Anniversary without fanfare. Vasily Grossman - a man who managed to tell the truth

MOSCOW. 110 years since the birth of Vasily Grossman.

The story of the salvation of one of the best novels of the XX century resembles a detective story and ancient tragedy. The past XX Congress and the Thaw did not become a catalyst for global change that would make the process of de-Stalinization inevitable. A return to the past for Vasily Grossman took place in 1961, when the denunciation and confiscation of Life and Fate deprived him of a book that had been given for many years. Fearless attempts to save her and appeal to Khrushchev did not lead to anything. Grossman did not wait for his audience, but ended up in Suslov’s office (who later participated in the dismissal of Khrushchev). The prospect of publishing a novel after a couple of hundred years and a categorical refusal to return the manuscript and any materials related to it - the heard “finished off” the writer completely. A year after meeting with Suslov, he died of cancer.

The only copy of the anti-Stalinist novel was miraculously preserved by the poet Lipkin. The microfilm with her was sent to the West by Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov and writer Vladimir Voinovich and published in Switzerland in 1980. 25 years after the ominous prediction of the “gray cardinal,” the book was printed in the Soviet Union. Grossman, withdrawn from Life, the story “Everything Flows” about Stalinist repressions, the destruction of the intelligentsia and the fight against cosmopolitanism, Grossman managed to restore shortly before his death. In the USSR, it could only be read in samizdat collections. In 1970, she came out in Germany. In the Soviet Union - during the years of perestroika.

No less tragic was the fate of the documentary "Black Book", dedicated to the extermination of Jews during the war, on which Vasily Semyonovich worked together with Ilya Erenburg. The Holocaust tragedy did not bypass the Grossman family. His mother, Ekaterina Savelyevna, was killed during the liquidation of Jews in the Berdychiv ghetto. The events of 1948 - the assassination of Mikhoels, the destruction of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which became the forerunner of the "case of doctors" and rampant anti-Semitism, made this book impossible. She first saw the light in 1980 in Jerusalem. Only in 2015, fundraising in the form of crowdfunding allowed her to return to Russia.

Elena Tanakova © Gallerix.ru