David Herman
Vasily Grossman

David Herman | Vasily Grossman | 06.03.21

- Hello and welcome to the last of three talks on some of the great, greatest Soviet writers born in Ukraine. The two previous talks were on Isaac Babel, born in Odessa and the great Soviet poet, Lev Ozerov born in Kiev. And today I’ll be talking about the writer, Vasily Grossman, born in Berdichev in Ukraine.

Grossman was an outstanding novelist, short story writer, essayist and war reporter. He had an extraordinary life witnessing some of the great battles of the Eastern front in the Second World War and the liberation of some of the greatest death camps in Poland. But he didn’t live to see his greatest work published either in the Soviet Union where he died in 1964 or abroad. First, he was one of the great war novelists and reporters. His biographers, John and Carol Garrard wrote, “Grossman was and is the great teller of truths about the war and about the most epic battle as well as its darkest secrets.”

Secondly, he was one of the first and most important witnesses of the Holocaust. He was among the first to write about the Holocaust and his short story, “The Old Teacher” in 19, written in 1943, was one of the first fictional works about the Holocaust. Thirdly, he was perhaps the greatest chronicler of Stalinism, the Gulag, collectivization, long before Saul Schnitzer. Fourthly, in 1990, the leading Soviet literary editor Theodore Balaski, said “The most important precursors of the changes sweeping Soviet society, under Gorbachov were, Khrushchev’s report on Stalin’s crimes of the 20th Party Congress. Solzhenitsyn’s "One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich” and Grossman’s “Life and Fate.”

Born in 1905, Vasily Grossman was one of the youngest members of that extraordinary generation of Jewish writers born in the Russian Empire who lived through the Stalin years, and which included Babel, Boris Pasternak who wrote “Doctor Zhivago”, Yevgenia Ginzburg and Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam. Grossman was born Iosif Solomonovich Grossman in Berdichev, in what is now Ukraine in 1905, but he later adopted the more Russian name Vasily. He was born into an emancipated and educated Russian fam, Jew, Jewish family. His parents were from the Jewish professional upper class, assimilated, Europeanized, speaking and reading Russian, not Yiddish. “We were not like the poor shtetel Jews described by Sholem Aleichem.”

Grossman wrote later to his daughter, the type that lived in hovels and slept side by side on the floor packed like sardines. The family was somewhere, socially between shtetel Jews; religious, poor, Yiddish speaking, and Russians and Ukrainians, Christian’s Russian Ukrainian speaking. Berdichev, where he was born was the thread that knit all the tangles of Grossman’s life. His first extensive article was about Berdichev published at the end of 1929. His first piece of fiction published in 1934 was also set in Berdichev. It was home to one of Europe’s largest Jewish communities and according to the 1897 census, eight years before Grossman was born, 41 out of the 54,000 population of Berdichev were Jews. “Berdichev was considered the most Jewish city in Ukraine before the Revolution, anti-Semite and the Black Hundreds called it the Jewish capital”, Grossman wrote.

His parents separated early on and he was brought up by his mother spending periods in Geneva and later during the first World War in Kiev. He studied chemistry in Moscow during the twenties, married briefly and in the early thirties, started writing, producing his first great short story in the town of Berdichev in 1934 and published his first novel in the same year. He wrote something like 20 stories during the 1930s and published three small collections of short stories. He survived the Starless terror in the thirties, but some of his closest friends were arrested and shot. His second wife was briefly imprisoned, but released. And his uncle David, who had supported Grossman and his mother during his childhood, was arrested and never returned. One cousin was arrested and never heard from again. Another was arrested, deported and subsequently rearrested and sent to a labour camp in Siberia for three more years.

These were terrible and terrifying times for Grossman, for his family and for his circle of literary friends. His career really falls politically into two halves and there are two schools of thought about this, some firstly, like the great critic Tzvetan Todorov argue that Grossman is the only example, or at least the most significant example of an established and leading Soviet writer changing his spots completely. The slave in him died and a free man arose. Others like the translator, Robert Chandler, who has done so much, to revive Grossman’s reputation in the English speaking world, with his extraordinary translations, see the changes as more gradual. “It is wrong” he writes in his introduction to “Life and Fate”, to draw so absolute a distinction between the conformist right of the thirties and forties and the dissident who wrote “Life and Fate” and “Everything Flows” in the fifties.

