David Herman
Vasily Grossman

David Herman | Vasily Grossman | 07.14.22

- A very, very, very warm welcome. Thank you for joining us today. David Herman is a freelance writer based in London. Over the past 20 years, he has written almost 1,000 articles, essays, and reviews on Jewish history and literature for publications including the Jewish Chronicle, Jewish Quarterly, Jewish Renaissance, The Guardian, the New Statesman, and Prospect. He has taught courses on Jewish culture for the London Jewish Cultural Centre, and JW3. He’s a regular contributor to Jewish Book Week. Forthcoming interviews include Robert Alter on “Nabokov” and Cynthia Ozick on her new novel, the Association of Jewish Refugees, the Insider/Outsiders Festival, and the Contribution of Jewish Refugees to British Culture, and all organisations based in London. Recent articles include reviews of the new David Grossman novel, a new book on the Vienna Circle, and essays on Philip Roth. Gosh, what a treat it is to have you with us today. Thank you, and now I’m going to hand over to you.

• Thank you so much, Wendy. Welcome everybody, welcome to sunny London. How did Vasily Grossman become so famous? Arguably the greatest 20th century Soviet writer, more even than Isaac Babel, more than Pasternak, more than Solzhenitsyn. Later on we’ll come to when he became so famous, but one of the reasons is that he was one of the great war novelists and reporters. He was reporting from the frontline on the Eastern front during the Second World War. According to his biographers, the Garrards, Grossman was and is the great teller of truths about the war and about its most epic battle Stalingrad, as well as its darkest secrets. Secondly, he was one of the first and most important witnesses of the Holocaust. He was among the first to write about the Holocaust. His story, “The Old Teacher”, published in 1943, was one of the first fictional works about the Holocaust. He was there at Treblinka when it was liberated.

Thirdly, he was perhaps the greatest chronicler of Stalinism. of the gulag, of collectivization, of the famine. In 1990, a leading Soviet literary editor, Fyodor Burlatsky, said the most important precursors of the changes sweeping Soviet society under Gorbachev were Cruzchov’s report on Stalin’s crimes at the 20th Party Congress, Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” and Grossman’s great novel, “Life and Fate”. So Grossman was an outstanding novelist, short story writer, essayist, and war reporter. He had an extraordinary life, witnessing some of the great battles of the Eastern front and the liberation of some of the death camps in Poland. But he didn’t live to see his greatest work published, either in the Soviet Union where he died in 1964, or abroad. Vasily Grossman was born in 1905, one of the youngest members of that extraordinary generation of Jewish writers born in the Russian Empire, who lived through the Stalin years, and which included Isaac Barbel, Boris Pasternak, Yevgenia Ginzburg, Osip Mandelstam.

Grossman was born Iosif Solomonovich Grossman in Berdychiv in what is now the Ukraine, in 1905, but he later adopted the more Russian name Vasily. He was born into an emancipated and educated Jewish family. His parents were from the Jewish professional upper class, assimilated, Europeanized, speaking and reading Russian, not Yiddish. We were not like the poor Stetl Jews described by shalom aleichem, he wrote later to his daughter, the type that lived in hovels and slept side by side on the floor, packed like sardines. His family were between Stetl Jews, religious poor, Yiddish speaking, and Russians and Ukrainians, Christian, Russian, and Ukrainian speaking. Berdychiv was the thread that knit all the tangles of Grossman’s life, wrote his biographers, the Garrards. His first extensive article was “Berdychiv for Real, No Kidding”, Published in 1929, and his first piece of fiction published in 1934 was also set in Berdychiv.

As we will see, the massacre in Berdychiv by the Einsatzgruppen during the cleansing of the Ukraine was one of the most decisive moments of his life. It was also home to one of Europe’s largest Jewish communities. In the 1897 census, 41 out of the 54,000 population were Jews. Grossman once wrote, “Berdychiv was considered "the most Jewish city in the Ukraine. "Before the Revolution anti-Semites and the black hundreds "called it the Jewish capital.” At one time there were 80 synagogues in Berdychiv. His parents separated early on and he was brought up by his mother, spending periods in Geneva and later during the First World War, in Kiev. He studied chemistry in Moscow during the 1920s, which is important because perhaps more than any other great 20th century novelist, he wrote about major scientists like Viktor Shtrum, perhaps his greatest single hero of nuclear physicist. He married briefly and in the early 1930s he started writing, producing his first great short story in the town of Berdychiv in 1934, published in English in 1936, and he publishes his first novel also in 1934.

