A short life of the author
Vasily Grossman (1905–1964) was born Iosif Solomonovich Grossman on 12 December 1905 in Berdichev, Ukraine. He was a war correspondent for the Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda and was among the first journalists to enter the extermination camps at Treblinka and Majdanek.
Life and Career
Grossman’s wartime journalism — including “The Hell of Treblinka” (1944), one of the first accounts of a Nazi extermination camp — and his contributions to the Black Book documenting the Holocaust in the Soviet Union established him as a major figure.
Za pravoe delo (Stalingrad, published in a censored version in 1952, restored 2019) is the first novel of a diptych. Zhizn’ i sud’ba (Life and Fate, completed 1959) — the second novel, a vast panoramic work centered on the Battle of Stalingrad — was “arrested” by the KGB in 1961. The Soviet ideological chief Mikhail Suslov told Grossman it could not be published for two or three hundred years. The manuscript survived because Grossman had given copies to friends. It was smuggled to the West on microfilm and published in 1980.
Major Works and Themes
Grossman wrote about war, totalitarianism, the Holocaust, and the moral choices of individuals under impossible pressure. Life and Fate argues that Nazism and Stalinism are morally equivalent — a truth the Soviet state could not permit.
Key Works
- Life and Fate (1959/1980)
- Everything Flows (1970, posthumous)
Collecting Grossman
Russian originals are the primary collected form. English translations (Harvill, NYRB Classics) bring $10–$30. Grossman died in 1964.