Introduction

Vasily Grossman was born to Jewish parents in the Ukrainian town of Berdichev in 1905. Trained as a chemist, he enjoyed professional success as a writer of novels and short stories in the 1930s, securing admission to the prestigious Union of Soviet Writers in 1937. On the outbreak of war with Nazi Germany in 1941 he became a correspondent for the military newspaper Red Star (Krasnaia zvezda), and his intuitive empathy and vivid writing made him immensely popular amongst Red Army soldiers. Grossman earned particular fame for his reports from the battle of Stalingrad, but he subsequently travelled with the Red Army for the whole of its advance westwards to Berlin. Along the way he became one of the earliest witnesses to the Jewish Holocaust, first in the liberated Ukraine, where he discovered that his own mother had been murdered in 1941, and then at the death camps in Poland.

Grossman was active in efforts to memorialize the Jewish dead in various ways. His 1944 essay on ‘The hell of Treblinka’ was a ground-breaking contemporary reconstruction of the machinery of destruction in the extermination camps (Grossman, 2010b: 126–79). He also became involved in the work of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which had embarked on a project to document the murder of the Jews on Soviet territory. After the war, this activism brought him increasingly into conflict with the Soviet authorities as official anti-Semitism mounted in the late Stalinist period, and publication of the Committee’s monumental collaborative work The Black Book (Chernaia kniga) was eventually prohibited (Ehrenburg and Grossman, 2002). During the same period, Grossman was working on a first large novel focused on Stalingrad, entitled For a Just Cause (Za pravoe delo). He was compelled to redraft this numerous times by censors and editors, partly because the representation of the war was a politically sensitive subject in the later 1940s and early 1950s, and partly because his Jewishness made him a target for suspicion and hostility. The novel eventually appeared in 1952, and was initially widely praised, but then became the subject of supremely vitriolic attacks which only abated after Stalin’s death in 1953.

During the Thaw initiated by Stalin’s reformist successor Nikita Khrushchev, Grossman once more enjoyed popularity and acclaim. He also worked on Life and Fate (Zhizn’ i sud’ba), a second major war novel with Stalingrad at its heart – in essence a sequel to For a Just Cause – that is now regarded as his masterpiece (Grossman, 2006). Even in the era of the Thaw, this novel’s questioning of the myths of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ and exploration of possible affinities between Stalinism and Nazism proved wholly unacceptable to the Soviet authorities. Grossman submitted the manuscript for publication in 1960 but in 1961 all known copies of it were confiscated by the KGB; Grossman embarked on a campaign to reverse this decision, but he was informed that his novel was so potentially dangerous that it could not be published for at least 250 years, if at all. The seizure of a work on which he had laboured so long threatened to crush Grossman’s spirit, and for the last few years of his life he was also in poor physical health. Yet he continued to produce important work. Alongside numerous short stories he wrote another novel, Everything Flows (Vse techet), which tackled the taboo topic of the Ukrainian famine of the early 1930s in harrowing detail and extended his critique of the Soviet system back to Lenin (Grossman, 2010a). Since this was even more explicitly heretical than Life and Fate, it too went unpublished. Grossman died of cancer in September 1964.

Fortunately for Grossman’s posthumous reputation, copies of the manuscripts of these last two major works were smuggled out of the Soviet Union, enabling their publication in the West. Everything Flows was published in Russian in West Germany in 1970 and then in an English translation by Thomas Whitney (under the variant title Forever Flowing) in 1972 (Grossman, 1972); Life and Fate was published in Russian in Switzerland in 1980 and then in an English translation by Robert Chandler in 1985. (It was also translated into numerous other European languages.) Both works were also finally published in the Soviet Union in 1988 and 1989, in the heyday of glasnost, where they made significant contributions to the explosion of historical revisionism on the Soviet past. ¹ It took some time, however, for Grossman’s reputation truly to flourish in the English-speaking world, even after the appearance of Life and Fate. Chandler has speculated that Grossman’s brand of gritty, epic historical realism was out of tune with the times in the 1990s. On the one hand, the epochal changes around the end of the Cold War nurtured the illusion that we could ‘be free of the weight of history’ if we so chose (Grossman, 2010a: x); moreover, in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, an era giddy with extravagant hopes for a new democratic and capitalist future for Russia, there was little public appetite for post-mortems. On the other hand, Grossman’s serious and sober realist prose style scarcely resonated with the ludic, fragmented and dislocated modes favoured by the then-voguish postmodernism (Grossman, 2010a: ix–x).