He wrote about 20 stories during the ‘30s and publishes three small collections of short stories in the mid 1930s. Amazingly, Grossman survived the Stalinist terror in the '30s. I say amazingly because some of his closest friends were arrested and shot. His second wife was briefly imprisoned, but released and his uncle David, who had supported Grossman and his mother throughout his childhood, was arrested and disappeared and never returned. One cousin was arrested and never heard from again. Another was arrested, deported to Astrakhan. She was subsequently rearrested and sent to a labour camp in Siberia for three more years. So really, it is quite astonishing that Grossman survived intact. His career really falls into two halves, and there are two schools of thought about this. Some, like the great critics Tzvetan Todorov, argue that Grossman is the only example, or at least the most significant example, of an established and leading Soviet writer, changing his spots completely.

The slave in him died and a free man arose. Others, like the great translator Robert Chandler, who I’ll also come back to because it was Robert Chandler and his wife who translated most of Grossman’s greatest work, he sees the changes more gradual. “It is wrong,” he writes in his introduction to “Life and Fate”, which he translated, “to draw so absolute a distinction "between the conformist right of the '30s and '40s, "and the dissident who wrote "Life and Fate” “and "Everything Flows”, flows in the 1950s" What is clear though, is that Grossman’s political beliefs underwent a significant change between his early stories and the later novels. “In the Town of Berdychiv”, published in 1934, it tells the story of Lavilova, a commissar fighting during the Polish Soviet War of 1919 to 20, chronicled so brilliantly by Grossman’s fellow, Jew Isaac Babel. Indeed, the story owes much both in style and subject matter to Babel’s famous collection Red Cavalry, but if anything, it has a more heroic feel, celebrating the moment of what he later calls young Bolshevism.

This was the generation of soldiers and idealists who were slaughtered in their tens of thousands in the great purges of the '30s, the subject that haunts his novel, “Everything Flows”. It is in his novel, “Everything Flows”, which shows the scale of his disillusion through the '50s and early '60s. Grossman started the novel in '55 after Stalin’s death, but it was still unfinished when he died in '64, and this book is extraordinary in a number of ways. First, how fresh it is still today, in its revelations of the labour camps and the Stalinist terror. You might be reading Saul Schnitzin. Indeed, if Grossman’s work had already been available in translation in the '60s and '70s, you might wonder whether he would’ve become as internationally famous then as Saul Schnitzin. Through the story of Evan Gregoriev, returning home after 30 years in the camps, Grossman presents us with a world which is deeply corrupt, full of people who had betrayed men who had ended up in the gulag, but it’s his accounts of the gulag itself that transports the treatment of women prisoners, the physical labour, disease, and brutality of the camps, which is breathtaking.

The next big decisive moment for Grossman though, was in 1941, when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. Grossman volunteered for the front where he spent more than a thousand days as a war reporter for the most popular Red Army newspaper, Red Star. And as the war raged on, he covered its major events, including the Battle of Moscow, Stalingrad, the Battle of Kursk, the greatest tank battle in history, and the Battle of Berlin. In Berlin, Grossman saw the Imperial Reich Chancellery, Hitler’s armchair and table he wrote, a huge metal globe, crushed and flattened. Anthony Bevo, the great military historian in his introduction to selection of some of Grossman’s war reports, a writer at war, call Grossman the most perceptive and honest eyewitness of the Soviet front lines between 1941 and 45, by far the best eyewitness account of the terrible Eastern front. One of the things that stands out in these war reports is Grossman’s admiration for the courage and the tough life of ordinary Soviet soldiers, often fighting against overwhelming odds under appalling conditions.

In battle, he wrote, “The Russian dons a white shirt. "He may live a sinful life, "but he dies like a saint. "At the front, many Russians have a purity of thought "and soul, a kind of monk-like modesty.” What is striking here is the Christian imagery. Two of the greatest accounts of war in the 20th century, perhaps the two greatest, were Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry and Grossman’s War Reports. Two bespectacled Jews travelling with anti-Semitic cossacks on the one hand, and anti-Semitic Soviet soldiers on the other. Their situation as Jews is not trivial or accidental. It is where much of the moral complexity of their writing comes from. In 1942, Grossman published “The People Immortal”, the first Soviet novel about the Second World War, and between 1943 and 49, he writes, “Stalingrad”, arguably his masterpiece. People are divided, whether Stalingrad is his masterpiece or its sequel “Life and Fate”. He submitted the novel “Stalingrad” for publication to the Soviet journal Novimir. A selection of 11 chapters heavily edited, was published later that same year, 1949, under the title, “By the Vulgar Chapters From the Novel Stalingrad”.

