The Road (39 page)

1. Grossman and “The Hell of Treblinka”

*
later that autumn
: See Vasily Grossman,
A Writer at War
, Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova, eds. and trans. (London: Pimlico, 2006), 306.

*
about these camps
: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
Sobranie sochinenii v deviati tomakh
(Moscow: Terra, 2000), vol. 5, page 9.

*
–298
published in 1989
: The original text can be found in the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw (record number 247); much is omitted from both the Hebrew and the English editions [e-mail from Timothy Snyder].

*
the last remains of our martyrs
: Rachel Auerbach, “In the Fields of Treblinka” in Alexander Donat, ed.,
The Death Camp Treblinka
(New York: Holocaust Library, 1979), 73.

*
how the world would see their crimes
: See also note for
Majdanek, Sobibor, and Bełzec
, and note for
far away on the Volga
.

2. Natalya Khayutina and the Yezhovs

*
first lady of the kingdom!
: See Simon Sebag Montefiore,
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar
(London: Orion, 2004), 273. Babel, for his part, was one of the stars of Yevgenia’s salon. According to Babel’s wife, Antonina Pirozhkova, “If you invited people ‘for Babel,’ they all came.” [Ibid., 272.]

*
at a Kremlin reception
: See http://www.seagullmag.com/article.php? id=1297.

*
a novel about the Cheka
: According to Furmanov, Babel continued, “I don’t know, though, if I can manage it—my view of Cheka is just too one-sided. The reason is that the Chekists that I know, they are, well, they are simply holy people, even those who did the shooting with their own hands...And I fear [the book] may come out too saccharine.” [Gregory Freidin,
The Enigma of Isaac Babel
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 229, note 65.] It is unlikely that Babel said this without irony.

*
see what it smells like
: Nadezhda Mandelstam,
Hope Against Hope
(London: Penguin, 1975), 385.

*
as early as 1933
: The date of Natalya Khayutina’s birth and the date of her adoption are both unclear. According to her birth certificate, she was born on May 1, 1936, but she considers this a fiction of Yezhov’s; one of the reasons she gives is that May 1 was Yezhov’s own birthday. [Erik Shur, “Reabilitiruyut li Yezhova?,” available at
www.sovsekretno. ru/magazines/article/166
.]

*
her adoptive parents
: The most complete account of the life of the real Natalya Khayutina is by G. Zhavoronkov, in the journal
Sintaksis
32 (1992). All unreferenced information about her life is taken from this, from Shur, or from http://www.ntv.ru/novosti/31837.

*
Yezhov’s sister
: Natalya grew up believing that the Yezhovs were her real parents. Only when she met Yezhov’s sister in the 1960s did she learn that she had been adopted. She has continued, however, at least intermittently, to cling to the idea that Yezhov was her biological father [Zhavoronkov, 47; see also N. Zen
'
kovich,
Elita: entsiklopediya biografii: samye sekretnye rodstvenniki
(Moscow: Olma Medis Group, 2005), 125–26].

*
“hedgehog skin gauntlets”
: Stalin, however, used to call him by the affectionate name of Yezhevichka, or “Little Blackberry,” and Lavrenty Beria, taking his cue from this, sometimes referred to him as Yozhik or “Little Hedgehog.”

*
after returning from the Lubyanka
: Marc Jansen and Nikita Petrov,
Stalin’s Loyal Executioner: People’s Commissar Nikolai Ezhov 1895–1940
(Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2002), 121.

*
a real prototype
: See www.moscvichka.ru/article/035/32-04.htm.

*
that she remembered as real
: My thanks to Leigh Kimmel for suggesting this, and for showing me a draft of “The Hedgehog’s Daughter”—her fictional treatment of the life of Natalya Khayutina [available at www.leighkimmel.com].

*
taken possession of this package
: See http://skoblin.blogspot.com/ 2009/03/yezhov-file-iv.html.

*
an end to the Purges
: Donald Rayfield,
Stalin and His Hangmen
(London: Penguin, 2005), 322.

*
to save myself
: For the circumstances leading up to Yevgenia’s death, see Rayfield, 327; Montefiore, 289; and Jansen and Petrov, 166–71.

