Life

1905

Vasily Semyenovich Grossman was born December 12, 1905 in Berdichev (in the Ukraine), then home of the largest Jewish community in Eastern Europe. He studied first in Kiev, and then in Moscow, where he specialized in chemistry at the university.

the 1930s

Quite early on, he began to write as a realist, specifically about the lives of miners, and in 1933 he moved definitively to the capital, where he met Gorky. Thanks to this celebrated writer, in 1934 he published "Gluckauf," a short story set in the mines of Donbass. His most important work in these years was Stepan Kolcugin, a novel about the formation of a young Bolshevik worker. Grossman was an "orthodox" writer, a member of the Writers' Union, and as such he enjoyed a reliable measure of popularity.

the 1940s

In June of 1941, with the outbreak of the "Great National War," he was sent to the front as a war correspondent for Krasnaya zvezda (Red Star), the newspaper of the Red Army. Thus, Grossman was an eyewitness to the disastrous defeats of the first years, the strenuous opposition at Stalingrad, and the Soviet counterattack. Following the advance of the Red Army to Berlin, he was one of the first to become aware of the tragedy of the Holocaust. His short story "The Hell of Treblinka" is well-known as the first account of the realities of a Nazi death camp. Upon the war's end, he collaborated with Ilya Ehrenburg to draft The Black Book, a detailed reconstruction of the genocide of the Jewish people in Soviet-occupied territories. Through this experience, along with the discovery of his mother's murder at the hands of the Nazis, Grossman became conscious of his own Jewish identity.

After the war, faced with the anti-Semitism propagated by Stalin and by the Soviet intelligentsia, Grossman began to reflect on those revolutionary ideals in which he had sincerely believed. It was the beginning of an irreparable crisis that would bring him to become a free and brave writer, untiring in the description of truth.

the 1950s

In 1946, the play "If You Believe the Pythagoreans" was harshly attacked by the Pravda, official organ of the regime. Resolute in his own work, Grossman began the drafts for a colossal work with which he meant to paint the epic of Stalingrad through the affairs of one family during the war. The first part, entitled For a Just Cause, was released serially in 1952 in the magazine Novy Mir. The book suffered from heavy criticism for "grave ideological errors" and was published only after the death of Stalin. It was then that Grossman begins to write the second part: Life and Fate.

Writing this novel occupied him incessantly from 1955 to 1960, when the manuscript was sent to the magazine Znamia. However, the content of the book was considered too dangerous. The magazine's director, Koževnikov, more out of fear than of a will to inform, advised the Central Committee.

the 1960s

On February 14, 1961, two KGB agents entered Grossman's house. They took everything: the manuscript pages, the typed copies, carbon paper, and even the typewriter tape. Of Life and Fate not a trace remained.

Grossman spent the last three years of his life pained both in his body and in his heart by the loss of his book, suffocated by a difficult economic situation, and isolated from the relationships which had accompanied him throughout his life. He finished writing Everything Flows, a short novel about returning from the gulags, which he had begun in the mid-1950s, but he didn't manage to publish it. In 1962 and 1963 he traveled to Armenia several times; his reports on these trips came together in a few short stories that constitute his literary will.

1964

Grossman died of cancer in Moscow on September 14, 1964.