They’re mostly about military matters and there is no mention of Viktor Shtrum or the Shaposhnikov sisters. He rewrote Stalingrad at least four times before it was published as a book in 1952. There are three different published editions and there are 11 versions, some complete, some partial, in the main literary archive in Moscow. The war marked a huge shift in Grossman’s writing, from the socialist realism of his first novel, to the extraordinary writing of the 1940s and '50s. There is the unblinking gaze at the inhumanity of war. “Grossman,” write the Garrards, “noted the deliberate policy of the Germans "to deprive Soviet prisoners of war of food "and mid medical assistance. "This act of gross inhumanity condemned men, "whose faces had been blistered off by flame throwers, "to an agonising death with no analgesics to ease the pain. "As the war went on, the Wehrmacht began routinely "to strip captured red army soldiers "of their warm great coats, hats, and felt boots, "condemning men to death by freezing.”

Grossman wrote of young women who deliberately wore rags and rubbed ashes on their faces to make themselves unattractive so they might not be raped by German soldiers. He wrote of how Russian soldiers cut the legs off frozen German bodies and thawed them on the stove so it was easier to remove the boots. Sometimes they use the frozen legs for fuel. Almost immediately after Grossman joined the Red Star to cover the eastern front was the Holocaust. As the Germans retreated, he saw what had happened in the Ukraine and wrote his famous report, “Ukraine Without Jews”, which was unpublished in Russian during his lifetime. He witnessed the interrogation of captured Nazi officers and knew the details of mass executions. He heard one Nazi say that for an experienced organiser, it should take two and a half hours to kill a thousand people. As he continued west with the Red Army in 1944, Grossman entered Poland and saw Majdanek and Treblinka. “Majdernek’s warehouses,” he wrote, “were full of clothing and shoes. "There were Russian soldiers boots, Polish soldiers’ shoes, "men’s boots, women’s slippers, rubber galoshes, "and what is the most terrible sight of all, "tens of thousands of pairs of children’s footwear.”

In September, 1944, they arrived in Treblinka. He collected some of the first eyewitness accounts, as early of what later became known as the Holocaust. His report, The Hell of Treblinka, published in November, 1944 and available in his collection of essays and short stories, “Road”, was one of the first accounts of the Nazi death camp. It was widely translated and distributed at Nuremberg as part of the evidence against the Nazis, and in 2005, Grossman’s wartime notebooks were published as a Writer at War and the Road, another extraordinary collection of writings and reports, includes two great short stories from this period, as well as the piece on Treblinka, unbelievably fresh and undated almost 70 years ago. Grossman was not just one of the first writers to write about the Holocaust, he was specifically one of the first journalists to write about what is now called, the Shoah by bullets, the massacres of Jews in the Western Soviet Union. He was also, because of what he saw in Poland, one of the first journalists to write about the Shoah up by gas.

Two events happened during this period, which had an enormous impact on Grossman. His mother was one of 12,000 Jews killed in one day at Berdychiv, one of the first mass killings by the Einsatzgruppen, as they swept through the Ukraine in 1941 on their way to Babiar. He never recovered from her death, as the letters to his mother published in “The Road” show, he was devastated by her death and his feelings of guilt and maternal love became one of his central subjects in his greatest novels. Secondly, with Ilia Ehrenberg, Grossman worked for the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee compiling the famous Black Book, a documentary account of the massacres of Jews in the Soviet Union and Poland. “To their dismay,” writes Antony Beaver, “They found that major publications rejected "most of their articles on the Holocaust. "Only small Jewish journals could be counted on "to accept them.”

The later post-war suppression of the Black Book by the Soviet state shook Grossman to the core, and for the first time he began to question his own loyal support of the Soviet regime. This was the turning point, the recognition of the anti-Semitism and the deceit of Stalin’s regime through and through led to his falling out with regime. Grossman also criticised collectivization and the political repression of peasants that led to the terrible tragedy of famine in Ukraine. He wrote that the decree about grain procurement required that the peasants of the Ukraine, the dawn and the Cuban be put to death by starvation, put to death along with their little children. While Grossman was never arrested by the Soviet authorities and was never sent to the gulag, his two major literary works, two of his major literary works, “Life and Fate” and “Forever Flowing”, were censored as unacceptably anti-Soviet and Grossman himself became a non-person.

There are two chapters in “Everything Flows”, which are among the masterpieces of modern literature and will give a flavour of what was considered unacceptable. One tells the story in 15 pages of Masha, a young wife and mother who is sent to Siberia and haunted by being separated from her child, who she knows has been sent to a state orphanage thousands of miles away. She will never see her again. The other is a dialogue between Ivan and a woman who has offered him shelter and who witnessed the famine in the Ukraine. There is no more terrifying account of the great famine which killed millions of peasants and their families. Grossman began it in 1955 and was still revising it during his last days in hospital in September, 1964. In the 1950s, in the words of his great and close friend, Anna Bertsa, he was buried alive. He found it virtually impossible to publish new works. The state pulled from library shelves and pulled his earlier books, and that silence persisted even after the collapse of the Soviet regime in ‘91.

