Vasily Grossman: life and destiny

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

One day a young chemist decided to leave his earthly profession and devote his life to literature. And he began to write. Started with the Civil War, reached the Battle of Stalingrad. But the novel about the great victory on the Volga was read only in the dungeons of the Lubyanka. Vasily Grossman - writer, journalist, war correspondent. The book of his life was not published until fifteen years after his death.

War in Grossman's life

Since the war began, only Vasily Grossman wrote about it. His biography begins from childhood in a small town in the Vinnitsa region, where a boy from an intelligent Jewish family, for convenience, was called not Joseph, but Vasya. This name stuck with him and became part of his literary pseudonym.

From a young age, he loved to write. While working in the Donbass, he wrote notes for the local newspaper. The first attempts at writing were devoted to the inhabitants of the mining village. The future author of the epic novel "Life and Fate" was twenty-three years old when he finally decided to connect his life with writing. And three years later, the Great Patriotic War began, andVasily Grossman witnessed the most terrible events in the history of mankind. Until the last days of his life, he lived these events and reflected them in his books.

Dedication to Mother

Fire, impassability, the dust of trenches and the blood of the wounded - Grossman knew this firsthand. As a war correspondent, he went through the war from beginning to end. He wrote essays, military field stories and did not shy away from the front line. And somewhere far away, in the Jewish ghetto, his mother died. Like the character he created, Vasily Grossman wrote letters to his mother when she was no longer alive.

The fates of different people are intertwined in the novel. Each of them is tragic in its own way. Some die at the hands of SS punishers, others on the battlefield. But there are also third ones. Their death comes with the death of loved ones. After the death of his son, Shtrum's wife walks, breathes and speaks, but he understands that she is no longer around. And he can do nothing, because he has his own pain. The pain of losing a mother is not the main motive in the work, but Vasily Grossman dedicated the book to her.

House "six fraction one"

The house on Penzenskaya street became the center of the story in the novel Life and Fate. The symbol of the heroism of the Russian soldier went down in history as a building, during the capture of which more German soldiers died than during the occupation of Paris. The legendary house of Pavlov Grossman reflects in his book. But the author pays attention not only to the heroism and courage of his characters, but also to happiness, simple, human. Happiness, which can arise even in the ruins of Stalingrad, in the lastminutes of life.

Life and fate after the war

Vasily Grossman devoted his work to the military theme in the post-war years. Reviews of these works from Soviet critics were negative. Committee members saw anti-Soviet overtones in the books. When the author of Life and Fate died, he was not yet sixty. Perhaps he would have lived longer if he could have published the novel he put his heart and soul into.

In his main work, Grossman did not bypass the camp theme, where political "criminals" were prisoners. Unfair arrests and brutal interrogations were carried out by state security officers even when the enemy was on the outskirts of Moscow. And most importantly, there is an invisible parallel between Stalin and Hitler in the book.

Later, such frank criticism in artistic form was not forgiven to Grossman. The manuscript was confiscated. And only in 1980, in some unknown way, it got abroad, where it was published.

Treblin Hell

Nineteen years after the end of the war, Vasily Grossman lived. All the works of this period were echoes of what was lived and seen in the forties. In the story "Treblinsky hell", the author tries to find the answer to the questions about why Himmler ordered in 1943 to destroy more than eight hundred prisoners of the "death camp" so hastily. Such inexplicable cruelty defied any logic. Even the logic of the Reichsfuehrer SS. The author of the story suggested that these actionsbecame a reaction to the victory of the Red Army in Stalingrad. Apparently, at the top they began to think about the inevitable consequences and the coming punishment. It was necessary to destroy the traces of crimes.

Vasily Grossman died in Moscow in 1965. At home, the main work of his life was published in 1988. Late. But much earlier than M. Suslov predicted this event. The Soviet ideologue, having heard about the plot, said: "Such a book can be printed in two hundred years, not earlier."