Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century by Alexandra Popoff

Author:Alexandra Popoff
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300222784
Publisher: Yale University Press

In 1948 the writer Viktor Nekrasov met Grossman in Koktebel, Crimea. Nekrasov’s honest novel Front-line Stalingrad had been awarded a Stalin Prize in 1947. The writer was told that Stalin himself decided the award, and this shielded his book from criticism. Nekrasov had read Grossman’s articles while at the front and nearly met him in Stalingrad. Grossman’s nephew Yura Benyash was the commander of Nekrasov’s battalion. Grossman visited this battalion in December 1942, two months after Benyash was killed, and talked with people who knew him.

In Crimea Nekrasov first observed Grossman from a distance. Grossman looked gloomy and unapproachable; he took lonely walks and went for swims at a distant beach. Even for the sociable Nekrasov, a former actor, starting a conversation was not easy. One night he saw Grossman smoking on the lower verandah of their hotel and asked casually, “Can’t sleep?” Grossman replied something “about the stars or about listening to cicadas—and this led to a conversation. We sat and talked for an hour. . . . Well, of course, the war, Stalingrad, Treblinka.” After this encounter they met and talked daily.

As it turned out, Vasily Semyonovich wasn’t gloomy at all, but the look in his eyes from behind glasses was occasionally sad and pensive. But his eyes could also smile softly and ironically. He valued irony. . . . Like every shy person (and Vasily Semyonovich was shy, that is, he was afraid to appear bothersome, interfering) he would be more at ease after a drink. . . . He always spoke softly, disliked empty phrases and superlatives and, strange as it may seem, strongly disliked reminiscing . . . (only on the first night did we reminisce about Stalingrad); in his questions he was reserved and tactful. He disliked the apparatchiks and, when talking about them, was neither reserved nor delicate. He fervently hated lies, hypocrisy. Having endured critical attacks along with their repercussions, he never complained, although he was vexed and continued to believe what he believed before.53

Grossman called himself “a heretic” and was glad to find “a heretic-friend” in Nekrasov. A native of Kiev, Nekrasov would correspond with Grossman and was among the first to write him when his novel For the Right Cause was published.

Grossman completed this novel in late 1948, when Stalin’s campaign against “rootless cosmopolitans” was picking up steam. Remembering “the moral and intellectual pogroms” of Stalin’s final years, the distinguished Leningrad philologist Olga Freidenberg wrote to her cousin Boris Pasternak, “The purpose of the last campaign has been to cause concussion of the brain. . . . One should see the pogrom as carried out in our department. Groups of students rummage through the works of Jewish professors, eavesdrop on private conversations, whisper in corners. . . . Jews no longer receive an education, are no longer accepted at universities or for graduate study. . . . The finest professors have been dismissed. The murder of the remaining intelligentsia goes on without cease.”54 Freidenberg reported in her diary that any

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