What is clear though, whichever position you take here, is that Grossman’s political beliefs underwent a significant change between his early stories and the later novels. For example, if you take that first great short story in the town of Berdichev, from 1934, it tells the story of Vavilova, a commissar fighting during the Polish Soviet War of 1919 to 20, which was chronicled so brilliantly by Grossman’s fellow to Isaac Babel. Indeed, the story owes much both in style and subject matter to Babel’s famous collection “Red Cavalry”. But if anything, it has a more heroic feel celebrating the moment of what he later calls “Young Bolshevism.” This was the generation of soldiers and idealists who were then later slaughtered in their tens of thousands, in the great purges of the thirties, that formed the subject of one of his greatest novels, “Everything Flows.”

It is his novel, “Everything Flows”, which shows the scale of his disillusion in the 1950s and early 1960s. He started the novel in ‘55 after Stalin’s death, but it was still unfinished when he died in '64. This book is extraordinary in a number of ways. First, how fresh it is in its revelations of the labour camps and the Starless terror. You might be reading Solzhenitysn, indeed. If Grossman’s work had already been available in translation in the sixties and seventies, one wonders whether he would’ve been as internationally famous as Solzhenitsyn, if not more so. Through the story of Ivan Gregorovitch returning home after 30 years in the camps, Grossman presents us with a world which is deeply corrupt, full of people who’d betrayed men like his central character.

But it is accounts of the Gulag itself; the transports, the treatment of women prisoners, the physical labour, disease, and the brutality of the camps, which is breathtaking. In 1941, when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, Grossman became a war reporter for the popular Red Army newspaper, “Krasnaya Zvezda”, “Red Star”, and he spent more than a thousand days during the war as a war reporter. And as the war raged on, he covered some of its major events; the Battle of Moscow, Stalingrad, the Battle of Kursk, and the Battle of Berlin. In Berlin, he saw the Imperial, Reich Chancellery, Hitler’s armchair and table. He wrote, “a huge metal globe, crushed and flattened.” “He was the most perceptive and honest eyewitness of the Soviet front lines between 1941 and 1945”, wrote the historian Anthony Beevor.

By far, the best eyewitness account of the terrible Eastern front. His writing is full of admiration for the courage and the tough life of ordinary Soviet soldiers, often fighting against overwhelming odds under appalling conditions. In battle, he wrote, “the Russian dons a white shirt. He may live a sinful life, but he dies like a saint. At the front, many Russians have a purity of thought and soul, a kind of monk-like modesty.” Does anything strike you about this language? It’s the Christian imagery; dies like a saint, monk-like modesty. Two of the greatest accounts of war in the 20th century were Isaac Babel’s “Red Cavalry” and Grossman’s war reports. To the spectacled Jews travelling with anti-Semitic Cossacks on the one hand and anti-Semitic Soviet soldiers on the other.

Their situation as Jews is not trivial or accidental. It is where much of the moral complexity of their writing comes from. In 1943, he starts to write one of his masterpieces, “Stalingrad”, a novel. He submitted it for publication and a selection of 11 chapters heavily edited were published later that same year. He rewrote “Stalingrad” at least four times between 1949 and the novels first publication as a book in 1952. There are three different published editions and there are 11 versions. Some complete, some partial in the main literary archive in Moscow. Robert Chandler’s translation of “Stalingrad”, which came out three years ago is a valiant attempt to piece together the fragments from these different versions published and unpublished.

The war marked a huge shift in Grossman’s writing from the socialist realism of his first novel in the thirties to the extraordinary writing in the forties and fifties. There is the unblinking gaze at the inhumanity of war. Grossman, writes his biographers, the ge, the Garrards, noted the deliberate policy of the Germans to deprive Soviet POWs of food and medical assistance. This act of gross inhumanity, they write, condemned men whose faces have been blistered off by flame throwers to an agonising death with no analgesics to ease the pain. As the war went on, the van marked began routinely to strip captured red army soldiers of their warm great coats, hats and felt boots condemning them to death by freezing.

Grossman wrote of young women who deliberately wore rags and rubbed ashes on their faces to make themselves unattractive so they might not be raped by German soldiers. He wrote of how Russian soldiers cut the legs off frozen German bodies and thawed them on the stove so it was easier to remove the boots. Sometimes, they used the frozen legs for fuel. And in the course, of writing about the war, he encountered the Holocaust. As the Germans retreated, he saw what had happened in Ukraine and wrote his famous report to Ukraine without Jews, unpublished in Russian during his lifetime. He witnessed the interrogation of captured Nazi officers and knew the details of mass executions. He heard one Nazi say that for an experienced organiser, quote unquote, “it should take two and a half hours to kill a thousand people.”

