Vasily Semyonovich Grossman was born on December 12, 1905, in
Berdichev, a Ukrainian town that was home to one of Europe’s
largest Jewish communities. In 1934 he published both “In the Town
of Berdichev”—a short story that won the admiration of such diverse
writers as Maksim Gorky, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Isaak Babel—and a
novel, Glyukauf, about the life of the Donbass miners. During the
Second World War, Grossman worked as a reporter for the army
newspaper Red Star, covering nearly all of the most important
battles from the defense of Moscow to the fall of Berlin. His vivid
yet sober “The Hell of Treblinka” (late 1944), one of the first
articles in any language about a Nazi death camp, was translated
and used as testimony in the Nuremberg trials. His novel For a Just
Cause (originally titled Stalingrad) was published to great acclaim
in 1952 and then fiercely attacked. A new wave of purges—directed
against the Jews—was about to begin; but for Stalin’s death, in
March 1953, Grossman would almost certainly have been arrested
himself. During the next few years Grossman, while enjoying public
success, worked on his two masterpieces, neither of which was to be
published in Russia until the late 1980s: Life and Fate and
Everything Flows. The KGB confiscated the manuscript of Life and
Fate in February 1961. Grossman was able, however, to continue
working on Everything Flows, a novel even more critical of Soviet
society than Life and Fate, until his last days in the hospital. He
died on September 14, 1964, on the eve of the twenty-third
anniversary of the massacre of the Jews of Berdichev in which his
mother had died.
Robert Chandler is the author of Alexander Pushkin and the editor
of two anthologies for Penguin Classics: Russian Short Stories from
Pushkin to Buida and Russian Magic Tales from
Pushkin to Platonov. His translations of Sappho and Guillaume
Apollinaire are published in the Everyman’s Poetry series. His
translations from Russian include Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate,
Everything Flows, and The Road (all published by NYRB Classics);
Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk; and Aleksander Pushkin’s The
Captain’s Daughter. Together with Olga Meerson and his wife,
Elizabeth, he has translated a number of works by Andrey Platonov.
One of these, Soul, won the 2004 AATSEEL (American Association of
Teachers of Slavonic and East European Languages) Prize. His
translation of Hamid Ismailov’s The Railway won the AATSEEL Prize
for 2007 and received a special commendation from the judges of the
2007 Rossica Translation Prize.
Elizabeth Chandler is a co-translator, with her husband, of
Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter; of Vasily Grossman’s Everything
Flows and The Road; and of several volumes of Andrey Platonov: The
Return, The Portable Platonov, Happy Moscow, and Soul.
Yury Bit-Yunan was born in Bryansk, in western Russia. He graduated
from the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow, and
completed his doctorate on the work of Vasily
Grossman. At present he is lecturing on literary criticism at the
Russian State University while continuing to research Grossman’s
life and work.
“Vasily Grossman is the Tolstoy of the USSR.” —Martin Amis
“…it is only a matter of time before Grossman is acknowledged as
one of the great writers of the 20th century.” —The Guardian
“Charming. Grossman digresses as nimbly about the master craftsmen
of Russian stoves found in the homes of the high-mountain villagers
as he does about the touching customs of a rustic wedding he
attended. Living among the Armenians, he witnessed a kind of
timeless biblical nobility he conveys with artless simplicity in
his own work.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Like history, human nature is open-ended; people are capable of
doing evil as much as good…[Vasily Grossman] the writer sought to
probe the historical fabric and future potential of his society.
Perhaps it's because of this stance that his work is finding its
way back into print…” —The Nation
“Vasily Grossman’s writing sneaks up on you, its simplicity
building to powerful impressions as he records the small things
that occur in people's lives as they experience - or endure -
larger events.” —The Jewish Chronicle
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