Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century

by Alexandra Popoff

Overview

The definitive biography of Soviet Jewish dissident writer Vasily Grossman
 
If Vasily Grossman’s 1961 masterpiece, Life and Fate, had been published during his lifetime, it would have reached the world together with Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and before Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag. But Life and Fate was seized by the KGB. When it emerged posthumously, decades later, it was recognized as the War and Peace of the twentieth century. Always at the epicenter of events, Grossman (1905–1964) was among the first to describe the Holocaust and the Ukrainian famine. His 1944 article “The Hell of Treblinka” became evidence at Nuremberg. Grossman’s powerful anti‑totalitarian works liken the Nazis’ crimes against humanity with those of Stalin. His compassionate prose has the everlasting quality of great art. Because Grossman’s major works appeared after much delay we are only now able to examine them properly. Alexandra Popoff’s authoritative biography illuminates Grossman’s life and legacy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300222784
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	03/26/2019
Pages:	424
Sales rank:	1,231,168
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Alexandra Popoff is a former Moscow journalist, an expert on Russian literature and cultural history, and the author of several literary biographies.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

1 In the Town of Berdichev 7

2 From Science to Literature and Politics 29

3 Facts on the Ground: The Donbass 50

4 Great Expectations 66

5 The Dread New World 85

6 The Inevitable War 105

7 1941 115

8 The Battle of Stalingrad 128

9 Arithmetic of Brutality 152

10 A Soviet Tolstoy 184

11 Toward Life and Fate 213

12 The Novel 236

13 An Unrepentant Heretic 255

14 Everything Flows 279

15 Keep My Words Forever 298

Epilogue 317

Notes 327

Bibliography 369

Index 379

Illustrations follow page 114

Editorial Reviews

02/18/2019

Popoff (Sophia Tolstoy), a formerly Moscow-based journalist, offers a fine biography of Soviet dissident writer Vasily Grossman. Born into a Ukrainian-Jewish family in 1905 and initially trained as an engineer, Grossman worked as a journalist while travelling with the Soviet army during WWII. He witnessed not only the Battle of Stalingrad, but the liberation of the Treblinka death camp, the ruins of Warsaw, and the fall of Berlin. He also lost his mother to the Holocaust. Much of this was recorded in his last, great novel, Life and Fate, modeled on Tolstoy’s War and Peace. But unlike Boris Pasternak’s contemporaneous and similarly antitotalitarian Dr. Zhivago, Grossman’s 1960 novel was successfully kept from readers by Soviet authorities. Grossman’s particular offense had been to equate fascism to Stalinism, likening the two ideologies to “gazing into a mirror.” The novel was not published until 1980 in the West, denying Grossman—who died of stomach cancer in 1964—his chance to lastingly affect the public consciousness. Nevertheless, Popoff argues, Grossman, with his recurring phrase “there is nothing more precious than human life,” provided a valuable, deeply humane perspective on a violent era. This well-researched portrait should introduce many new readers to a significant writer whose stand against totalitarian ideology, as Popoff’s epilogue on Putin’s veneration of Stalin demonstrates, has taken on new relevance and urgency today. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Popoff's summary of Grossman's life in the 1930s is striking. [. . .] clear and well-structured”—Robert Chandler, Spectator

“Alexandra Popoff's biography is crisp and comprehensive, deftly interweaving Grossman's personal life with the momentous events he experienced”—John Thornhill, Financial Times

 “[A] fine biography”—William Boyd, Sunday Times

“Gripping . . . As told by Popoff, the stories behind Grossman’s stories, particularly of censors’ efforts to alter and limit them, are fascinating.”—William Taubman, New York Times

“[Popoff] tells Grossman’s story with sensitivity and a keen understanding of his world, drawing on little-known archival collections to produce what must be considered the definitive biography.”—Douglas Smith, The Wall Street Journal

“[Popoff’s] emphasis on what she calls “the connection between totalitarian regimes and political ignorance” not only applies to Soviet Russia but constitutes a warning for the United States” —William Taubman, International New York Times

“This well-researched portrait should introduce many new readers to a significant writer whose stand against totalitarian ideology, as Popoff’s epilogue on Putin’s veneration of Stalin demonstrates, has taken on new relevance and urgency today.”—Publishers Weekly