As he continued west with the Red Army in 1944, Grossman entered Poland and saw Majdanek and Treblinka. Majdanek’s warehouses he wrote “were full of clothing and shoes. There were Russian soldiers’ boots, Polish soldiers’ shoes, men’s boots, women’s slippers, rubber galoshes, and what is the most terrible sight of all?” He wrote, “tens of thousands of pairs of children’s footwear.” In September 1944, the soldiers with Grossman, arrived in Treblinka. He collected some of the first eyewitness accounts of what later became known as the Holocaust. His report, “The hell of Treblinka” published in November 1944, was one of the first accounts of a Nazi death camp. It was widely translated and distributed at Nuremberg, as part of the evidence against the Nazis. He continued to Berlin and saw Hitler’s office.

In 2005, Grossman’s wartime notebooks were published as “A Writer At War” edited by Antony Beevor and Lyuba Vinogradova. In the introduction, Beevor calls Grossman by far the best eyewitness account of the Eastern front. A collection of essays and short stories called “The Road” translated by Robert Chandler includes two great short stories from this period as well as the piece on Treblinka. Unbelievably fresh and undated, almost 70 years later. One story, “The Old Teacher” writes Chandler, is among the first works of fiction about the Shoah in any language. He writes, Robert Chandler that is, “Grossman was one of the first journalists to write about what is now being called the Shoah by bullets, the massacres of Jews in the Western Soviet Union. He was also one of the first journalists to write about the death camps in Poland, the Shoah by gas.

Two events happened during this period that had an enormous incalculable effect on Grossman. First, most important, his mother was one of 12,000 Soviet Jews killed in one day at Berdichev, one of the first mass killings by the Einsatzgruppen as they swept through Ukraine in 1941. He never recovered from her death as the letters to his mother published in "The Road” show he was devastated by her death and his feelings of guilt. Maternal love, became one of his central subjects. Secondly, with Ilya Ehrenburg, another Jewish Soviet writer, Grossman worked for the Jewish anti-Fascist Committee compiling the Black Book, as it was known, a documentary account of the massacres of Jews in the Soviet Union and Poland. To their dismay, writes Antony Beevor, “they found that major publications rejected most of their articles on the Holocaust. Only small Jewish journals could be counted on to accept them.

The later post-war suppression of the Black Book by the Soviet state under Stalin, shook Grossman to the core and he began to question his own loyal support for the Soviet Union.” Grossman also criticised collectivization and the political repression of peasants that led to the tragedy and the great famine in Ukraine. He wrote that the decree about grain procurement required that the peasants of the Ukraine, the Dom and the Kuban be put to death by starvation, put to death along with their little children. While Grossman was never arrested by the Soviet, the authorities and he was never sent to the Gulag, his two major literary works, “Life and Fate” and “Forever Flowing” were censored as unacceptably anti-Soviet and Grossman became a non-person. He was, to quote his friend, Anna Berza, in the 1950s, “buried alive”, quote unquote.

The Garrards write in their biography, “he found it virtually impossible to publish new works. The state pulled from library shelves and pulped his earlier books. That silence persists even after the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991.” In 1961, on Valentine’s Day, three KGB officers entered Grossman’s apartment in Moscow and confiscated more than 10,000 pages of typed scripts, including, seven draughts of his masterpiece, “Life and Fate”, one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. They even took the ribbon from the typewriter on which the text had been written. Grossman was told by Mikhail Suslov that it could not be published for at least 200 years. Friends had fortunately already taken a copy away for self keeping. It was smuggled out to the west and it is now widely regarded as one of the masterpieces of the century. He died before this international recognition of lung cancer in 1964.

In 1980, “Life and Fate” was published in Russian, but not in the Soviet Union, for the first time in Switzerland. The physicist Andrei Sakharov, physicist and dissident, secretly photographed draught pages preserved by Grossman’s friend, Semen Lipkin and the writer, Vladimir Voinovich managed to smuggle the photographic films abroad. Two dissident researchers retyped the text from the microfilm with some mistakes and misreadings due to the bad quality. It was published first in the UK in 1985 and republished in 1995. The book was finally published in Russia in 1988 after the policy of Glasnost was initiated by Gorbachev. The text was published again in 1989 because further original manuscripts emerged after the first publication. And then comes the international breakthrough.

