Vasily Grossman

Russian · 1905 to 1964

Born Iosif Solomonovich Grossman on December 12, 1905, in Berdychiv, Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire, into a non-observant Jewish family, he was raised mostly by his French-teacher mother after his parents separated; a Russian nanny turned Yossya into Vasya, and the name held. From 1910 to 1912 he lived with his mother in Geneva. He trained as a chemical engineer at Moscow State University, earning the nickname Vasya-khimik for his diligence, and took a first job in the Donets Basin mines. In the 1930s he turned to writing full-time, drawing the praise of Maxim Gorky and Mikhail Bulgakov for the story "In the Town of Berdichev." When his second wife Olga was arrested in the Great Purge of 1937 for failing to denounce her previous husband, Grossman wrote directly to the head of the NKVD, an act his friend Semyon Lipkin called the work of "a very brave man"; Olga was released. As a correspondent for Krasnaya Zvezda he covered Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, and Berlin, spending more than a thousand days at the front. His report on the Treblinka extermination camp was among the first published anywhere. His mother was murdered by the Einsatzgruppen at Berdychiv with thirty thousand other Jews in 1941. Life and Fate, his great novel of Stalingrad and the totalitarian century, was seized by the KGB in 1961, who confiscated even the typewriter ribbon. He was told the book could not be published "for two hundred years." He died of stomach cancer in Moscow on September 14, 1964, never knowing that smuggled microfilm would carry the manuscript west, where it was published in 1980.