Vasily Grossman — novelist and war correspondent with roots in the Russian Empire
He was born Iosif Solomonovich Grossman in Berdichev, in the Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire, on 12 December 1905, into a secular, educated Jewish family in what was then one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe. His parents had met as students in Switzerland and separated when he was a child; he later used the more Russian name Vasily. He studied chemistry at Moscow State University, graduating in December 1929, and worked for a time as a chemist in the Donbas before turning to writing.
His first story, "In the Town of Berdichev" (1934), set during the Civil War, made his name; filmed by Aleksandr Askoldov in 1967 as Commissar, it was suppressed and released only in 1988. In 1928 he had married Anna Matsuk, and their daughter, Yekaterina, was named after his mother. In 1937 he was admitted to the Union of Soviet Writers.
From 1941 to 1945 he was a correspondent for the army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda. He spent months at Stalingrad and followed the Red Army to Berlin. His essay "The Hell of Treblinka" (1944), one of the first accounts of a Nazi death camp, was distributed at the Nuremberg trials. His mother, Yekaterina Savelievna, was among the Jews of Berdichev killed by the German occupiers in September 1941. With Ilya Ehrenburg he compiled The Black Book, a documentary record of the murder of Jews in the occupied Soviet territories; it was not published in the USSR.
His war novel For a Just Cause appeared in 1952. Its sequel, Life and Fate, centred on Stalingrad, was completed in 1960 and submitted to the magazine Znamya that October. On 14 February 1961 KGB officers came to his Moscow flat and confiscated the manuscript, drafts, carbon paper and typewriter ribbons. He wrote to Khrushchev asking for the book's release. Mikhail Suslov, the party's chief ideologist, told him it could not be published for two hundred years; other accounts give two hundred and fifty, or two or three hundred.
He died of stomach cancer in Moscow on 14 September 1964, the eve of the anniversary of the killings in Berdichev, leaving his last novel, Everything Flows, unfinished. A typescript of Life and Fate survived with his friend the poet Semyon Lipkin. In the 1970s it was photographed with the help of Andrei Sakharov and taken to the West on microfilm by Vladimir Voinovich; accounts differ on the year. The novel was published in Lausanne in 1980 and in the Soviet Union in 1988. In 2013 the FSB transferred the confiscated manuscripts to the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art.
"Remained in the USSR; Life and Fate reached the West on microfilm in the 1970s"
Migration storyTracing the roots — Berdichev (Ukraine)
Born in Berdichev, in the Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire, in 1905, he lived and wrote in the Soviet Union all his life. His major novel, confiscated by the KGB in 1961, was published abroad in 1980 and at home in 1988.
Born in 1905 in Berdichev, Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire, to a secular Jewish family; lived and wrote in the Soviet Union all his life.
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Berdichev (Ukraine). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.