Over the last decade or so, however, as these broad cultural conditions and dispositions have shifted, Grossman’s stock has been steadily rising. His writing has been recognized as an invaluable historical source by authors of high-profile works on the Second World War era, at a time when that conflict has enjoyed a marked resurgence in popular culture. Antony Beevor, for example, drew heavily on Grossman as a witness in his two landmark bestselling histories, Stalingrad (1998), and Berlin: The Downfall, 1945 (2002). More recently, Timothy Snyder employed Grossman as a source and as an epigraphist in his magisterial history of Europe between Hitler and Stalin, Bloodlands (2010). Grossman had already attracted attention from scholars interested in some of the more profound ethical and political questions of the totalitarian century, from Tzvetan Todorov (2003) to Emmanuel Levinas (1996). Yet their specialist usage of his work could perforce only incite a slow permeation of Grossman’s name into the wider public consciousness; writers such as Beevor vastly accelerated the process.

Simultaneously, and thanks largely to the tireless work of Robert Chandler (in diverse collaborations with his wife Elizabeth, and others), more of Grossman’s oeuvre was made available in English translation. Chandler published a revised version of Life and Fate in 2006 (Grossman, 2006) and an authoritative new translation of Everything Flows in 2010 (Grossman, 2010a). ² He also edited and translated a collection of Grossman’s short stories and non-fiction pieces from across his career to which he gave the title The Road (2010b); and in 2013 he published a translation of An Armenian Sketchbook (Dobro vam!), a short memoir inspired by a two-month trip Grossman made to Armenia in 1961 after the arrest of Life and Fate. (Chandler is currently working on an eagerly awaited translation of For a Just Cause, which has not previously been translated into English.) Grossman’s wartime notebooks have also been published in a meticulous English edition by Anthony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova entitled A Writer at War (2005). More materials from the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee’s collaborative documentary project on the Holocaust have appeared, including the most complete edition to date of The Black Book (Ehrenburg and Grossman, 2002), and a further volume of material drawn from the Committee’s archives (Rubenstein and Altman, 2008). These publications have transformed the possibilities for engagement with Grossman in the English-speaking world.

Grossman’s work has also been disseminated through adaptation, further enhancing his reputation with a broad public. One of the most poignant chapters in Life and Fate takes the form of a letter composed by a Jewish woman, imprisoned by the Nazis in a ghetto and facing imminent death, to her son, Viktor Shtrum, the novel’s leading character, modelled on Grossman himself. Theatrical versions of The Last Letter have been performed many times; it was also filmed by Frederick Wiseman in 2002, and it was even transformed into a Scottish Opera production in 2010. The high point to date of efforts to expose an ever wider British (and global) audience to Grossman’s writing came in September 2011 when BBC Radio 4 broadcast a new dramatization of Life and Fate. In 13 parts and of over eight hours duration, featuring actors of the calibre of Kenneth Branagh, David Tennant and Janet Suzman, this was broadcast ‘stripped’ across the Radio 4 schedule over a single week. The BBC accompanied this broadcast with a barrage of related programming and publicity, featuring endorsements of Grossman’s works from novelists such as Linda Grant, Andrey Kurkov and Francis Spufford. In its aftermath, Life and Fate rose to the top of the Amazon UK bestseller list.

Scholarly interest in Grossman has also intensified. Some important major studies did appear in the 1990s, including Frank Ellis’s revised doctoral thesis (1994) and a 1996 biography by John and Carol Garrard, The Bones of Berdichev, now republished as The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman (2012). Yet recently the volume of work has palpably increased. Specialists in Slavic literature have analysed Grossman’s writing, unpicking how it combines both Chekhovian subtlety and Tolstoyan scope, even as it generally hews to the formal conventions of Soviet realism. They have also located it in its diverse contexts as a contribution to Russian, Soviet and Soviet-Jewish literature, and explored its significance for illuminating many core themes and issues in Soviet history. Yet, and as translations of his work proliferate, Grossman’s appeal is certainly not restricted to Russianists. Historians, philosophers, political theorists, Holocaust studies practitioners and many others have turned to Grossman for the insights of unparalleled acuity and sensitivity that he offers into some of the central horrors of the totalitarian century – from the Stalinist Terror of the 1930s, to the brutal Eastern Front warfare of the Second World War, to the Holocaust. Part of the richness of Grossman’s work is its multifaceted character. Undoubtedly, he makes an important contribution as a provider of documentary evidence, as an external witness to the specific events he depicts or evokes. Yet he also offers testimony from within those events, either on his own count or on behalf of those who are no longer able to speak, and in this respect his writing has relevance far beyond its immediate context. So Russianists and others have found it fruitful for exploring many larger historical, political and philosophical issues, including the possibilities for resistance under totalitarian dictatorship; the workings of collective memory, witnessing and testimony; responses to trauma; and even the very nature of humanity and freedom.