In 1961, to give you a sense of how this worked, on February the 14th, three KGB officers entered Vasily Grossman’s apartment in Moscow and confiscated more than 10,000 pages of type scripts, including seven draughts of Grossman’s masterpiece, “Life and Fate”, one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. They even took the ribbon from the typewriter on which the text had been written. Grossman was told by the great apparatchik, Mikhail Suslov, that it could not be published for at least 200 years. Friends had fortunately, already taken a copy away for safekeeping. It was smuggled out to the West and is now widely regarded as one of the masterpieces of the last hundred years. Grossman died of lung cancer in 1964, and in 1980 “Life and Fate” was published in Russian for the first time in Switzerland. The great physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov, secretly photographed draught pages preserved by a friend of Grossman’s and the writer, Vladimir Voinovich, managed to smuggle the photographic films abroad.

Two dissident researchers retyped the text from the microfilm with some mistakes and misreadings, due to the bad quality. It was published in the UK in 1985 and then republished in 1995, and the book was finally published in Russia, in Russian in 1988, after the policy of glasnost was initiated by Gorbachev. The text was published again in '89 because further original manuscripts emerged after the first publication, but his real breakthrough came later in 2006, when “Life and Fate” was republished in another English translation by the Chandlers. In 2010, “Everything Flows” and “The Road” were both published in Britain. In 2011, “Life and Fate” was broadcast on Radio4 over eight hours with Kenneth Branaugh, Eleanor Braun, Freddy Fox, Sarah Kesselman, Janet Susman, David Tennant, Harriet Walter, and Samuel West among others. In 2012 appeared the first biography by the Garrards. In 2019, the second biography by Alexandra Popoff, “Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century”, and in the same year, “Stalingrad”. “Life and Fate” because it came out in English before “Stalingrad”, was the real breakthrough book in the English speaking world in Britain and in America.

Its major themes are Jewish identity and the Holocaust. Firstly, throughout “Life and Fate” it becomes obvious that a portion of the novel’s thesis is about his Jewish identity. Viktor Shtrum, his sort of alter ego, a brilliant physicist and a Jew, is in part a reflection of Grossman’s own character. There are many overlaps between Shtrum’s life and Grossman’s life. Both lose their mother in the Holocaust, both seem to find a place in their Jewish identity that was not present before the war. Grossman was one of the first to write about the Holocaust and seeing firsthand that eastern Europe was empty of Jews, Jewish acquaintances he came to check up on were in mass graves, their houses empty. There is also Grossman’s idea of humanity and human goodness. Tolstoy was enormously important to Grossman and one of the most important topics that “Life and Fate” discusses is the nature of humanity.

More specifically, the nature of human good. He first asks whether a good common to all man exists and then proceeds to describe how the ideal of good has changed for different races and religions. He then inquires as to the very nature of life, is it that life itself is evil, and although he provides multiple examples of such evil throughout not only “Life and Fate”, but throughout all his work, there is no writer, perhaps no writer in the 20th century, who confronts human evil, unblinking, and Grossman does believe that life itself, nevertheless, has some good in it. Yes, as well as this terrible good, there is everyday human kindness and his books, as as well as being full of evil and disaster and suffering, are full of everyday human kindness. But it’s not so simple, for after despairing of finding good either in God or nature, I began to despair even of kindness, and Grossman then resolves that human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a kernel of human kindness.

But if what is human, human beings has not been destroyed, even now, then evil will never conquer. Here Grossman offers an alternative to despair. The idea that despite such great evil, humanity and good will be the ultimate victors. Simple, often unnoticed human kindness, forms the basis for Grossman’s theory, which is to say that despite great evil, small acts of charity reflect the idea that both good, that good is both alive and incomparable no matter what, no matter how great the evil may be, this basic kernel of good is a key part of human nature and can never be crushed. Grossman believes humanity to be fundamentally good. If mankind is stripped out to its very core, all that will remain is this invincible kernel. Therefore, it is this that is responsible for the basic goodness of humanity.

Thirdly, there is Stalinism and Stalin’s greatest crime for Grossman is not just the terrible famine, the collectivization, the gulag, all of which he writes about in some of his greatest work, the purges, but one of Stalin’s most frightening achievements during this period was his total distortion of Soviet reality, that he changed the reality of the Soviet Union from a world in which common good, kindness and humanity were released alive to a world in which only devotion to the party mattered, and this is reflected in part one, chapter 40 of “Life and Fate”. When Grossman describes a called Abachuk and his love for Stalinism, Abachuk had repeated, you don’t get arrested for nothing. Believing that only a tiny minority himself among them had been arrested by mistake. As for everyone else, they had deserved their sentences. The sword of justice was chastising the enemies of the revolution. He had seen civility, treachery, submissiveness, cruelty.

