A Writer at War (19 page)

I’ve been given leave
for two months’ creative work, from 10 April until 10 June. I am overjoyed, I feel just like a schoolboy. Reaching
Moscow made a deep impression on me – the city, the streets and boulevards, they are all like the faces of my dear ones.

I have managed to do something to improve my financial affairs: I’ve signed a contract for the publication of a small book of my front essays and stories. I will send you some money today . . . It is very cold in our flat. Zhenni Genrikhovna has become so weak.

I haven’t been anywhere during my stay here. The editor piled lots of work upon me, and I sat working day and night. Actually, this was not so bad, as it is relatively warm in the editorial office, and they’ve been feeding me with
kasha
there. I’ve become so spoilt by the food at the front.

I will be writing a novel during my stay in Chistopol. I am not so well physically. I am overtired and cough a lot. My insides were frozen when I flew over the front in an open aircraft.

Grossman wasted no time in setting off for Chistopol. There, living again with his wife, he worked long hours on his novel about the disasters of 1941, which he decided to call
The People Immortal
. This book, drawing heavily on his notes taken at the front, became a huge success among the soldiers of the Red Army. Grossman, a Jewish intellectual from another world, had not just proved his courage at the front, but above all the accuracy and human sympathy of his observation. Yet despite all his hard work, Grossman also yearned to be back at the front. In fact, he wrote to his father from Chistopol on 15 May that he would leave in the first week of June.

Action has started at the front
, and I am listening to the radio greedily. There [at the front] lies the answer to all questions and to all fates.

Three days before, Marshal Timoshenko had attacked with 640,000 men south of Kharkov from the Barvenkovo salient. It was to prove a terrible disaster. The Wehrmacht’s Army Group South had been about to launch Operation Fridericus, the preparatory stage before its major summer offensive, Operation Blue, which was to take it to Stalingrad and into the Caucasus. As a result the uninspired Soviet assault found itself surprised between the hammer of Kleist’s First Panzer Army and the anvil of General Paulus’s Sixth Army. Two Soviet armies were surrounded and virtually annihilated in a little over a week. The Germans took nearly a
quarter of a million prisoners. Grossman’s enthusiasm for the front appears rapidly to have dissolved, and he returned to work on his novel.

I am doing a great deal of work here
[he wrote to his father on 31 May]. It seems to me I’ve never worked so hard in my life . . . The day before yesterday I was reading out to Aseev what I’ve written, and he liked it a great deal.

The sort of Red Army soldier whose courage and resilience Grossman evoked in his novel
The People Immortal.

Unfortunately, my leave is running out, and I am very tired. I’ve exhausted myself by writing. However, I’ve received, completely unexpectedly, a super-liberal telegram from my fierce editor, who wrote that he did not mind me extending my leave to continue my
work in Chistopol. So probably with his permission I will stay here for an extra seven or ten days. I am writing about the war during the summer and autumn of 1941.

Another thing that I am suffering from is a terrible shortage of money . . . I’ve written to Moscow, to all my publishers, but none of these sons of bitches has sent me a kopeck yet . . .

I often think of Katyusha. I would love to see her . . . She must be so grown up now. I’ve had two letters from her and I felt from those letters that she does not remember me well; they were such cold letters.

In the evenings I sit under the apple tree which is now in blossom, and I look at the lit windows of the house. It is so peaceful and quiet here. This amazes me. There’s a general called Ignatiev who once said that correspondents are the bravest people in war, because they have to leave the rear for the front so many times. And this moment is the most unpleasant one, this change from nightingales to aircraft.

I’ve had a card from the Migration Department, saying that Mama is not on the lists of those evacuated. I knew that she hadn’t managed to escape, but still my heart shrank when I read those typed lines.

It appears that Grossman did not need the extra time Ortenberg had allowed him. He delivered the manuscript on 11 June and wrote to his father the following day.

Things seem to be going well
with my novel. The editor read it yesterday and approved it passionately. He summoned me at night and embraced me. He said lots of flattering things and promised to publish it in
Krasnaya Zvezda
without any cuts. And the novel is quite long . . . I am anxious about how the readers will receive it . . . By the way, the publication of the novel should greatly improve my financial affairs. I hope you’ll be able to see this for yourself in the very near future. This makes me pleased. You must have grown so skinny, my poor man.

At the same time, he wrote to his wife in Chistopol saying much the same as he had written to his father, but added, with touching pride:

I am a key person at the editorial office now
. The editor summons me ten times a day. I sleep there in the office, as the proofs are read until two or three in the morning.

Ortenberg himself wrote: ‘
[After] precisely two months
, Vasily Semyonovich brought me
The People Immortal
, a manuscript which was about two hundred pages long. I read it, so to speak, without putting it down. Nothing of the sort had been written since the war began. We decided to publish it without delay. The first chapter was sent to the typesetters. When the three-column page was ready, I started proofreading it. Grossman was standing by my side watching my movements jealously. He feared that I would make unnecessary corrections.’

On 14 July, Grossman wrote in great excitement to his father.

Krasnaya Zvezda
started serialising
my novel today . . . I wired you 400 roubles the day before yesterday! I will be in Moscow for another three weeks or a month, while the newspaper serialises the novel.

On 12 August, Ortenberg wrote: ‘
Today we published the final
chapter of the novel
The People Immortal
by Vasily Grossman. It was serialised over eighteen issues of the newspaper, and after each one the interest of the readers increased. For eighteen days, and even nights, I stood with the writer by my desk proofreading one chapter after another in order to publish it in the next issue. There were no conflicts with Vasily Semyonovich. Only the end of the novel caused heated discussions: the main character, I. Babadzhanyan, gets killed. When I was reading the manuscript and when I was reading the proofed version of the final chapter, I kept asking the writer whether it wasn’t possible to resurrect the main character, of whom the reader had grown so fond? Vasily Semyonovich replied: “We have to follow the ruthless truth of war.”’

