Vasily Grossman's novel Life and Fate (completed in 1960) has been hailed as a 20th-century War and Peace. It has been translated into most European languages and also into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Turkish and Vietnamese. There have been stage productions, TV series and an eight-hour radio dramatization. And Grossman himself — like Leo Tolstoy, Osip Mandelstam, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and several other Russian poets and novelists — is now venerated not only as a writer but also as a moral exemplar.
His life story is indeed remarkable. He bore witness, with clarity and balance, to many of the most terrible events of the last century: the terror famine in Ukraine, Stalin's purges of 1936–37, the battle of Stalingrad, the fall of Berlin, and the Shoah on both Soviet and Polish soil. Throughout his life, he showed ever greater courage in his determination to write truthfully. And he went on writing better and better almost up to his death, aged 59, in 1964. The still-undervalued short stories he produced in his last years are among his masterpieces.
Alexandra Popoff begins by outlining the various influences on the young Grossman: his mother's love of Russian and French literature; his father's liberal socialism; the emotional generosity of the uncle and aunt with whom Grossman and his mother lived throughout much of his childhood. Sensibly, Popoff devotes almost half the book to the social and political background. Stalin's Soviet Union is an alien world; every aspect of Soviet life — housing, food provision, employment conditions — can seem bewildering. And few sources of information — diaries, letters, even NKVD records — are reliable. To understand Grossman, we need to know as much as possible about the world he lived in.
Popoff's summary of Grossman's life in the 1930s is striking. He spent long enough in Ukraine in 1932–33 to sense at least some of the horror of the terror famine. His cousin Nadya, who helped him publish his first pieces of journalism, was exiled because of her Trotskyist ties. His doctor uncle was shot and his father lived in constant fear of arrest. The three writers who helped and befriended him at the beginning of his literary career were also all shot. His second wife, Olga Mikhailovna, was imprisoned for several months in 1938. Grossman did not suddenly turn ‘dissident' in the 1950s; he was always well aware of the nature of Stalin's regime.
Most Soviet citizens — writers not least — ‘edited' their life stories, deleting bourgeois relatives and painting themselves as pure members of the proletariat. In the 1960s and 1970s, the dissident intelligentsia created their own counter-myths. Much of what we think we know about Grossman derives from a single memoir, by his friend Semyon Lipkin. Lipkin is a good writer and he tells an engaging story. Nearly everyone — including myself and Grossman's previous biographers, John and Carol Garrard — has relied on him unquestioningly.
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