His faith was unshakable. His devotion to the party, writes Grossman, infinite. Abachuk is incapable of understanding the reality of his situation, that he’s been wrongly imprisoned and will suffer in spite of his innocence, as has happened to so many others. He’s so dedicated to the party that he cannot see what’s happening all around him. The prisoner simply refuses to comprehend his situation and chooses to focus on his faith and devotion to the party. We must remember that Grossman had no published sources to rely on. These accounts were written before Robert Conquest’s “History of Stalinism” were available. Grossman spoke to eyewitnesses and survivors, but his work had to be smuggled out of the Soviet Union after his death and even then was not published for some years. The other astonishing thing, both about “Life and Fate” and about “Stalingrad”, is the range of human beings we encounter. Soviet prisoners of war and the range of civilians, scientists, and the range of experiences the Shoah by bullets, the Battle of Stalingrad, the gulag, the Holocaust.

And yet despite all this, despite the terrible suffering that these books chronicle, life goes on. At the very end of “Life and Fate”, Grossman presents the reader with the broadest concept of his novel, the idea that despite everything life goes on. In the last lines of the book, he writes, “Somehow you could sense spring more vividly "in this cool forest than on the sunlit plain, "and there was a deeper sadness in this silence "than in the silence of autumn. "In it, you could hear both a lament for the dead "and the furious joy of life itself. "It was still cold and dark, but soon the doors and shutters "would be flung open. "Soon the house would be filled with the tears and laughter "of children with the hurried steps of a loved woman "and the measured gait of the master of the house. "They stood there holding their bags in silence.” I should say something about Grossman’s writing. It wasn’t just the subject matter, the extraordinary horror of what he describes, the moving descriptions of human goodness that he describes.

Grossman’s writing is a reminder that it is realism, not modernism, which was the great literary legacy of the 20th century. Writers like Grossman, Solzhenitsyn and Primo Levi, produced accounts of inhumanity and terror, which will endure for many years. In his article on Treblinka., in his account of the famine in the Ukraine or the transports to the gulag, he simply tells us what happened in clear prose. There’s an extraordinary passage in “Stalingrad” on page 380, where suddenly out of the middle of nowhere, near the beginning of part two, he writes, “When people read obscure novels, "when they listen to over complex music "or look at a frighteningly unintelligible painting, "they feel anxious and unhappy. "The thoughts and feelings of the novel’s characters, "the sounds of the symphony, the colours of the painting, "everything seems peculiar and difficult, "as if from some other world. "Almost ashamed of being natural and straightforward, "people read, look and listen without joy, "without any real emotion. "Contrived art is a barrier placed "between man and the world, but there are also books "that make a reader or exclaim joyfully, "yes, that’s just what I feel. "I’ve gone through that too, "and that’s what I thought myself. "Art of this kind does not separate people from the world. "Art like this connects people to life, "to other people and to the world as a whole. "It does not scrutinise life "through strangely tinted spectacles.”

This passage is extraordinary in so many ways. It is as if the author suddenly just steps forward to address the reader directly, but above all, it is wonderfully old fashioned, as if almost 50 years of literary theory had never happened. All this talk of what readers feel and how art connects people to life, it makes us think of a debate that hasn’t really happened but perhaps should, a debate not about modernism or post-modernism, but another kind of traditional altogether. Writers like Orwell and Kersler, Levi and Vasily Grossman and Pasternak, who wrote clearly and simply about terrible things that were done to people in the mid 20th century. There are many examples of this kind of plain writing in “Stalingrad”. Chapter 21 describes the first night of the war on the eastern front.

It begins, Novikov was always able to recall the first night of the war with absolute clarity, such clear, simple prose. A few pages into the chapter on the first night of the war, Novikov, a key figure in the novel, went to the grand spacious dining room. A plentiful meal is put in front of him, meat patties and fried potatoes in an enamel bowl, followed by thin pancakes with sour cream on a gilt-rimmed porcelain plate with a picture of a shepherdess in a pink dress surrounded by white sheep. This is so apparently simple and old fashioned, but this short passage to something else, it reminds us of many meals in Stalingrad. Very early on in chapter five, Vavalov is about to go off to war. He sits at his table, on it stood a bowl of potatoes, a saucer with a little white crystallised honey, some slices of bread and a mug of milk. He ate slowly. Such simple food, such simple prose.