In fact, Grossman was to face acute embarrassment, the sort that any novelist dreads, even though it had been unusual to give the main character in the novel his real name as well as identity. Babadzhanyan had not been killed, as Grossman had been told. But this future general of tank troops forgave the novelist for his fictional death.

In Moscow, meanwhile, few seemed to have had any idea of the disaster taking place in the south as Hitler’s armies advanced on the Don and drove towards the Caucasus. Grossman’s letter to his wife on 22 July showed that even those coming back to Moscow from the region appeared oblivious to the dangers.

Yesterday Kostya Bukovsky
returned from Stalingrad by air, and I gave a ‘reception’. We drank and sang songs . . . Tvardovsky read
a wonderful chapter from his new work [‘Vasily Tyorkin’]. Everyone was moved to tears.
¹

Just over three weeks later, on 19 August, Grossman wrote to his father.

I am leaving for the front
in a couple of days. Your parental heart would have rejoiced if you could see how I was welcomed by the Red Army after the novel was published. My God, I was so proud of myself and so touched. And it was received so well at every level, from the top to the bottom of the army. My dear, my situation is better than ever now. I have success and recognition, but there is a heavy, heavy feeling in my soul. My passionate desire is to help all my dear ones, to assemble you all in one place. I am tormented by the thought about Mama’s fate . . .

I’ve had a letter from Vadya’s son Yura. He is at the front, a lieutenant. He has fought in many battles and has been wounded.

Grossman’s young cousin, Yura Benash, was about to be sent to Stalingrad, which is where Grossman himself was bound.

1
Tvardovsky (see note p.63) was best known as the author of ‘Vasily Tyorkin’, the story of a fictional peasant soldier, a real optimist who always manages to survive. He had begun life in Tvardovsky’s newspaper column during the Russian-Finnish War. The character became a folk hero during the Great Patriotic War and won Tvardovsky another Stalin Prize in 1946.

While Grossman was working on
The People Immortal
, the German general staff had been preparing the plans for Hitler’s great summer offensive, Operation Blue. In what was almost a relaunch of Operation Barbarossa, Hitler counted on charging into the Caucasus to seize the oilfields there. He was convinced that securing this source of fuel would enable him to hold out against the ‘Big Three’ powers now ranged against him. But on 12 May, six days before the German operation was scheduled to start, Marshal Timoshenko launched his own offensive south of Kharkov, as mentioned in the previous chapter. The
Stavka
was hoping to recapture the city. The Soviet attack, however, was doomed. The large concentration of German forces in the area, and their rapid reaction to the new situation led to another disastrous encirclement five days later when General Paulus’s Sixth Army sealed the trap on more than three Soviet armies. News of the disaster was a shock, especially for Grossman, who had spent so much time in that area and had met many men involved in the battle.

One important side effect of this engagement was to postpone the main phase of Operation Blue until the end of June. A German staff officer, with all the plans for the offensive in the south, was shot down on Soviet territory when his pilot lost his way, but Stalin refused to believe the evidence. He thought it was a trick, just as he had refused to believe warnings before Barbarossa. He was convinced that Hitler would again attack towards Moscow. It was not long, however, before he realised how serious his obstinacy had been. Timoshenko’s South-Western and Southern Fronts, already badly mauled near Kharkov, were soon in headlong retreat. Paulus’s Sixth Army pushed into the great bend of the River Don, while three other armies – Fourth Panzer, First Panzer and the Seventeenth Army, approached the lower Don to advance into the Caucasus.

Stalin began to panic. On 19 July, he personally ordered the Stalingrad Defence Committe to prepare the city for war immediately. It had seemed
unthinkable that the Germans might reach the Volga, let alone attack the city named after him, for he had bolstered his reputation on a highly inflated version of its defence in the civil war when it was still called Tsaritsyn.

Hitler, meanwhile, began to meddle with the German general staff’s operational plan. In the original version, the task of Paulus’s Sixth Army had been to advance towards Stalingrad, but not to take it. The idea was simply to guard the whole of Operation Blue’s left flank along the Volga as the main thrust went southwards into the Caucasus. But soon the plan changed. The Sixth Army, supported by part of the Fourth Panzer Army diverted back from the Caucasus, was ordered to capture the city which bore Stalin’s name.

On 28 July, just after the Germans took Rostov and three of their armies crossed the River Don into the Caucasus, Stalin issued the notorious Order No. 227, known as ‘Not One Step Back’. Anyone who retreated without orders or surrendered was to be treated as a ‘traitor to the Motherland’. Grossman’s daughter later heard of the following exchange in the editorial offices of
Krasnaya Zvezda
. ‘
When the famous order was issued
to shoot deserters, Ortenberg said to my father, Pavlenko and [Aleksei] Tolstoy,
¹
who all happened to be in the office at that moment: “Could one of you write a story on this subject, please?” My father replied immediately, without reflecting: “I am not going to write anything of the sort.” This made Pavlenko furious. He twisted his body and, hissing like a snake, said: “You are an arrogant man, Vasily Semyonovich, such an arrogant man!” But Tolstoy, who had just stood there and did not take part in this verbal exchange, soon wrote a story about a beast-like deserter who, when fleeing from the Red Army, goes into a house and kills little children there.’

The retreating Soviet armies were in chaos. Thousands of lives were wasted in futile counter-attacks. Many trapped in the bend of the River Don, some sixty kilometres west of Stalingrad, drowned trying to escape. Grossman later interviewed a number of men involved in the disaster.