*
find her father in Kolyma
: In 1959, after giving birth to a daughter, Yevgenia, Natalya returned to Penza, but she settled permanently in Kolyma a few years after this.

*
study the accordion
: Zhavoronkov, 59. Zinaida’s husband, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, died in 1937—possibly from a heart attack, though it is more likely that he committed suicide.

*
Marfa Grigoryevna gave up the idea
: Zhavoronkov, 55–57; see also Jansen and Petrov, 189–90 and 258, note 67.

*
the running of the household
: Fyodor Guber,
Pamyat´ i pis´ma
(Moscow: Probel, 2007), 32. See also Vitaly Shentalinsky’s discussion of the Pereval “conspiracy” in “Rasstrel
´
nye nochi,”
Zvezda
5 (2007).

*
learning about for the first time
: On February 25, 1938, Grossman was interrogated in the Lubyanka in connection with Olga Mikhailovna’s arrest. The NKVD records of this interrogation contain no mention of anything pertaining to this “conspiracy” [John and Carol Garrard,
The Bones of Berdichev
(New York: The Free Press, 1996), 123–24].

*
nonjudgmental portrayal of Yezhov
: In the manuscript version of the first section, Grossman five times refers to Yezhov as
chelovechek
(“a little man”). This use of the diminutive sounds condescending, and the first mention of Yezhov—
malen'kii, shchuplyi chelovechek
(“a small, puny little runt”)—is positively contemptuous. In the typescript and in the final version, however, Grossman refers to Yezhov simply as
chelovek
(“a man,” “a person”).

Afterword

*
or, more likely, orphanages
: The Soviet authorities usually sent the children of “enemies of the people” to orphanages rather than allowing them to be brought up by relatives who might imbue them with a sense of grievance against the regime. Siblings were usually separated.

Ilya Altman and Joshua Rubenstein.
The Unknown Black Book
. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.

Anne Applebaum.
Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps
. New York: Doubleday, 2003.

Yitzhak Arad.
Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps
. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.

Jonathan Brent and Vladimir P. Naumov.
Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948–1953
. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.

Witold Chrostowski.
Extermination Camp Treblinka
. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2004.

Alexander Donat, ed.
The Death Camp Treblinka
. New York: Holocaust Library, 1979.

Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman.
The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry
. David Patterson, trans. and ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002.

Orlando Figes.
The Whisperers
. London: Penguin, 2008.

Sheila Fitzpatrick.
Everyday Stalinism
. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

John and Carol Garrard.
The Bones of Berdichev
. New York: The Free Press, 1996.

J. Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov.
Yezhov: The Rise of Stalin’s “Iron Fist
.
”
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.

Richard Glazar.
Trap with a Green Fence
. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1992.

Vasily Grossman.
Everything Flows
. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler with Anna Aslanyan, trans. New York: New York Review Books, 2009.

———.
Life and Fate
. Robert Chandler, trans. New York: New York Review Books, 2006.

———.
A Writer at War
. Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova, eds. and trans. New York: Pantheon, 2005.

Marc Jansen and Nikita Petrov.
Stalin’s Loyal Executioner: People’s Commissar Nikolai Ezhov 1895–1940
. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2002.

Mark Mazower.
Hitler’s Empire
. London: Penguin, 2008.

Catherine Merridale.
Night of Stone
. London: Granta, 2001.

Simon Sebag Montefiore.
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar
. London: Orion, 2004.

Rachel Polonsky.
Molotov’s Magic Lantern: A Journey in Russian History
. London: Faber, 2010.

Donald Rayfield.
Stalin and His Hangmen
. London: Penguin, 2005.

Richard Rhodes.
Masters of Death: The Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust
. New York: Vintage, 2003.

Gitta Sereny.
Into that Darkness
. London: Pimlico, 1995.

Timothy Snyder.
Bloodlands
. New York: Basic Books, 2010.

Arkady Vaksberg,
Stalin Against the Jews
. New York: Knopf, 1994.

Samuel Willenberg.
Surviving Treblinka
. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.

