Grossman, Vasily, Ukraine Without Jews, trans. Polly Zavadivker (Jewish Quarterly, no. 218 (Summer 2011)), 10–16.

Shrayer, M.D., Bearing Witness: The War, the Shoah and the Legacy of Vasily Grossman (Jewish Quarterly, 217 (Spring 2011)), 14–19.

TRANSLATIONS OF VASILY GROSSMAN'S WORKS

Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman, translated by Robert Chandler (New York: NYRB Classics, 2006 and London: Vintage Classics, 2006)

Everything Flows, by Vasily Grossman, translated by Robert & Elizabeth Chandler (New York: NYRB Classics, 2009)

The Road, by Vasily Grossman, translated by Robert & Elizabeth Chandler (New York: NYRB Classics, 2010)

The Road, by Vasily Grossman, translated by Robert & Elizabeth Chandler (London: The MacLehose Press, 2011)

Everything Flows, by Vasily Grossman, translated by Robert & Elizabeth Chandler (London: Vintage Classics, 2011)

An Armenian Sketchbook, translated by Robert & Elizabeth Chandler (NYRB Classics, 2012)

Soul and other stories, by Andrey Platonov, translated by Robert & Elizabeth Chandler, Angela Livingstone & Olga Meerson (New York: NYRB Classics, 2007)

THE JOHN & CAROL GARRARD COLLECTION

The John & Carol Garrard Collection is part of the Andrei Sakharov Archive, Houghton Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Harvard University. The Curator is Leslie Morris, email address: [email protected]. This collection contains all archival materials related to Vasily Grossman which the Garrards acquired during the research and writing of their biography. The original typescript/manuscript of Vsyo Techot (Everything Flows …) is part of the collection. The Houghton offers qualified researchers grants of $1,500.00 per month to work in its collections.

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

AS THE TORMENTED twentieth century draws to a close, dogged by nagging contradictions that mock its declared ideals and claims of inevitable human progress, we look back and see all too clearly that its dazzling advances in science and technology have been used not