Vasili Grossman: "The night is full of light: everything burns"

«I inform you, for your information, that the writer Vasili Grossman has given Znamia magazine his new novel, entitled Life and destiny , which occupies more than a thousand typed pages, with a view to its publication (...) Apparently dedicated to narrating the battle of Stalingrad and the events associated with it, the novel constitutes a rabid criticism of the Soviet socialist system . In narrating the facts related to the battle of Stalingrad, Grossman identifies the socialist and fascist states, defames the Soviet social order by assigning him totalitarian features, presents the Soviet society as a society that cruelly crushes the individual, while restricting his freedom » . Letter from the KGB to Nikita Khrushchev. December 22, 1960.

This is one of the documents provided by the book Letters and Memories of Vasili Grossman (Gutenberg Galaxy), a profile of one of the most important novelists and war correspondents of the Soviet Union of the last century. He is signed by his stepson Fedor Guber. Through letters addressed to his father and his second wife and with notes of warbooks from the front, the biography of Vasili Grossman (1905-1964) is drawn, who in the monumental Life and destiny - «War and peace of the century XX »- traced the misadventures of a country plagued by the ravages of the communist dictatorship and the catastrophe of World War II.

«The invasion of the Soviet Union by the German army, on June 22, 1941, is what gives meaning to the life of both Grossman and many other Soviets. Now he knows that he has enlisted in a fair battle against that enemy that has invaded his country and also threatens to annihilate all the Jews, ”writes Tzvetan Todorov, shortly before his death, as a prologue in this book commissioned by the Galaxy editor Gutenberg, Jordi Tarrida. Todorov recalls in those pages the Jewish and Ukrainian origin of Grossman, his stay in Switzerland with his mother between 1912 and 1914, his studies of Chemistry at the University of Moscow, his work in the Donetsk mining basin, the literary accolade of Gorki himself after publishing the story In the city of Berdichev, his first marriage that lasted a sigh ... But above all how the Stalin police arrested the Life and Destiny manuscript and seized "all the copies they find, including the machine tapes of writing used ». He never saw the book published, which was first printed in Switzerland, in 1980, and eight years later in his country.

Grossman had to overcome many avatars. After his first marriage, he fell in love in 1935 with the wife of a close friend , Borís Guber, a member of the Pereval group, who was arrested and shot after the accusation of a counterrevolutionary plot. Olga, the wife of Guber, was imprisoned and banished to Astrakhan in 1937, there by the Caspian Sea, for not denouncing an enemy of the people. Grossman adopted the two sons of the Gruber : one, Mikhail, died, along with 16 other boys, after being hit by a projectile explosion in 1942; the other, Fedor, lived to tell it in this book.

The news "plunged me into immense pain, Liusia [that's what Grossman called his wife]. You don't have to get depressed and give yourself up to despair, ”wrote the special envoy of the newspaper La estrella roja . «There is so much pain everywhere, if you knew how much I see! I meet women who have lost their husbands and their children . And all of them draw strength from weakness, follow their lives ”(10-IX-1942).

«In August 1941 I was assigned to the Central Front. I worked for the writing of The Red Star during all the years of the war. I was demobilized in the fall of 1945, ”Grossman himself wrote in his Autobiography . Before leaving for the front, they lived in a shared apartment with three more families. “In the shared kitchen there were all kinds of oil and kerosene burners, in addition to a table. We lacked a bathroom, so we went to public toilets, ”recalls Fedor Guber in this book. And he adds: «I remember Grossman reading the volumes of Tolstoy, bound in black, and those of Dostoyevsky, bound in red, but his favorite Russian writer and to whom he felt closest was Chekhov (...) He felt a strong predilection also for Hamsun and Ibsen and I remember seeing him before the war reading the Conversations of Goethe , Eckermann, and Shakespeare, the Iliad , the Odyssey , Catulo, Aristotle ».

Grossman was never liked by Stalin . In the first call of the Stalin literature awards, in 1942, his novel Sepán Kolchuguin was unanimously approved on the first ballot, he was considered the winner, until the all-powerful Koba crossed out his name, even though they had already been published interviews with the writer. «I don't want you to be sad about what happened. All that has already been left behind and now I have a great job ahead of us, a genuine job, ”Grossman writes to his Luisia. According to Fedor Guber, he already typed Life and destiny .

«Now I weigh 74 kilos, far from the horrific 91 of a year ago», he writes from the front in 1941. «By just listening to the action, I know if it is artillery shots or an air strike, if mines explode or projectiles ». February 25, 1942, this time to his father: «I spend the day and night on the move, I travel in the middle of snowstorms and the cruelest frosts by car, I climb planes, travel by sled and even, on an occasion when our car got caught in a blizzard in the middle of the steppe, I did it aboard a tank (...) I usually find copies of my book [ Stepán Kolchuguin ] in armored cars and trenches ».

The stepson also refers to the notebooks that the journalist was carrying during the war. He wrote them by hand "in precarious paper notebooks, like newspaper. It is noted that the notes were taken quickly. You barely understand them. Liusia / Olga Gruber prepared them, now Grossman, to be published. There is no waste, nor does it intend to do literature:

- «They told me that after Minsk burned the blind people of a house of invalids were seen moving along the road forming a long chain and joined together by means of towels ».

- «Lying in the grass, after a fight, a soldier of the Red Army says:" Animals and plants fight for survival, while men fight for power. "

- « The city [Stalingrad] is dead ... But the bombs do not stop falling on the corpse of the city (...) There are between 10 and 15 attacks a day».

- «How it wears and scares the silence of the front».

