A Writer at War
Authors: Vasily Grossman
Vasily Grossman with the Red Army
1941–1945
EDITED AND TRANSLATED
BY
Antony Beevor
AND
Luba Vinogradova
THE HARVILL PRESS
LONDON
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781407092010
Published by The Harvill Press 2005
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Copyright © Ekaterina Vasilievna Korotkova-Grossman and Elena Fedorovna Kozhichkina 2005
English translation, introduction, and commentary © Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova
The moral right of Vasily Grossman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
First published in Great Britain in 2005 by The Harvill Press Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London sw1v 2sa
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ISBN
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Also by Vasily Grossman in English
PART ONE
The Shock of Invasion 1941
2 The Terrible Retreat
August to September 1941
3 On the Bryansk Front
September 1941
4 With the 50th Army
September 1941
5 Back into the Ukraine
September 1941
6 The German Capture of Orel
October 1941
7 The Withdrawal before Moscow
October 1941
PART TWO
The Year of Stalingrad 1942
9 The Air War in the South
January 1942
10 On the Donets with the Black Division
January and February 1942
11 With the Khasin Tank Brigade
February 1942
12 ‘The Ruthless Truth of War’
March to July 1942
13 The Road to Stalingrad
August 1942
15 The Stalingrad Academy
Autumn 1942
17 The Tide Turned
November 1942
PART THREE
Recovering the Occupied Territories 1943
18 After the Battle
January 1943
19 Winning Back the Motherland
The Early Spring of 1943
20 The Battle of Kursk
July 1943
PART FOUR
From the Dnepr to the Vistula 1944
21 The Killing Ground of Berdichev
January 1944
22 Across the Ukraine to Odessa
March & April 1944
23 Operation Bagration
June & July 1944
PART FIVE
Amid the Ruins of the Nazi World 1945
ód
January 194526 Into the Lair of the Fascist Beast
January 1945 Pozna
and Schwerin
27 The Battle for Berlin
April and May 1945
Gomel and the Central Front,
August 1941
In the Donbass,
January to March 1942
Stalingrad,
Autumn and Winter 1942
Also by Vasily Grossman in English
LIFE AND FATE
FOREVER FLOWING
Vasily Grossman’s place in the history of world literature is assured by his masterpiece
Life and Fate
, one of the greatest Russian novels of the twentieth century. Some critics even rate it more highly than Pasternak’s
Doctor Zhivago
or the novels of Solzhenitsyn.
This volume is based on his wartime notebooks, but also some essays which are all in the Russian State Archive for Literature and the Arts (RGALI). We have also included some letters in the possession of his daughter and step-son. The notebooks reveal a good deal of the raw material which he accumulated for his novels as well as his articles. Grossman, a special correspondent for the Red Army newspaper,
Krasnaya Zvezda
, or
Red Star
, proved to be the most perceptive and honest eyewitness of the Soviet frontlines between 1941 and 1945. He spent more than a thousand days at the front – nearly three out of the four years of war. The sharpness of his observation and the humanity of his understanding offer an invaluable lesson for any writer and historian.
Vasily Grossman was born in the Ukrainian town of Berdichev on 12 December 1905. Berdichev had one of the largest Jewish populations in central Europe and the Grossmans were part of its educated elite. Vasily had been given the name of Iosif, but like many assimilated families, the Grossmans russified their names. His father, born Solomon Iosifovich, had changed his to Semyon Osipovich.
Grossman’s parents separated and, as a young boy, he lived in Switzerland for two years with his mother before the First World War. In 1918, just after the revolution, he was back in Berdichev. The Ukraine and its rich agriculture was destroyed first by Field Marshal von Eichhorn’s German occupation, which stripped the countryside.
1
Then, as the German armies withdrew in November as revolution broke out at home, the Russian civil war began in earnest with fighting between White and Red Armies, while Ukrainian nationalists and anarchists resisted both
sides. Whites and nationalists, and in some cases Red Guards, vented their blind hatred with pogroms across the Ukraine. Some say that around 150,000 Jews, roughly a third of the Jewish population, were murdered during the civil war. Famine followed between 1920 and 1922, with hundreds of thousands of deaths in the Ukraine alone.
Grossman went to Moscow University in 1923 where he studied chemistry. Even at that early stage, the unmilitary Grossman demonstrated a fascination for the army. ‘
At first glance, Father
was a completely civilian person’, said his only child, Ekaterina Korotkova-Grossman. ‘One could see this immediately from the way he stooped and the way he wore his glasses. And his hands were so clumsy. [Yet] he first showed an interest in the army when he was still a student. He wrote in one letter that if he was not called up he would volunteer.’
In 1928, when only twenty-three and still a student, he married his girlfriend in Kiev, Anna Petrovna Matsuk, known as Galya. This relationship produced a daughter in January 1930. They called her Ekaterina, or Katya, after Grossman’s mother. In 1932, ten years after the civil war, an even worse man-made famine, provoked by Stalin’s campaign against the kulaks and the forced collectivisation of agriculture, killed over seven million people.
2
Parents crazed by hunger ate their own children. It was the epitome of what Osip Mandelstam described in a memorable poem as ‘
the wolfhound century
’. If Grossman did not witness the worst horrors of the famine, he certainly heard of them or saw the results, as skeletal figures begged beside railway tracks in the hope of a generous traveller throwing them a crust. He described this Ukrainian famine in his last novel,
Forever Flowing
, including the execution of a woman accused of eating her two children.