In 2006, “Life and Fate” is republished in English translation. In 2010, “Everything Flows” and “The Road” are both published in the UK in English translation. In 2011, a Radio 4 version of “Life and Fate” eight hours long, is produced with an all-star cast including Kenneth Branagn, Eleanor Bron, Freddie Fox, Sara Kestelman, Janet Suzman, David Tennant, Harriet Walter and Samuel West. In 2012, the Garrards republish their biography, “The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman” and in two, and in 2019, Alexandra Popoff publishes her biography, “Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century” and “Stalingrad” is at last published in translation.

The major themes of “Life and Fate”, which remains I think his best known novel, include the theme of Jewish identity and the Holocaust. Throughout “Life and Fate”, it becomes obvious that a portion of the novel’s thesis is about his Jewish identity. Viktor Shtrum, the physicist and Jew and central character in the novel is in part, a reflection of Grossman’s own character. There are many overlaps in Shtrum’s life and Grossman’s life such as, the mother’s death and the Holocaust, both seemed to find a place in their Jewish identity that was not present before the war. Grossman’s-

Secondly, Grossman’s idea of humanity and human goodness, strong echoes here of Tolstoy. One of the most important topics in “Life and Fate” is the discussion of the nature of humanity, the nature of human good. He first asks whether a good common to all man exists and then proceeds to describe how the ideal of good has changed for different races and religions. Grossman criticises Christianity, especially deeming its attempts to create universal good through peace and love responsible for many of the world’s most horrific events.

Thirdly, he tackles, unbelievably, Stalin’s distortion of reality and values because one of Stalin’s most frightening achievements for so many Soviet dissidents was his total distortion of Soviet reality. Stalin changed the reality of the Soviet Union from a world in which common good kindness and humanity were released alive to a world in which only devotion to the party mattered. And this world view is reflected in chapter 40 of part one, when Grossman describes Abarchuk and his love for Stalinism. He, Abarchuk had repeated, “You don’t get arrested for nothing. Believing that only a tiny minority himself among them had been arrested by mistake. As for everyone else, they deserve their sentences. The sword of justice was chastising the enemies of the revolution. He had seen civility, treachery, submissiveness, cruelty. His faith was unshakable, his devotion to the party, infinite.”

Abarchuk is incapable of understanding the reality of his situation that he has been wrongly imprisoned and will suffer in spite of his innocence as has happened to so many others. Abarchuk is so dedicated to the party that he cannot see the ethical violations occurring all around him. The prisoner simply refuses to comprehend his situation and instead chooses to focus on his faith and devotion to the party. He and his mentality represent, for Grossman, “the arche typical party member. Abarchuk’s situation is easy enough to understand; he’s been arrested for a crime that he didn’t commit, and regardless of his guilt, he will be punished. Instead of understanding and accepting this, however, he remains faithful to the party and truly believes that he’s been imprisoned by mistake. He maintains his faith. No better allegory can be found.”

The Stalin’s iron grip on Soviet reality. We must remember that Grossman had no published sources to rely on. These accounts were written before Robert Conquest’s histories of Stalinism were available and Grossman spoke to eyewitnesses and survivors, but his work had to be smuggled out of the Soviet Union after his death. And even then he was not published for years. Finally, perhaps, there’s the theme of life goes on. At the end of “Life and Fate”, Grossman presents the reader with the broadest concept of his novel, the idea that despite war, genocide, suffering and utter destruction, life goes on.

In the last lines of the book, he writes, “somehow you could sense spring more vividly in the cool forest than on the sunlit plain, and there was a deeper sadness in this silence than in the silence of autumn. In it you could hear both a lament for the dead and the furious joy of life itself. It was still cold and dark, but soon the doors and shutters would be flung open. Soon the house would be filled with the tears and laughter of children, with the hurried steps of a loved woman and the measured gate of the mast of the house. They stood there, holding their bags in silence.”

Finally, we should consider the writing itself and particularly what is especially fascinating is the tension in Grossman’s later writing and his greatest writing, between realism and what we might call modernism. His writing is a reminder, that it is realism, which was the great literary legacy of the 20th century. Writers like Grossman, Solzhenitsyn, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, produced accounts of inhumanity and terror, which will endure for many years, I hope for centuries. Grossman asked big questions, “How could Stalinism have happened? How could such things be done to millions of people?”

