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Sunday, May 02, 2021 6:33:28 PM
shajandr, Vasily Grossman Loser Saint
A truly appreciated man. He was honestly a heroic human being.
By Sam Sacks
June 25, 2013
There were two major acts in the life of Jewish-Russian writer Vasily Grossman, and in each he played a different role.
The first is bound up in the epochal events of the twentieth century: the battles of Stalingrad, Kursk, and Berlin; the genocides at Treblinka and Auschwitz. In the travel memoir he wrote late in his life, published for the first time in English earlier this year, under the title “An Armenian Sketchbook,” Grossman brushes the surface of his experiences in the Second World War: “I crossed the Volga more than once under German fire. I experienced both massive bombing raids and barrages of mortar and artillery fire.” He was the star correspondent for the Red Army, and his dispatches for the newspaper Red Star documented with thrilling immediacy the Nazi lightning attack upon the U.S.S.R., the decisive reversal at Stalingrad, and the Soviet’s slow, bloody bulldozer-march to the German capital. That westward advance took him through the Nazi camps in Poland and his 1944 report “The Hell Called Treblinka” was the first article about a death camp ever published. It remains one of the finest, providing firsthand forensic documentation—Grossman meticulously lays out the physical dimensions of the camp, down to the square footage—and then icily explaining the engineering of genocide.
Grossman was a fiction writer before the war, and his journalism—even his concentration camp reportage—is uncommonly enlivened by telling descriptions of the besieged landscape, expert character profiles, and an irrepressible tendency toward philosophical reflection and emotional outburst. (His dispatches were collected in the superb 2006 book “A Writer at War.”) When the war ended, he returned to fiction, taking on the twin tasks of eyewitness and interpreter, shaping everything he had seen in the forge of artistic creation.
“Life and Fate,” his resulting magnum opus, is not likely to be unseated as the greatest Second World War novel ever written. Grossman’s challenge over the ten years of its composition seems nearly insuperable: to evoke the scope and magnitude of the conflict without turning his characters into cogs in a vast military machine. “Fascism has rejected the concept of a separate individuality, the concept of ‘a man,’ and operates only with vast aggregates,” he writes in one of the novel’s interwoven meditations. The war itself, Grossman believed, was a noble struggle against that very process of dehumanization.
Grossman’s touchstone for the book was “War and Peace,”...
[...]
The final act of Grossman’s life began in 1961, when “Life and Fate” was “arrested” by the K.G.B., who said that it could not be published for two hundred and fifty years. The reason they gave was that Grossman had placed too much emphasis on the Nazi persecution of Jews—the pointedly anti-Semitic official decree was that war chroniclers could not divide the dead into groups—but biographers have speculated that Khrushchev saw an unflattering resemblance of himself in one of the novel’s fictional commissars. (A hidden copy of the book was eventually smuggled out of the U.S.S.R. in 1974, ten years after Grossman’s death.)
The censorship made him a persona non grata among members of the Soviet Writer’s Union, effectively stripping him of his livelihood. Meanwhile, his marriage fell apart (his wife resented their decline in status and could not understand why her husband wouldn’t write books that were acceptable to the State) and his health deteriorated. A friend recalled that he aged “before our eyes. His curly hair turned greyer and a bald patch appeared. His asthma … returned. His walk became a shuffle.” Soon he began to experience symptoms of the stomach cancer that would eventually kill him. If he was once the stalwart messenger who had escaped from cataclysm and was prepared to tell the world what he had seen, now he was Job. The history of loss and affliction he had transmuted into fiction had become autobiography.
It’s under these circumstances that Grossman wrote “An Armenian Sketchbook,”...
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/vasily-grossman-loser-saint
A truly appreciated man. He was honestly a heroic human being.
By Sam Sacks
June 25, 2013
There were two major acts in the life of Jewish-Russian writer Vasily Grossman, and in each he played a different role.
The first is bound up in the epochal events of the twentieth century: the battles of Stalingrad, Kursk, and Berlin; the genocides at Treblinka and Auschwitz. In the travel memoir he wrote late in his life, published for the first time in English earlier this year, under the title “An Armenian Sketchbook,” Grossman brushes the surface of his experiences in the Second World War: “I crossed the Volga more than once under German fire. I experienced both massive bombing raids and barrages of mortar and artillery fire.” He was the star correspondent for the Red Army, and his dispatches for the newspaper Red Star documented with thrilling immediacy the Nazi lightning attack upon the U.S.S.R., the decisive reversal at Stalingrad, and the Soviet’s slow, bloody bulldozer-march to the German capital. That westward advance took him through the Nazi camps in Poland and his 1944 report “The Hell Called Treblinka” was the first article about a death camp ever published. It remains one of the finest, providing firsthand forensic documentation—Grossman meticulously lays out the physical dimensions of the camp, down to the square footage—and then icily explaining the engineering of genocide.
Grossman was a fiction writer before the war, and his journalism—even his concentration camp reportage—is uncommonly enlivened by telling descriptions of the besieged landscape, expert character profiles, and an irrepressible tendency toward philosophical reflection and emotional outburst. (His dispatches were collected in the superb 2006 book “A Writer at War.”) When the war ended, he returned to fiction, taking on the twin tasks of eyewitness and interpreter, shaping everything he had seen in the forge of artistic creation.
“Life and Fate,” his resulting magnum opus, is not likely to be unseated as the greatest Second World War novel ever written. Grossman’s challenge over the ten years of its composition seems nearly insuperable: to evoke the scope and magnitude of the conflict without turning his characters into cogs in a vast military machine. “Fascism has rejected the concept of a separate individuality, the concept of ‘a man,’ and operates only with vast aggregates,” he writes in one of the novel’s interwoven meditations. The war itself, Grossman believed, was a noble struggle against that very process of dehumanization.
Grossman’s touchstone for the book was “War and Peace,”...
[...]
The final act of Grossman’s life began in 1961, when “Life and Fate” was “arrested” by the K.G.B., who said that it could not be published for two hundred and fifty years. The reason they gave was that Grossman had placed too much emphasis on the Nazi persecution of Jews—the pointedly anti-Semitic official decree was that war chroniclers could not divide the dead into groups—but biographers have speculated that Khrushchev saw an unflattering resemblance of himself in one of the novel’s fictional commissars. (A hidden copy of the book was eventually smuggled out of the U.S.S.R. in 1974, ten years after Grossman’s death.)
The censorship made him a persona non grata among members of the Soviet Writer’s Union, effectively stripping him of his livelihood. Meanwhile, his marriage fell apart (his wife resented their decline in status and could not understand why her husband wouldn’t write books that were acceptable to the State) and his health deteriorated. A friend recalled that he aged “before our eyes. His curly hair turned greyer and a bald patch appeared. His asthma … returned. His walk became a shuffle.” Soon he began to experience symptoms of the stomach cancer that would eventually kill him. If he was once the stalwart messenger who had escaped from cataclysm and was prepared to tell the world what he had seen, now he was Job. The history of loss and affliction he had transmuted into fiction had become autobiography.
It’s under these circumstances that Grossman wrote “An Armenian Sketchbook,”...
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/vasily-grossman-loser-saint
It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”
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