Wassili Semjonowitsch Grossman

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Memorial plaque for Vasily Grossman in Donetsk

Vasily Grossman (also Vassily , Vasily , Russian Василий Семёнович Гроссман ; born November 29 . Jul / 12. December  1905 greg. In Berdichev , Russian Empire ; † 14. September 1964 in Moscow ) was a Soviet writer and journalist.

biography

Grossman was born as Josif Solomonowitsch Grossman in an enlightened Jewish family in Berditschew in what is now Ukraine . He received no traditional Jewish education and spoke only a few words of Yiddish . A Russian nanny changed her name from Jossja to Russian Vasya (a diminutive of Vasily ), which was accepted by the whole family. His father was a Social Democrat and joined the Mensheviks .

Grossman began writing short stories while studying at Moscow University and continued his literary activities when he later worked as an engineer in the Donets Basin . One of his first short stories, In the City of Berdichev (В городе Бердичеве), made Maxim Gorky and Mikhail Bulgakov aware of and encouraged Grossman. The famous film The Commissioner (directed by Alexander Askoldov ), suppressed by the KGB in 1967 , only released in 1987 and shown at the Moscow Film Festival , is based on this four-page story. He received at the Berlinale in 1988 the Special Jury Prize .

In the mid-1930s, Grossman gave up his career as an engineer and devoted himself entirely to writing. By 1936 he had published two collections of stories, and in 1937 he became a member of the Union of Writers of the USSR . During the Great Terror , some of his friends and close relatives were arrested, including his wife Olga, whose ex-husband Boris Guber was executed in August 1937. For months he wrote petitions to the authorities to obtain their release, which he succeeded in 1938.

Wassili Grossmann as a correspondent for Krasnaya Zvezda in March 1945 in Germany

After the German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, his mother stayed in Berditschew and was murdered with more than 20,000 to 30,000 other Jews. Grossman was exempted from serving in the army, but volunteered for the front, where he spent more than 1,000 days. He became a war reporter for the popular Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star). He described the major events of the war, including the Battle of Moscow , the Battle of Stalingrad , the Battle of Kursk , the Soviet reconquest of Belarus and the Battle of Berlin . In addition to his war reports , his novels (such as This people are immortal (Народ бессмертен)) were published and he was considered a war hero. The novel Stalingrad (1950), later renamed The Just Cause (За правое дело), ​​is based on his experiences during the siege.

Grossman's documentary descriptions of the ethnically cleansed Ukraine, Belarus and Poland , the Treblinka extermination camp and the Majdanek concentration camp were among the first eyewitness accounts - as early as 1943 - of what would later become known as the Holocaust . His 1944 article The Hell of Treblinka was circulated as a prosecution document during the Nuremberg Trials .

The suppression of the Black Book drawn up by the Jewish Antifascist Committee shook him deeply and called his loyalty to the state into question. First, the censors ordered changes to the text in order to hide the specifically anti-Jewish character of the mass murders and to downplay the role of the Ukrainians who had worked as police officers for the Nazis. The Black Book, edited by Grossman from Ilja Ehrenburg , was finally completed in 1948, but not published. The sentence was melted down, the printed sheets crushed. The poet Semjon Lipkin , a friend of Grossman, believes it was Stalin's anti-Semitic campaign that destroyed Grossman's belief in the Soviet system.

1946… I met some close friends, including an Ingush and a Balkar man , whose families had been deported to Kazakhstan during the war . I told Grossman this and he said, "Maybe it was necessary for military reasons." I said, "Would you say that too if they did that to Jews?" He said it could never happen. A few years later, an aggressive article against the rootless cosmopolitans appeared in Pravda . Grossman sent me a note that I was finally right. Grossman hadn't considered himself very Jewish for a long time. The campaign against cosmopolitanism revived his relationship with Judaism.

Due to state persecution, few of his post-war works were published during Grossman's lifetime. After he submitted his magnum opus , the novel Life and Fate (Жизнь и судьба, 1959), for publication, the KGB ransacked his apartment. The manuscripts, the carbon copies, his notebooks as well as the typewritten copies and even the typewriter tapes were confiscated.

During the post- Stalinist " thaw period " Grossman wrote to Khrushchev :

What use is it to me if I am physically free and the book to which I have dedicated my life is arrested ... I do not renounce ... I demand freedom for my book.

Mikhail Suslov , the chief ideologist of the Politburo , told the author that his book would be published in 200 years at the earliest.

Life and Fate and his last novel Everything flows (Всё течёт, 1961) were seen as a threat to communist rule and the dissident became a non-person. Grossman died in 1964 without knowing whether his work would ever be read by the public.

A section from Life and Fate was published in Switzerland in 1980 thanks to other dissidents : Andrei Sakharov secretly photographed pages of the draft that Semyon Lipkin had kept and the writer Vladimir Voinowitsch managed to smuggle the films abroad. When the glasnost policy was initiated by Gorbachev , the book was published in Russia in 1988. Everything flows appeared in 1989 in the Soviet Union. The manuscript on Life and Fate comprises around 11,000 pages and was handed over to the State Archives in Moscow by the Russian secret service in July 2013, making it accessible to the public.

Some critics have compared Grossman's novels with Leo Tolstoy's monumental prose. In 1998, Solzhenitsyn expressed his "great respect" for Grossman's "patient, persistent, far-reaching work".