Sometimes he looks for answers in philosophy and history, speculating about the distinctive history of Russia. At other times, as in his article on Treblinka or his accounts of the famine or the transports to the Gulag, he simply tells us what happened in clear, crystal clear prose. Let me just read you one passage from “Stalingrad”, an extraordinary passage, on page 380, if you happen to have the latest edition. “When people read obscure novels, when they listen to over complex music or look at a frighteningly unintelligible painting, they feel anxious and unhappy. The thoughts and feelings of the novel’s characters, the sounds of the symphony, the colours of the painting, everything seems peculiar and difficult as if from some other world. Almost ashamed of being natural and straightforward. People read, look and listen without joy, without any real emotion. Contrived art is a barrier placed between man and the world, impenetrable and oppressive like a cast iron grill. But there are also books that make a reader exclaim joyfully, "Yes, that’s just what I feel. I’ve gone through that too and that’s what I thought myself.”

Any of, art of this kind does not separate people from the world. Art like this connects people to life, to other people and to the world as a whole. It does not scrutinise life through strangely tinted spectacles.“ It is quite clear what kind of writer Grossman thought he was and what kinds of stories and novels he thought he was writing. It is as if the author, Grossman suddenly steps forward to address the reader directly. But above all, it is wonderfully old fashioned as if almost 50 years of literary theory and universities had never happened. All this talk of what readers feel and how art connects people to life, it makes one think of a debate that hasn’t really happened but perhaps should.

A debate not about modernism or post-modernism, but another kind of tradition altogether. Writers like George Orwell and Arthur Koestler, Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, Grossman and Pasternak who wrote clearly and simply about terrible things that were done to people in the mid 20th century. And there are many examples of this kind of plain writing in the "Stalingrad” about the Eastern front, about lives and deaths during the Second World War. And in a way, this is simple and old fashioned descriptive writing. But, there’s something else.

He describes in chapter five, “Vavilov is about to go off to war. He sits at his table. On it stood a bowl of potatoes, a saucer with a little white crystallised honey, some slices of bread and a mug of milk. He ate slowly.” Such simple food, like the simple prose. But, as we read other accounts of food in the novel, we realise that often these meals take place in poor peasant homes like Vavilov’s. This traditional food and the pastoral imagery, a shepherdess in a pink dress is described is reassuring safe, in contrast to the chaos of mayhem that runs through the book.

Perhaps a better example, or the best example, is the famous letter to Shtrum from his mother in “Life and Fate”, from pages 64 to 77. Again, simple, clear prose, tremendously moving. “Vitya, I’ve always been lonely. I’ve wept in anguish through lonely nights, but my fate is to end my life alone, never having shared it with you. Always be happy with those you love, those around you, those who have become closer to you than your mother. Forgive me, Vitenka, this is the last line of your mother’s last letter to you, live, live, live forever.” But, in “Stalingrad”, the novel, we see another side of this letter.

First, we don’t get to read the actual letter at all, but we read about her letter, again and again. Grossman describes each stage of the letter’s journey from the Berdichev ghetto where Shturm’s mother is murdered, to Viktor Shtrum’s dacha. Altogether the letter is passed from hand to hand seven times. At one point the old Bolshevik takes the letter to the Stalingrad apartment, to Viktor Shtrum’s mother-in-law, Alexandra. When he hands it to the young friend of the family who opens the door, she says, “Heavens! What filthy paper. Anyone would think it’s been lying in a cellar for the last two years and she promptly wraps it up in a sheet of the thick pink paper people use to make decorations for Christmas trees.”

She then gives the package to Colonel Novikov, one of the key figures in the novel who’s about to go to Moscow. He goes to Viktor’s apartment where he interrupts a romantic tete-a-tete between Viktor and a pretty young neighbour. Viktor drops the package into his briefcase, then forgets about it. 24 hours later at his, at his dacha, in his briefcase, Viktor finds, quote, “a small package and thought it was a bar of chocolate he’d brought for Nina. Then he remembered it being given to him by Novikov. He opens the package.”