But as we read other accounts of food, we realise that often these meals take place in poor peasant homes, like Vavalov’s. This traditional food and the pastoral imagery, a shepherdess in a pink dress, is reassuring, safe, in contrast to the chaos and mayhem that runs through the book. It also rubs up against the new Soviet society that’s emerging in the novel. This is a, which is a thrilling evocation of the new Soviet Union, no shepherdess here, and of course no peasants because as Grossman knows better than anyone, peasants had been starved in their millions and those who weren’t starved to death had been shot or deported to the east. Those meals start to feel more charged. Then there’s the letter to Viktor Shtrum from his mother, Anna Simnyinova. 13 pages in “Life and Fate”, simple, clear prose, very moving. Viktor, I’ve always been lonely. I’ve wept in anguish through lonely nights, but my fate is to end my life alone, never having shared it with you. Always be happy with those you love those around you, those who’ve become closer to you than your mother. Forgive me, vityanka, this is the last line of your mother’s last letter to you. Live, live, live forever.

But in “Stalingrad”, we see another side to this letter. First, we don’t get to read the actual letter, but we read about her letter again and again. Grossman describes each stage of the letter’s journey, from the Berdychiv ghetto to Viktor Shtrum’s . Altogether, the letter is passed from hand to hand, seven times. Not so simple and easy now. At one point, the old Bolshevik Mustovskoy takes the letter to the Stalingrad apartment of Viktor Shtrum’s mother-in-law. When he hands it to the young friend of the family, opens the door, she says, “Heaven’s what filthy paper! "Anyone would think it’s been lying in a cellar "for the last two years.” And she promptly wraps it up in a sheet of the thick pink paper people use to make decorations for Christmas trees. She then gives a package to Colonel Novikov, of the key figures in the novel who’s about to go to Moscow.

He goes to Viktor’s appointment, where he interrupts a romantic tet-a-tet between Viktor and a pretty young neighbour. Viktor drops the package into his briefcase, then forgets about it. 24 hours later at his in his briefcase, Viktor finds a small package and thought it was a bar of chocolate he’d bought for Nina. Then he remembered it being given to him by Novikov and he opens the package. Viktor sat down and glanced through the long letter. It was his mother’s record of her last days from the beginning of the war until the eve of her inevitable death, behind the barbed wire of the Jewish ghetto. It was her farewell to her son. The morning after finally reading the letter, Viktor looks at himself in the mirror. He’s surprised to find that he looks much the same as he did the day before. From then on, he carries the letter about with him wherever he goes, but he’s unable to talk about it. He can hardly even talk about it to himself. Viktor read the letter again and again. Each time, writes Grossman, he felt the same shock as at the as if he were reading it for the first time.

Perhaps his memory was instinctively resisting, unwilling and unable fully to take in something whose constant presence would make life unbearable. Again, the prose is clear and simple, just like the letter, and yet there is this journey. The letter is passed from hand to hand seven times in “Stalingrad”, and we don’t read it until we read the sequel, “Life and Fate”. The adventures of this letter are like something from Tristan Shandy or Moby Dick, this fascination with a text that keeps vanishing and is never read at all, like the clear, calm and deep simplicity that Grossman wrote about in that great passage about literature. And as we reflect on this, we realise that Grossman is not interested in either simple, clear storytelling or the strange adventures of a manuscript that never gets read. The journey of the letter, its constant movement, its vicissitudes, that is the hallmark of modernism, where texts constantly prove unreliable, unstable, strange things happen to them.

They get lost, they get wrapped in pink paper. So Grossman is the master of the clearest and simplest prose, more than almost any writer you can think of, but he’s also one of the great modernists. There is so much in these novels and stories. Realism and modernism, the Holocaust, the gulag and Stalingrad, Jews and commissars and apparatchiks, hope and optimism, but devastation and loneliness, families and couples brought together and reunited, but also separated and torn apart. This and the way in which these novels and stories are written is what makes Grossman one of the great writers of the 20th century. Thank you for your time and patience. I’m sorry I’ve rather overrun. On Monday at the same time, I will be talking about Yiddish literature after the Holocaust, so please do join me then. But if you have any questions, I think I can see some here.

Q&A and Comments

Q: David, are you related to Joyce Hermann in Harrogate? A: Sadly not. So that’s an easy one to answer. Somebody else’s grandfather’s name was Hermann. He emigrated from Romania around 1890, and that was the surname of the family that remained.

Q: Did your family originate from there? A: No, from Warsaw where they were all killed, apart from my father.

Q: If you are only allowed one Grossman book, asks Michael Eliastam, I hope I pronounced your name right, what would you choose? A: That is a fantastic question. In a way, in a way, the two obvious choices should be “Life and Fate” and “Stalingrad”, because these are two extraordinary novels. “Life and Fate” and “Stalingrad”, and as you can see, they’re both absolutely massive. However, I think I would actually opt for a short collection selection of his reports, including The Hell of Treblinka and his greatest short stories called Road, which is also translated by the Chandlers, and it just covers the full range of Grossman’s career, from the 1930s to his death and both war reports and the Holocaust and short stories, and it is just a masterpiece of a book. So that would be, that would be my choice.