I am especially
grateful to Vasily Grossman’s daughter, Yekaterina Korotkova, and his stepson Fyodor Guber, both of whom have been patient and generous in answering my many questions. All quotations or references without endnotes are from personal correspondence. I also thank Fyodor Guber and his daughter Elena Guber for allowing us to reproduce a number of photographs from their fine collection.

It has been a joy, as always, to collaborate with my wife, Elizabeth, and a great pleasure to collaborate for the first time with Yury Bit-Yunan and Olga Mukovnikova. Olga Meerson has, as always, provided brilliant insights, especially into “In the Town of Berdichev,” and Vadim Altskan has sent me copies of important material from the archives of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

I also wish to thank Lily Alexander, Antony Beevor, Karel Berkhoff, Michael Berry, David Black, Emily Van Buskirk, Inna Caron, Frederick Choate, Elizabeth Cook, Jane Costlow, Vivian Curran, Martin Dewhirst, Masha Dmitrovskaya, Irina Dolgova, Jean-marc Dreyfus, David Fel'dman, Jennifer Foray, John and Carol Garrard, Andrew Glikin-Gusinsky, Igor Golomstock, Elena Fyodorovna Guber, Gasan Gusejnov, Jochen Hellbeck, Jeremy Hicks, Gerard Jacobs, Elana Jakel, Mike Jones, Martha Kapos, Leigh Kimmel, Giovanni Maddalena, Nina Malygina, Irina Mashinski, Tatiana Menaker, Mark Miller, Polina Morozova, Nina Murray, Anna Muza, Elena Ostrovskaya, Katarina Peitlova, Anne Pitt, John Puckett, Donald Rayfield, Joe Roeber, Margo Rosen, Karen Rosneck, Tim Sergay, Nina Shevchuk, Jekaterina Shulga, Robert Smith, Tim Snyder, Pietro Tosco, Val Vinokur, Yevgeny Yablokov, Sarah Young, and the many members of my translation classes at Queen Mary, University of London, and of the seelangs e-mail discussion group who have contributed to these translations.

—R.C.

Yury Bit-Yunan was born in western Russia, in the city of Bryansk. He graduated from the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow, where he now lectures in literary criticism. He is writing his doctorate on Vasily Grossman.

Elizabeth Chandler is a co-translator, with her husband, of Alexander Pushkin’s
The Captain’s Daughter
, of Vasily Grossman’s
Everything Flows
, and of several volumes of Andrey Platonov:
The Return
,
The Portable Platonov
,
Happy Moscow
, and
Soul.

Robert Chandler is the editor of
Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida
and the author of
Alexander Pushkin
(in the Hesperus Brief Lives series). His translations of Sappho and Guillaume Apollinaire are published in the series Everyman’s Poetry. His translations from Russian include Vasily Grossman’s
Life and Fate
and
Everything Flows
, Nikolay Leskov’s
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
, and Alexander Pushkin’s
The Captain’s Daughter
and
Dubrovsky
. Along with Olga Meerson and his wife, Elizabeth, he has translated a number of works by Andrey Platonov. One of these,
Soul
, won the American Association of Teachers of Slavonic and East European Languages (AATSEEL) Prize for 2004. His translation of Hamid Ismailov’s
The Railway
won the AATSEEL prize for 2007 and received a special commendation from the judges of the 2007 Rossica Translation Prize.

Fyodor Guber is the son of the writer Boris Guber, who was arrested and shot in 1937, and of Olga Mikhailovna, Vasily Grossman’s second wife. From 1937 Vasily Grossman was Fyodor’s official guardian and substitute father. Fyodor Guber is the author of a number of scientific papers about polymer mechanics, several articles about Vasily Grossman, and a selection of Grossman’s letters and biographical material titled
Memory and Letters
(Pamyat' i pis'ma)”

Olga Mukovnikova is a freelance translator and a member of the Chartered Institute of Linguists. She graduated from Oryol State University in 1998, where she read English and history. Since 2004 Mukovnikova has worked as a translator and translation reviser for Amnesty International. She lives and works in the United Kingdom.