Magazine Article

Chekhov and Capa of the USSR

Nesvisky, Matt

2011

Overview

Martin Amis has called [Vasily Grossman] \"the Tolstoy of the USSR,\" and Grossman's vast World War II novel \"Life and Fate\" is ample support for such a claim. Now with \"The Road,\" the first collection of Grossman's short fiction to appear in English, the writer also might well merit the accolade as the \"Chekhov of the USSR.\" In Russia, the career of Vasily Grossman (1905-1964) was decidedly bumpy. His early socialist realist novels and his war reporting for Red Star and other publications - journalism that covered everything from the siege of Moscow and the Battle of Stalingrad to the liberation of the death camps and the Red Army's capture of Berlin - won him both official praise and great popularity. But much of his postwar work was banned during his lifetime. This included \"The Black Book,\" the documentary anthology on the Holocaust that he edited with Ilya Ehrenberg and others, and the major novels \"Life and Fate\" and \"Everything Flows.\" Indeed, only Stalin's death in 1953 forestalled Grossman's arrest and likely execution as an enemy of the state. When the novels finally appeared in 1985, a generation after Grossman's death from cancer, they did not greatly stir glasnost-era Russians. Grossman's perceived literary offenses were two-fold; first, that his writings, especially those concerned with the Holocaust, were \"too Jewish,\" and second, that his fiction was critical of Communism. (\"Life and Fate\" indeed draws parallels between Hitlerism and Stalinism.) Such charges also might well have been leveled against much of the material in \"The Road.\" For example, \"The Hell of Treblinka,\" the first full-scale account of a death camp to appear in any language (and appearing here in complete form in English for the first time) was published in November 1944, both in magazine and in book form, shortly after the Soviet forces rolled in. Grossman's report, based on interviews with survivors, captured prison guards and local peasants, was even submitted as evidence in the Nuremberg trials. But Grossman's Soviet masters, shying away from admitting that any single ethnic group had been especially persecuted by the Nazis, would not allow the victims of Treblinka to be identified as Jews. Instead, they were \"prisoners\" or \"people.\"

• Publisher: Jerusalem Report
• Subject: Chandler, Robert / Grossman, Vasily / Shneer, David