Now, let me see. Sorry about this one. Check… I’m afraid I can’t get through to the remaining questions. I don’t know if Judi or Trudy or Wendy can, I can only open the first four, but.

• [Judi] I will just scroll down.

Q: Are most of Vasily Grossman’s books translated into English, is the question from Anna P? A: Yes, Anna P, they are, they are now. This was really only in the last 20 years that they’ve been mostly translated. And as far as I know, I know Robert Chandler quite well, and I haven’t heard that he’s working on any other translations. But “Stalingrad” after all, only came out two years ago. And one of the problems with that and with some of the other novels is that there are so many different manuscripts because of the sensors. And Grossman was constantly, all through the late '40s and '50s and early '60s, ducking and weaving from the sensors, trying to get a version which to safety through his friends who would smuggle them abroad and that was perhaps one of his great achievements, really. So thank you for that question.

• [Judi] We have one from Jonathan Matthews.

Q: How influenced was he by Tolstoy? A: Hugely is the honest answer. And indeed, let me just see if I can, I had to cut this from the talk because there was, there’s an extraordinary moment in “Stalingrad”, when Cremoff, one of the great characters, he’s pretty much constantly on the move. And if I may just read you just a few lines, on the road to Tula, Cremoff stopped at Yasnaya Pollyanna. Yasnaya Pollyanna of course, was Tolstoy’s home, where he wrote “War and Peace”. The house was in the grip of feverish departure preparations. The paintings had been taken down from the walls, tablecloths, dishes and books had all been packed. The hall was full of boxes ready to be transported east. In peacetime, Cremoff had once spent a day there with a group of foreign comrades. The museum staff had done what they could to create the illusion this was a house where people still went about their daily lives. There were fresh flowers everywhere and the dining room table was neatly laid. This was not a house but a museum, a sepulchral. But when he went inside the second time, Cremoff felt this was a Russian house like any other. The storm that had flung open every door in Russia that had driven people out of their warm homes and onto black autumn roads, sparing neither peaceful city apartments nor village huts nor hamlets deep in the village had treated Leo Tolstoy’s home no less harshly. With absolute clarity, Cremoff saw in his mind, bull hills and the old sick principle, Konsky. The present merged with the past.

Today’s events were one with what Tolstoy described such truth and power that it become the supreme reality of a war that ran its course 130 years ago. And of course, the point is that Tolstoy was the great 19th century writer about war and peace. And what Grossman aspired to was to be the great 20th century writer about war and peace. So Tolstoy was massively important, both as a rival but also as an influence. And this line, the storm that had flung open every door in Russia, I think that sentence sums up really, what happens in both “Life and Fate” and “Stalingrad”, that it is as if a huge nation has just been tipped on its edge and everyone has poured out and they’ve been landed in Stalingrad, they’ve landed in Kaza and the Euros, they’ve landed in Moscow, they’ve landed everywhere, and some have landed in the gulag and some have landed in pits and ravines in Ukraine. And that is what is so extraordinary about the influence of Tolstoy on Grossman, that it just captures a whole sense of a nation at war and what that feels like for everybody and what the soul of Russia feels like.

So yes, the other huge influence early on was Isaac Babel because again, you know, another small bespectacled Jew riding with anti-Semitic soldiers. And his first story, first stories really, but the first story in particular was hugely influenced by Babel and a third influence, in terms of his career, was Maxim Gorki, the other great early 20th century Soviet writer who was in part Grossman’s patron during this time. Babel incidentally features in one of possibly the greatest single short story that Grossman ever wrote in the Road, which is translated in the Road, and it is an extraordinary story about the real people at the top of Stalin’s regime who ran the Secret Service. And we get a glimpse into that world. And Babel, of course, was trying to ingratiate himself with that world, and disastrously had an affair with the wife of the man who ran Stalin’s secret state and ended up being shot in the . So yeah, so those three I would say, Tolstoy, Babel and Gorki.

• [Judi] Thank you, so I have a question from Bev Price.

Q: As a chemist, do you know if he had contact with Primo Levi? A: No, no. I mean, one of the things was that if you grew up in the Soviet Union… He was born in 1905, so from the age of 12, he was living in post-evolutionary, in the post-revolutionary Soviet Union. So no, he had no contact with anybody outside the Soviet Union at all. Although, I mean, it is fascinating to think how they would’ve got on, not just because they were both had trained as chemists, but also because of course, they’d experienced the terror of two different regimes and the way they chose to write about it with their very simple, apparently simple, deceptively simple prose, and of course, they were both great writers. So it’s one of those sort of fantasies that one has. What would’ve happened if you could have a dinner party and who could you invite, and I must say, Grossman and Levi would be two fascinating interlocutors.