The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas was also among the admirers of life and fate .

Works (selection)

  • The Hell of Treblinka , translated from the Russian by L. Becher, Verlag für Fremdsprachige Literatur , Moscow 1946.
    • The Hell of Treblinka , Vienna 2020 (= VWI Study Series Volume 5), ISBN 978-3-7003-2177-4 (annotated reprint of the Moscow original edition).
  • This people is immortal , translated from the Russian by H. Angarowa, Verlag für Fremdsprachige Literatur, Moscow 1946.
  • Stalingrad . Publishing house for foreign language literature, Moscow 1946 (printed by Bohn & Sohn in Leipzig).
  • Wende an der Wolga , novel, translated from Russian by Leon Nebenzahl, Dietz , Berlin 1961, 6th edition.
  • Stormy youth , novel in four parts, translated from Russian by Leon Nebenzahl, with an afterword by F. Lewin, Dietz, Berlin 1962, 2nd edition.
    (Note: the first edition was published in 1953 by Dietz-Verlag, Berlin (East), in 4 volumes under the title Stepan Koltschugin )
  • The black book , the genocide of the Soviet Jews (editor, with Ilja Ehrenburg , editor of the German edition Arno Lustiger ), in German by Ruth and Heinz Germany, Rowohlt , Reinbek bei Hamburg 1995, 2nd edition, ISBN 3-498-01655-5 .
  • Everything flows , from the Russian by Annelore Nitschke , with an afterword by Franziska Thun-Hohenstein, Ullstein , Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-550-08795-0 .
  • Tiergarten , Stories, translated from Russian by Katharina Narbutovič, with an afterword by Franziska Thun-Hohenstein, Claassen , Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-546-00437-4 .
  • Life and Fate , novel, from the Russian by Madeleine von Ballestrem, Claassen, Berlin 2007, ISBN 3-546-00415-9 .
  • The Commissioner , short story, translated from Russian by Thies Ziemke, with numerous photos from the eponymous film by Alexander Askoldow, Neuer Malik Verlag , Kiel 1989, ISBN 3890290442 .

Secondary literature

  • John Gordon & Carol Garrard: The Bones of Berdichev. The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman ISBN 0684822954 .
  • Frank Ellis: Vasiliy Grossman. The Genesis and Evolution of a Russian Heretic ISBN 085496830X .
  • Antony Beevor & Luba Winogradowa: A Writer at War. Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941–1945 Pantheon, 2006 ISBN 0375424075 (Based on Grossman's notebooks, war diaries , personal letters, and articles.)
    • German: a writer at war. Wassili Grossman and the Red Army 1941–1945 . by Luba Vinogradova. Translated by Helmut Ettinger. Bertelsmann, Munich 2007 ISBN 9783570009130 .
  • Salomon Malka: La vie et Le destin de Vassili Grossman (French) foreword Jean-François Colosimo; Nachw. Alexis Lacroix. Editions du CNRS, Paris 2008 (biography). Review: [1] ISBN 2271067502 .
  • Alexandra Popoff: Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century . New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019 ISBN 9780300222784
  • Ulrich Schmid: Stalingrad. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 5: Pr-Sy. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2014, ISBN 978-3-476-02505-0 , pp. 576-581.

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Florian Anton, Leonid Luks (ed.): Germany, Russia and the Baltic States: Contributions to a history of changeful relationships. Festschrift for the 85th birthday of Peter Krupnikow ( publications of the Central Institute for Central and Eastern European Studies  7). Böhlau Verlag, Cologne / Weimar 2005, ISBN 3412126055 , p. 265
  2. ↑ Wassili Grossmann in waralbum.ru
  3. ↑ Треблинский ад
  4. ↑ Efim Etkind : Twenty Years After . Epilogue to Life and Fate . Albrecht Knaus Verlag, Munich and Hamburg 1984. ISBN 3-8135-0187-6 . Pp. 905-917, here p. 906.
  5. ↑ Priscilla Pizzato: Stronger than the KGB - The Stalingrad epic "Life and Fate". (No longer available online.) ARTE, 2018, archived from the original on January 27, 2018 ; accessed on January 27, 2018 (detsch). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.arte.tv
  6. ↑ Inna Hartwich: The other story of Stalingrad. NZZ, January 24, 2018, accessed on January 27, 2018 (German).
  7. ↑ Uwe Stolzmann: Stalin's mercilessly punishing hand. NZZ, March 26, 2011, accessed on January 27, 2018 (German).
  8. ^ Tolstoy Studies Journal : Ellis, Frank. "Concepts of War in LN Tolstoy and VS Grossman." Volume II, 1989, pp. 101-108.
  9. ↑ Biography of Grossman (PDF) by Gregory Freidin, Stanford University .
  10. ^ Salomon Malka, Emmanuel Lévinas. Eine Biographie , Munich 2003, p. 132.

Web links

Commons : Vasily Grossman  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Grossman, Wassili Semjonowitsch
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Василий Семёнович Гроссман; Grossman, Josif Solomonovich; Grossmann, Wassilij (in early German publications)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Soviet writer and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH December 12, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Berdychiv , Ukraine
DATE OF DEATH September 14, 1964
Place of death Moscow