Once, 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 whole life was published only fifteen years after his death.
War in the life of grossman
Since the war began, only Vasily Grossman wrote about it. His biography begins in childhood in a small town in the Vinnitsa region, where a boy from an intelligent Jewish family was not called Joseph, but Vasya, for convenience. This name was fixed to him and became part of a literary pseudonym.
From a young age he loved to write. While working in the Donbass, he composed notes for a local newspaper. The first samples of the pen were dedicated 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. Three years later, the Great Patriotic War began, and Vasily Grossman witnessed the most terrible events in the history of mankind. Until the last days of his life, he lived on these events and reflected them in his books.
Mother's dedication
Fire, impassability, dust of trenches and 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 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.
In the novel, the fates of different people are intertwined. Each of them is tragic in its own way. Some die at the hands of the punishers of the SS, others - on the battlefield. But there are still others. Their death occurs with the death of loved ones. After the death of his son, Strum's wife walks, breathes and speaks, but he realizes that she is no longer there. And he can’t do anything, because he has his own pain. The pain of losing a mother does not become the main motive in the work, but Vasily Grossman dedicated the book to her.
House "six fractions 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, the capture of which killed German soldiers more than during the occupation of Paris. Grossman reflects the legendary house of Pavlov in his book. But the author pays attention not only to the heroism and courage of his characters, but also to happiness, simple, human. The happiness that can occur even in the Stalingrad ruins in the last minutes of life.
Life and fate after the war
It was the military theme in the postwar years that Vasily Grossman devoted his work to. Reviews of these works by Soviet critics were negative. The committee members saw anti-Soviet subtext in the books. When the author of the novel Life and Fate died, he was not yet sixty. Perhaps he would live longer if he could publish a novel in which he invested his whole soul.
In his main work, Grossman did not bypass the camp theme, where political "criminals" were prisoners. State security officials made unfair arrests and cruel interrogations even when the enemy was on the outskirts of Moscow. And most importantly, the book contains an invisible parallel between Stalin and Hitler.
Later, such frank criticism in art form was not forgiven to Grossman. The manuscript was confiscated. And only in 1980, in some unprecedented way, did she go abroad, where she was published.
"Treblin hell"
Nineteen years after the war ended, Vasily Grossman lived. All the works of this period were echoes of lived and seen in the forties. In the story “Treblin Hell”, the author tries to find an answer to questions about why Himmler ordered in 1943 to so quickly destroy more than eight hundred prisoners of the “death camp”. Such inexplicable cruelty did not yield to any logic. Even the logic of the Reichsfuhrer SS. The author of the story suggested that these actions were a reaction to the victory of the Red Army in Stalingrad. Apparently, at the top, they began to think about the inevitable consequences and impending punishment. It was necessary to destroy the traces of crime.
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 foreshadowed this event. The Soviet ideologist, hearing about the plot, said: "Such a book can be printed in two hundred years, not earlier."