• [Judi] One from Marion Bregman.

Q: Why do you think he was not a victim of Stalin? How did he escape the fate of many of his friends? A: Luck. Luck is the only answer. And of course, many survived only through luck and friends, relatives were killed. He was incredibly courageous. One of his wives was, his second wife was taken away by the security forces, and Grossman, this little tiny Jewish man, wrote to everybody he could write to pleading for her release. And eventually she was released. It’s an extraordinary story, both of his courage and of her and of how the regime could sometimes do that. You know, there were these odd stories of contingency. I just read yesterday about the great Yiddish writer, Abraham Sutzkever, who had written some of the great accounts of the Vilnas Ghetto, which I’ll be talking about on Monday. And he was, and these reached the highest places in the regime and a plane was sent, he managed to escape from Vilnius into the forest and join the partisans, and a plane was sent to fetch him from where he was. And he had to, he and his wife had to tiptoe very carefully through a minefield, trying to avoid being blown up and managed to be flown to Moscow. So there were these extraordinary moments where amidst, as the bodies piled up everywhere around you, some people just managed to survive.

• [Judi] Is from Lee Desar.

Q: Is he related to the Israeli writer Grossman?

A: No, no, he is not. No, David Grossman, who’s just published a wonderful, possibly his best new novel and which is absolutely fantastic and oddly, is not really based as much in Israel as most of his novels, and maybe this has been rather liberating for him. So half of it is set in Israel, half of it is set in central Europe, and it’s it’s absolutely wonderful novel. No, then they weren’t related at all, no. The other odd co-literary coincidences, if you’re interested in literary coincidences, is a Berdychiv, where Grossman was born, was where Balzak went for his honeymoon and it’s where Conrad lived. Joseph Conrad was born in Berdychiv. So there are some sort of weird literary coincidences, but that’s not one of them.

• [Judi] And I see one final one here.

Q: What was his relationship with music? A: He didn’t really have a relationship with music or with art. He was, he had a very important relationship with science and of course literature. Those were his two great passions, but not really with music and, but science, I mean that’s, it really is interesting because there are so few great modern novels where the real hero is a scientist, a physicist who is constantly battling with the Stalin state and their attempt to corrupt him, to thwart his search for scientific truth. And then amazingly of all people, Stalin phones him up and this is another of these extraordinary moments in “Life and Fate”. Stalin phones him up in person and says, “I want you to continue with your research "and follow it wherever it leads you.” And it’s, he’s just an astonishing moment for Viktor Shtrum. And suddenly, of course he’s untouchable. Nobody can go, can touch him because Stalin trumps everybody, even the highest apparatchiks, who’ve been making his life a misery. And so Grossman knew that world and it is, and he was fascinated by science, but also fascinated by peasants and farmers and ordinary soldiers. And he was fascinated, it seems, by everybody and children and orphans and old women. And he just had this extraordinary gaze, as if he could sort of be interested in everybody in that entire country at this tortured time. I hope that’s answered some of your questions anyway.

• David.

• Hello!

• Hi. That was absolutely fabulous. Thank you so, so much.

• Great, good, I’m so glad! I hope it was all right. I had to cut it short in the end because there was lots more to talk about, but I just thought I was running out of time, so.

• Well, would you be happy to come back?

• I’d be very happy to come back. I’m coming back anyway on Monday, I think. To talk about Yiddish writers and then I’m also coming back to talk about Isaac Bahavasinger also next week, so.

• But the beauty of our forum is that we can be very, very flexible with the programme. So if you decide, you know, what you want to have part two or you want to add good or you want to go a, you know, a different route, you know.

• Sure, absolutely.

• We do deal with the… You know, we really are flexible. I’m very, very flexible and I said with Trudy as well, and you know, we really have to go with the flow. I think that’s really what what makes it easy and it’s very difficult to talk about huge, you know, giants in history and periods in one hour. You know.

• It is.

• It’s a taster.

• Exactly, there we are. Well, I’ll speak with Trudy and we’ll work out a date and we’ll come back to, 'cause there is a more to say about Grossman.

• You know, let’s I’ll set up a Zoom with you and Trudy and we can chat about it and we can see how along different route. Thanks a million it was a pleasure. Wonderful having you with us and we look forward to seeing you next week.

• I look forward to it and good luck I hope they’re okay.

• Wonderful, thank you very much.

• Take care, bye.

• Bye bye!