Grossman writes, “No. As Viktor sat down, and glanced through the long letter, it was his mother’s record of her last days from the beginning of the war until the eve of her inevitable death behind the barbed wire of the Jewish ghetto. It was her farewell to her son. The morning after finally reading the letter, Viktor looks at himself in the mirror. He’s surprised to find that he looks much the same as he did the day before. From then on, he carries the letter about with him wherever he goes, but is unable to talk about it, he can hardly even talk about it to himself. He read the letter again and again each time he felt the same shock as at the dacha, as if you were reading it for the first time. Perhaps his memory was instinctively resisting, unwilling, and unable finally to take in something whose constant presence would make life unbearable.”

Again, the prose is clear and simple, like the letter. But the letter, is passed, from hand to hand. The adventures of the letter are like something from Tristram Shandy or Jacques Derrida’s reading of reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s "Purloined Letter”. This fascination with a text that keeps vanishing and is never read is not at all, like the clear, calm and deep simplicity that Grossman wrote about in that great passage I just read out. And as we reflect on this, we realise that Grossman, is not interested just in either simple clear storytelling or the strange adventures of a manuscript that never gets read. The journey of the letter, it’s constant movement, it’s vicissitudes, that is the hallmark of modernism, where texts constantly prove unreliable, unstable, strange things, happen to them.

Let me just conclude with this thought, that yes, he was a realist. He did believe in the straightforwardness and the accessibility and the transparency of great art, and yet constantly through his greatest writing there is movement, instability, it is not clear what is going on. What happens to the letter, is typical of what happens to, in many images, in Grossman. That he’s a modernist and he’s a realist. It’s not actually, an either or, despite that extraordinary passage that I read out to you. There is so much in these novels and stories; realism and modernism, the Holocaust, the Gulag and Stalingrad, Jews and commissars, hope and optimism, but also devastation and loneliness.

Families and couples brought together and reunited, but also separated and torn apart. This, is what makes Grossman one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. No one, not a single writer in the 20th century took on bigger subjects, greater battles, more terrible violence to human beings, greater examples of man’s inhumanity to man, but at the same time, it wasn’t just the subjects, it was the quality of the writing, the movement between realism and modernism that made Grossman, such a great writer.

So I hope, that gives you some sense, of his writing. I would also say, in addition to the great novels, “Life and Fate”, “Everything Flows” and “Stalingrad”, all three major huge novels, powerful novels. In addition, if you want to dip a toe into Grossman’s writing, his reportage, his short stories, his articles, I would strongly recommend the collection called “The Road” available in paperback. It’s only about 250 pages. So, let me tell you exactly how long it is. Actually I lied. It’s nearly 370 pages, translated by Robert Chandler with wonderful notes, introduction and that will give you a flavour. And then if you feel, “yes, this is really for me” and I hope you will find that, then, move on to the great novels and I hope those will be just as rewarding.

Let me just look at some of the questions and answers.

Q&A and Comments

Adrian Wolf has kindly written, “Grossman’s "A Writer At War” with the Red Army, 1941 to 1945, in English, edited by Antony Beevor, is published by Pimlico in 2006.“

Rosalyn Luper, thank you very much for your very kind words.

Adrianne Banks writes, "I think he wrote a book about Armenia.” You are absolutely right, Adrianne. I hope I’m pronouncing your name correctly. He did. It has a fascinating story because his trip to Armenia was immediately after the KGB raided his apartment and he wanted to get out of Moscow for perfectly understandable reasons. He was ill. He was coming towards the end of his life, although he didn’t know that yet because this was 1961 and he died in 1964. And it’s a very fascinating account of Armenia, which was on the edges of the Soviet Union. And, it’s a short book. It’s more than a travel log. It gives you a fantastic sense of Soviet society in a very different kind of culture, far away from Moscow, Leningrad, or indeed the great Ukrainian cities. So it is well worth reading, but I wouldn’t read it first because I don’t think it’s entirely representative of Grossman’s writing. So I would still start with “The Road” and then move on to the great novels. And then if you are still looking for more, then the Armenian sketchbook would be another good good book to read.

Dennis Klauber, thank you very much for your, for your kind message.

Now let’s see, Goldie, thank you for your kind message.

Also, Anthony Austrian, thank you, “excellent author based on his background as a war reporter.” Absolutely, because it was really in his war reporting that he finds this distinctive voice because he’s writing for ordinary Soviet soldiers for these thousand days or more. And they know what the reality of fighting at Stalingrad was. They know what the Eastern front was like, and so he had permission to write about it accessibly and write about their experiences in a way that is not pure propaganda.