“Soviet expert Alexandra Popoff presents [Grossman’s]  life with a degree of detail and compassion not yet seen in any English-language publication. Her portrait provides not only the best look yet at this great author's working life but also a stirring study of one man's lifelong fight against totalitarian rule.”—The Christian Science Monitor

“Alexandra Popoff investigates Grossman’s career as a war correspondent and fiction writer, considers the personal tragedies that befell him over the course of his fifty-eight-year life, and examines what is sure to be his lasting legacy as a uniquely compelling anti-despotic voice.”—The New Criterion

“Comprehensive . . . and of interest to students of literature, journalism, and history alike.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Alexandra Popoff’s authoritative biography illuminates Grossman’s life and legacy.”—Reading Religion

“An excellent biography of Grossman . . . that offers no striking psychological portrait of its subject or radical reading of his works. Instead it is what I think of as a Dragnet, or Jack Webb, biography—'Just the facts, Ma’am’—the accretion of which is no small accomplishment about a life lived almost entirely in the murky and heavily censored atmosphere of the Soviet Union.”—Joseph Epstein, Commentary

“In Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century we find a complicated figure.”—Shelia Fitzpatrick, The Nation

“Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century provides a readable and fascinating account of an author . . . [who] was one of totalitarianism’s sharpest critics. . . . Popoff's book serves to illuminate the paradoxes and deep humanity of a figure long overlooked by English-speaking readers.”—B.M. Sutcliffe, Choice

Longlisted for the 2019 Cundill History Prize sponsored by McGill University

  Winner of the the Canadian Jewish Literary Award in the Biography category, sponsored by the Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies

Finalist in the 2019 National Jewish Book Awards, Biography category

Winner of the Jewish Studies Literary Awards in Biography, sponsored by The Canadian Jewish Literary Awards

"Alexandra Popoff has produced a magnificent biography of the great Soviet Jewish writer and journalist Vasily Grossman. Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century does justice to Grossman’s outspoken eloquence and defiance as one of the twentieth century’s foremost witnesses to the twin evils of Nazism and Stalinism."—Joshua Rubenstein, author of The Last Days of Stalin

“A harrowing tale of cruelty and courage, this unflinching study of Vasily Grossman’s life in a totalitarian society is a timely reminder of how all despots thrive on fear and lies. Alexandra Popoff has given us an invaluable autopsy of various Soviet monsters, including the enigmatic Stalin himself, yet in her inspiring account of Grossman’s efforts to resist tyranny, she has also created an unforgettable portrait of one brave soul’s triumph over a soulless state.”—Michael Shelden, author of Orwell: The Authorized Biography

From the Publisher

★ 2019-02-24

Comprehensive biography of the great Soviet war correspondent, novelist, and dissident.

As a young man, Vasily Grossman (1905-1964) ignored advice to change his patronymic from Solomonovich to Semyonovich, embracing his Jewish heritage in a time of pogroms. He was skeptical about the Bolshevik Revolution, writing in his novel Everything Flows, "in February 1917, the path of freedom lay open for Russia. Russia chose Lenin." Yet, as Moscow-born journalist and historian Popoff (Tolstoy's False Disciple: The Untold Story of Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Chertkov, 2014, etc.) writes, Grossman weathered tuberculosis and unsatisfying work as a chemist (not in that alone does he resemble the Italian writer Primo Levi) to embark on a literary career. An early novel presaged themes he would follow in later works, namely the sameness of different totalitarian systems; the similarities between Stalin's and Hitler's regimes would emerge in several of his pieces, which did not endear him to the authorities. He traveled with units of the Red Army throughout World War II as a war correspondent, getting into the thick of Stalingrad, Kursk, and, later, Berlin, providing some of the best reportage on any theater of the war: "The dead sleep on the hills," he wrote of Stalingrad, "near the ruins of factory workshops, in gullies and ravines; they sleep in places where they fought….Sacred land!" His novel Life and Fate, which preoccupied him for years, captured those experiences while repeating his mistrust of totalitarianism. Amazingly, he was not executed, but he constantly ran afoul of Soviet authorities and often endured their "administrative violence." As Popoff notes in closing, Grossman remains little known in Russia today, in part because of historical amnesia and in part because Vladimir Putin, "who is striving to re-create the Soviet police state," does not brook criticism of Stalin or any equation of Stalinism and Hitlerism.

An essential companion to the ongoing reissue campaign, courtesy of the New York Review of Books, of Grossman's work in English and of interest to students of literature, journalism, and history alike.

Kirkus Reviews

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