This was the context for the convening of the symposium at which earlier versions of the papers in this themed issue were delivered. Entitled ‘Vasily Grossman: Ruthless Truth in the Totalitarian Century’, its aim was to bring together an interdisciplinary collection of scholars working on Grossman from Britain, continental Europe, Russia and the United States. The participants were drawn from several generations and included a healthy number of early career scholars (including graduate students) alongside more senior figures such as John and Carol Garrard and Robert Chandler. It thus aspired to showcase ongoing advanced specialist research, to forge links between those working in diverse disciplines, and to delineate a research agenda for the future.

The symposium took place at St Peter’s College, Oxford, in September 2011 and was part of a larger series of events organized in connection with the broadcast of the BBC Radio 4 Life and Fate adaptation. A first day of events was comprised of public talks, readings, debates and recordings designed to launch the adaptation – broadcast in the following week – by introducing a wide audience to the novel and its author. ³ Our symposium, on the following day, offered a more specialist and scholarly perspective on Grossman’s life and oeuvre. ⁴ A crucial figure in facilitating all this was Mark Damazer, who as Controller of Radio 4 had commissioned the dramatization before taking up the post of Master of St Peter’s. Many other individuals and organizations were also involved, however, and should be acknowledged, including the Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University; Abigail Williams and Mary Chalk at St Peter’s; BBC Radio 4, especially Rob Ketteridge; the Centro Studi Grossman, Turin, especially Giovanni Maddalena and Pietro Tosco; Philip Bullock; and Martin Sixsmith. ⁵

The two-day event proved exhausting but very stimulating. The first, public-facing, day of talks worked extremely well as a general introduction to Grossman and his book. Yet, that said, there was a frisson of tension as the academic symposium participants evinced a slight unease about the popularization through adaptation of a work for which they had proprietorial feelings. This was dramatized when Alex Danchev asked the two writers of the radio drama how they had handled the character of Ikonnikov-Morzh who, as Danchev’s contribution to this themed issue makes clear, might be said to embody the core ethical messages of the novel. After some head-scratching, the writers remembered the character in question but admitted that he had been cut altogether from the adaptation. Of course, the challenges of condensing such a huge novel into even eight hours of radio were formidable, and difficult choices had to be made. Yet this particular omission was perhaps somewhat portentous: subsequent reviewers of the series advanced the mild criticism that through various editorial decisions – such as dispensing with Grossman’s voice as narrator – the writers had regrettably reduced the novel to character, dialogue and plot, eliding its reflective philosophical and ethical dimensions. Nevertheless, the series was superb drama in its own right and a bold and innovative programming endeavour; it also manifestly exposed a large audience to an author of whom they would not otherwise have been aware. (It was also far more respectful of the source than the lavish adaptation broadcast on Russian television in late 2012 which, by all accounts, more or less reduced Grossman’s novel to a formulaic war film.)

The academic symposium succeeded in bringing a wide range of intellectual perspectives to bear on the whole span of Grossman’s life and work. The discussions were animated and productive. Inevitably, as with any interdisciplinary endeavour, there were certain tensions here too, not least between those scholars doing detailed archival work on Grossman’s biography and professional career, or seeking to resolve issues of textual history and authenticity, and those non-Russianists keener to tease out the implications of his writing for wider intellectual debates. Yet the dominant tone was one of fruitful cross-fertilization between fields and perspectives. The six papers published in this themed issue comprise the first English-language collection of critical essays on Grossman. They also well represent both the quality of the proceedings and the variety of perspectives brought into play, with contributions from three scholars located in Slavic studies – Polly Zavadivker, Jekaterina Shulga and Sarah J. Young – and three from other disciplines – Patrick Finney, Laura Guillaume and Alex Danchev. ⁶ They indicate the tremendous depth and complexity of Grossman’s work, and illustrate the wide array of contemporary political, ethical and intellectual issues to which it speaks, and yet they also point to future necessary avenues of inquiry. Grossman’s voice uniquely embodies ‘both a lament for the dead and the furious joy of life itself’ (Grossman, 2006: 855): we still have much to learn from attending to it.