Judy Lyes, thank you for your kind words. “Heard Robert Chandler at Jewish Book Week in London a few years ago, whetted my appetite for his work.” Well, Judy, you may remember, this may not be the same occasion, but I have interviewed Robert a number of times at Jewish Book Week, so perhaps it was one of those occasions.

Thank you Aubrey Kravitz for your kind words. Thank you Sharon Fingleson for yours.

Q: Myrna Ross asks, “is it Robert Chandler or John?” A: It is definitely Robert Chandler and his wife Elizabeth, and they co translate, co-write the translations. And you know, I think we forget, that how much we owe, to an extraordinary generation of translators. Michael Hofmann, who has almost single-handedly translated and retranslated most of Joseph Roth, the translations of Stefnei Slysz, the translations of Grossman.

You know, these extraordinary scholars have introduced us to an amazing, well, generation, two generations of Soviet writers, of Central European and East European writers; Bruno Schulz, Primo Levi of course, Wiesel of course, Stefnei Slysz and Joseph Roth and the great Soviet writers. And these have enriched our lives beyond measure as readers. And we should also, I should also thank, the small independent publishers like Pushkin Press, like New York Review Classics, who have published these translations and taken a risk because who knew that “Life and Fate” was going to be such a success, who knew that “Stalingrad” would be such a success. So these were tremendously brave ventures by small, often by small publishers.

Amy Bernbum, thank you so much for your kind words. Agnes Kaposi, thank you for your kind words. “Without your advice, I read "Stalingrad” first. I don’t think about as a which order you read the masterpieces of this wonderful writer.“ I absolutely take your point. I read "Stalingrad” first on the beach by the Mediterranean, on the beach near Jaffa, in Israel. And, but, the first I’d read in fact was “Life and Fate”, which is, I still think his greatest masterpiece. But then, as a, after that, “Stalingrad” hadn’t come out yet in translation. So I then read “Road” and let me just tell you a bit more about “Road”, if I can find, yes here we are. About the contents, anyway.

So it starts with three stories from the 1930s, including the first published story in the town, or the first great story in the town of Berdichev from 1934. And then, part two, is on the war and the Shoah. And this is, two stories, “The Old Man”, “The Old Teacher”, and “The Hell of Treblinka”, his report on Treblinka. And then there are four, six short stories from later on in Grossman’s career, including, my two favourites, “Mama” and “Living Space”. And “Mama” is the story of an orphan, Soviet orphan. Well, I, I won’t give it away. It’s, it’s a, it’s just a fantastic, fantastic piece of writing and it’s only 15 pages long and “Living Space” is only about three pages long and it’s a wonderful, wonderful story about a tragic life and the indifference of other Soviet citizens. And then there are three letters and then there are appendices afterwards, chronologies, notes, further readings. It, it’s got it, it, it’s a fantastic introduction, I, I think, but you know, I guess each, each to their own I say.

Q: Goldie, “how is Grossman regarded in Russia today, if at all?” A: Well, that’s a very, very interesting and important question and of course, although his work is of still available under Putin, under Putin’s dictatorship, as we should rightly call it, it is not acknowledged as the kind of masterpieces that it, in the same way as it is acknowledged in the West and by the West, I mean certainly the English speaking world, I don’t really know how he’s rated in France or Germany or in East Europe. But, I, I think he has once again become marginalised though not as desperately, seriously as he was, during his own lifetime.

And Len Ostroover, thank you for your kind words, “Listened to "Life and Fate” from the BBC some years ago. Unforgettable.“ Absolutely. It was an extraordinary cast and it was a very brave decision by the controller of Radio 4. Mark Damazer, who was then the controller, who read the novel, fell in love with it and through enormous resources, I mean to eight hours of radio, that is a serious commitment in terms of budget and in terms of the commitment to the stars, that they, the extraordinary all star cast that they had for it. So it, it was one of the great moments of BBC radio, I would say.

Adrian Wolf, Grossman, ah, okay. So now back to the beginning. So, I think, I think that is it. Let me just check in case I’ve missed anything.

• [Lauren] That’s it. Thank you so much, David.

• Lauren, thank you for all your help. Everybody in the audience, thank you so much for joining me. I will be back in August with a talk, a very different kind of subject, Yiddish humour and I look forward to seeing you all then. Thank you so much for your interesting questions.