The Soviet writer Vasily Grossman was a controversial figure whose fame, after serving the Stalinist regime diligently for several decades, was paradoxically destroyed by the illusory freedom of the “thaw”. Grossman forged popularity with his frontline reports and ambitious work “For a Just Cause”, but in the novel “Life and Destiny”, written after Stalin’s death, the events of the war took on the contours of superhuman horror. and the party and the check did not forgive him. The BBC recently included the work in its historic series of banned books, as Putin’s regime once again became uncomfortable with the author’s literary legacy for presenting a different take on glorified Russian history.
In the essay “Vasily Grossman: Myths and Mythbusting” by Yuri Bit-Yunan and Robert Chandler, it is pointed out that Soviet writers in the West are usually divided into two broad categories: regime-obedient apologists and heroic dissidents. Authors such as Boris Pasternak, Joseph Brodsky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn are classic examples of the second group: condemned, persecuted, exiled from the regime. Meanwhile, Grossman has long been regarded as belonging to the first category: he enjoyed special favor of the regime, was a member of the Writers’ Union of the USSR, wrote works belonging to socialist realism, was not distinguished by open dissidence and not suffered severe repression during his life.
Only relatively recently have Western researchers begun to pay more attention to Grossman’s works. The translator of Grossman’s works, Robert Chandler, believes that his wartime reports (especially from the battle of Stalingrad), published in the Soviet propaganda newspaper “Red Star”, have no equivalent in Anglophone literature either. In his reports, Grossman not only demonstrates an excellent talent as a storyteller, but demonstrates himself, firstly, as a humanist interested in the fate of specific people in the terrifying war machine and, secondly, as an “unreliable propagandist” who sought to reflect the course of the war as he saw it with his own eyes, and refrained from propaganda clichés and the glorification of Stalin.