- «Superiors always consider the enemy weaker than they really are».

- «You have to be active: live with the troops and know what is going on in the minds of the soldiers ».

- «I read long before the war. In what we have been doing in war, I have only read War and Peace twice.

- «Warsaw! The first sentence I heard in Warsaw as soon as I set foot on a collapsed bridge was pronounced by a soldier who, searching in his pockets, exclaimed: 'Look where you are: I still have a cookie' ».

- «The night is full of light: everything burns».

And it arrives on May 2, 1945, day of the capitulation of Berlin. Vasili Grossman is there. «Shooting and fire everywhere. Smoke, smoke and more smoke (...) In almost all the bodies crushed by the tanks, rolled up as if they were pipes, grenades and assault rifles are clenched in the fists. They are men who died in combat (...) The Reichstag building is huge and impressive. The soldiers light bonfires in the lobby, bubble soup in the pots, the bayonets serve to open the jars of condensed milk .

A testimony of how Vasili Grossman worked. In Oktiabr magazine, Yevgueni Dolmátovski reports: “Grossman was not one of those who liked to travel to Moscow to report. He worked without haste, but even in Stalingrad's bunkers he found a way to seclude himself. In Stalingrad and in the outstanding troops on the banks of the Volga, everyone knew him, from Commander Chuikov to sniper Záitsev (...) Grossman did not attend the signing of the capitulation of Germany. The correspondents had received a few invitations and he gave his pleasure to Vsevolod Ivanov: 'He has been in war for a short time, so it will be of interest to him ...', he said ».

After the war, Grossman devoted himself to writing with all his strenght. 28-II-1948: «I spend the day sitting at my desk. In the morning I take care of the new chapters and in the afternoons of the correction of those that I have already written until one or two in the morning ». The book finished it in 1949. He presents it to the magazine Novi mir ( The new world ). Months go by without any response. Until they reject it. Desperate, on December 6, 1950 he sent a letter to Stalin himself : «I have dedicated six years to work on my novel Stalingrad, a commitment that I consider the main work of my life (...) Five months ago the writing of the magazine He sent the galleys to the Central Committee (...) I strongly urge you to help me resolve ... ».

His stepson says that in the spring of 1951 the novel was subjected to four different correction processes, which meant the suppression of the descriptions of the leaders of the party and the government ». The novel appeared, under the title For a just cause , in the magazine in November 1952. It had an extraordinary reception, but an article in Pravda on February 13, 1953 caused those parabien to turn into acid criticism . They even "tried to force him to issue a statement expressing his regret," writes Fedor Gruber.

It is the turn of Life and destiny , which would have started in a row (and from 1956) "exclusively." The letters to Liusia show their frenzy throughout 1958 and 1959. "I work endlessly ...", "I continue working tirelessly ...", "Work piecework ...". Once the first version was finished, "it was subjected to a radical rewriting process, almost half of the text of each of its pages was corrected," according to his stepson. Grossman says that in October 1960 “they are [the manuscript] going clean. Three typists [from Znamia magazine] take care of it and it will take between seven and eight working days (...) I stay calm and wait armed with patience ». Everything for nothing ... back then. Not even his letter to Nikita Khrushchev was enough . Nor the writer's appeal to the new era that Khrushchev himself boasted after "the cruelty that Stalin imposed on us" (Grossman). Nor did it remind him that he started with the book "12 years ago." "I ask that you return my book to freedom." There was some light, because the novelist was received, on July 23, 1962, by the secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU ... for nothing. He was told that "the damage that his publication would cause us would be incomparably greater than that inflicted on us by Doctor Zhivago," Grossman himself noted after the meeting. "There is no longer who to write to, who to appeal to."

A kidney disease had begun to undermine him since 1961, the year of the kidnapping of Life and destiny . In 1963 he was found to have lung cancer, then his right kidney was removed. He died on September 14, 1964.

A microfilmed copy of the novel "hard to read" by physicist Andrei Sakharov mocked the country's borders. The manuscript had been taken well by a friend of Grossman, Semión Lipkin. The book was finally published in Switzerland in 1980. Eight years later, in the USSR of Gorbachev .

Life and destiny is dedicated to the mother of Grossman, that French teacher whom she loved so much, executed by the Nazis in 1941. He learned in 1944. He was never forgiven for not having done enough to save her. Grossman wrote him two letters, already dead. One in 1950, another in 1961. The two are reproduced in Letters and Memories of Vasili Grossman . In the second, the writer shares his pain at the kidnapping of Life and destiny: «I am you, my dear mother. And as long as I live, you also live. Then, when I have died, you will still be alive in the book that I have dedicated to you, whose destiny is so similar to yours ».

Joan Tarrida, editor of Galaxia Gutenberg, is the architect of the passion that is lived in Spain with Grossman. The WORLD highlights the five-page letter that he sent to Khrushchev "from you to you, without kneeling" for Life and destiny to be edited. And the chronicles of war that Grossman sent: "They were the most read, both in the rear and in the front."

And it highlights that Vasili Grossman Letters and Memories has worked since 2013. «After the translation of Jorge Ferrer, we asked Todorov for a preface and he suggested re-ordering chapters. In addition there was a long discussion with Fedor Guber, Grossman's stepson. This book is an event ».

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

• WWII
• culture
• literature
• history

LiteratureMario Vargas Llosa: "Yes, everything is very bad, but we have never been better"

The final interview Manuel Hurtado Marjalizo: "Writing is easy, the bad thing is getting them to read you"

A VILLANO IN MADRID Peter Handke in Linares