VASILY GROSSMAN AND THE SOVIET CENTURY

ALEXANDRA POPOFF

Yale, 424pp, £25 Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, a panoramic saga of Russian society during the Second World War, is one of the great Russian books of the 20th century. Grossman was a Russian Jew, born in 1905, who had reported on the war for a Red Army newspaper and turned his first-hand knowledge of the conflict into fiction. Life and

Fate was his masterpiece, but the Soviet authorities took against it and seized it from his apartment. By the time the text was smuggled into Switzerland in 1980, there to be published in Russian for the first time, Grossman had been dead for 16 years.

The book came out in English in 1985, but it was only with the publication of Robert Chandler’s translation in 2006 that it gained widespread acclaim in the West. Niall Ferguson called it ‘World War II’S

War and Peace’ – indeed, Grossman said that while he was reporting on the Eastern Front, Tolstoy’s huge novel was the only book he read. Chandler has now translated

Stalingrad, to which Life and Fate was a sequel. It, too, is panoramic in scope, describing events referred to in the later work as they happen and shedding light on characters’ back stories. ‘Reading it is a very eerie experience,’ wrote Marcel Theroux in his review in the Guardian. ‘It’s like discovering the Bayeux tapestry has a prequel.’ Theroux thought that

Stalingrad did not ‘quite touch the unbearable heights of Life and Fate’ but contained ‘heart-rending moments of loss and separation’ nonetheless. Some reviewers disagreed, thinking it even better than the later book. All heralded

Stalingrad’s publication as a major event.

Unlike Life and Fate, Stalingrad was published in Grossman’s lifetime, albeit in heavily censored form and under the more politically didactic title of For a Just Cause. To produce their version, Chandler and his wife and co-translator, Elizabeth, have juggled the Soviet editions of the book with the uncensored manuscripts left behind by Grossman. One of the many fascinations of this new publication is the afterword, in which Chandler provides details of the Soviet censors’ activities. For instance, they replaced the names of Sherlock Holmes novels with those of approved Soviet titles. They even forced Grossman to add text, making him give a major Jewish character a non-jewish mentor.

By that time, the Soviet regime was openly anti-semitic. For Grossman, who had been one of the first to report directly the horrors of the Holocaust and whose own mother had been killed by the invading Nazis in Ukraine in 1941, this was intolerable. He began to openly dissent against Stalin’s regime. But he had always been aware of its iniquities. He spent time in Ukraine during the famine in the 1930s; his uncle was shot, his father lived in fear of arrest, and three writers who helped him at the beginning of his career were also shot.

For a new study of Grossman’s life, readers can turn to Alexandra Popoff’s Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century. Robert Chandler himself reviewed it in the Spectator, calling it a ‘clear, well-structured guide to the world Grossman lived in’, while John Thornhill, writing in the Financial Times, said that it was ‘crisp and comprehensive, deftly interweaving Grossman’s personal life with the momentous events he experienced’. For Ian Thomson, in the Evening Standard, it was ‘excellent’. The shame, as Popoff herself pointed out, is that in today’s Russia, where anti-semitism is again in the ascendant, Grossman, who should be a Russian hero, is now a neglected figure.