An Armenian Sketchbook

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 the Russian State University for the Humanities while continuing to research Grossman’s life and work.

AN ARMENIAN SKETCHBOOK

VASILY GROSSMAN

Translated from the Russian by

ROBERT and ELIZABETH CHANDLER

With an introduction and notes by

ROBERT CHANDLER and YURY BIT-YUNAN

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

New York

THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

Copyright © by E.V. Korotkova-Grossman and F.B. Guber

Translation and notes copyright © 2013 by Robert Chandler

All rights reserved.

An Armenian Sketchbook
is translated from the text of
Dobro vam
published in Vasily Grossman,
Sobranie sochinenii v 4-h tomakh
(Moscow: Agraf, 1998).

Cover image: Vasily Grossman in Armenia, with ruins of the Hellenistic temple of Garni in the background

Cover design: Katy Homans

The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

Grossman, Vasilii, 1905–1964.

[Dobro vam. English]

An Armenian sketchbook / by Vasily Grossman ; translated by Robert and

Elizabeth Chandler ; with an introduction and notes by Robert Chandler and

Yury Bit-Yunan.

pages ; cm. — (New York Review Books classics)

ISBN 978-1-59017-618-4 (alkaline paper)

1. Grossman, Vasilii Semenovich—Travel—Armenia (Republic) 2. Armenia (Republic)—Description and travel. I. Chandler, Robert, 1953–, translator, writer of added commentary. II. Chandler, Elizabeth, 1947–, translator. III. Bit-Yunan, Yury, writer of added commentary. IV. Title. V. Series: New York Review Books classics.

PG3476.G7D613 2013

891.73'42—dc23

2012039197

eISBN 978-1-59017-635-1
v1.0

For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit
www.nyrb.com
or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

Biographical Notes

Title page

Copyright and More Information

Introduction

AN ARMENIAN SKETCHBOOK

An Armenian Picture Album

Acknowledgments

Notes

Further Reading

AN ARMENIAN SKETCHBOOK
, written in early 1962, two years before Vasily Grossman’s death in September 1964, is unlike anything else Grossman wrote. It is deeply personal and has an air of spontaneity; Grossman seems simply to be chatting to the reader about his immediate impressions of Armenia—its people, its mountains, its ancient churches—and digressing, almost at random, onto subjects that range from the problem of nationalism to his views on art and even his difficulties with his bladder and bowels.

The underlying cause of these physical problems was that Grossman was in the early stages of cancer, soon to be diagnosed in one of his kidneys. Just as
Everything Flows
, which he began in the mid-1950s but continued to expand and revise during his last years, is Grossman’s political testament, so
An Armenian Sketchbook
is his personal testament, a discussion of the values he holds dearest—in art and in life. It seems likely that, at some level, Grossman sensed he did not have long to live.

There are relatively few memoirs of Grossman, and there is no other work, by Grossman or anyone else, that gives us so clear a sense of the man he was. Three qualities stand out: an unusual openness to other people, and especially to those who are not members of the Soviet elite; a clearheaded skepticism, directed sometimes towards others but more often towards himself; and a quiet, modest persistence. Grossman never deliberately sets out to be original, either with regard to literary style or with regard to content; his originality emerges only gradually, as he doggedly continues to see with his own eyes and to think his own thoughts. And the remarkable coherence of these thoughts emerges equally gradually; the different threads of this apparently casual memoir are deftly interwoven.

Russian writers, unable to travel freely outside the Russian (or Soviet) Empire, have often been attracted to the Caucasus, and they have left us a number of fine travel sketches: Alexander Pushkin’s
Journey to Erzurum
and Osip Mandelstam’s
Journey to Armenia
are the two most remarkable.[
1
] Grossman, however, does not mention either of these works; the inspiration for
An Armenian Sketchbook
came not from literature but from the circumstances of his life.

In October 1960, Grossman had submitted the manuscript of
Life and Fate
to the editors of a Soviet literary journal. It was the height of Khrushchev’s “thaw” and Grossman seems genuinely to have believed that
Life and Fate
could be published in the Soviet Union, even though a central theme of the novel is that Nazism and Stalinism are mirror images of each other. In February 1961, three KGB officers came to Grossman’s apartment and confiscated the typescript and everything bearing any relation to it, even carbon paper and typewriter ribbons. The Soviet authorities were evidently determined not to repeat the mistake they had made three years earlier with Boris Pasternak; by persecuting Pasternak when he was awarded the Nobel Prize after the publication of
Doctor Zhivago
, they succeeded only in bringing him unprecedented international attention. They dealt with Grossman more shrewdly; rather than making a martyr of him, they simply took his book away.

Grossman did not know that his work would survive, let alone be published. According to his friend Semyon Lipkin, “Grossman aged before our eyes. His curly hair turned grayer and a bald patch appeared. His asthma. . .returned. His walk became a shuffle.”[
2
] And the writer Boris Yampolsky reports Grossman himself as saying, “They strangled me in a dark corner.”[
3
]

Later that year Grossman agreed to rewrite a clumsy literal translation of a long Armenian war novel—a task that would entail spending two months in Armenia. He evidently felt that he needed the money: After completing the work, he wrote to his wife, “I’m glad that I have been able to escape from material difficulties, that I haven’t got into debt, that I haven’t had to borrow money from well-wishers.”[
4
] He may also simply have wanted to get away from Moscow; his difficulties at this time included not only the “arrest” of his novel but also the near breakdown of his marriage. He may have hoped that the combination of disciplined work and a trip to somewhere exotic would do him good.

It needs to be said, however, that this story is more complicated than is immediately apparent and has yet to be fully researched. No previous scholar or memoirist has mentioned that an entirely competent Russian translation—by a different translator, Arus Tadeosyan—of an earlier, shorter version of this novel, Hrachya Kochar’s
The Children of the Large House
, had been published in 1955 (by Sovetsky pisatel′) and again in 1956 (by Voenizdat), only five years before Grossman’s visit to Armenia. Kochar may have hoped that a new version, by someone important, would bring more attention to his novel, but it is surprising that neither Lipkin nor Grossman appear ever to have mentioned the earlier version. Grossman would certainly have known about it; Sovetsky pisatel′ and Voenizdat were two of the most important Soviet publishers. Both were based in Moscow, and both had brought out editions of Grossman’s first novel about Stalingrad,
For a Just Cause
.

The most plausible explanation of the decision by the Soviet literary authorities to commission a new translation of Kochar’s novel is that it was an attempt to buy Grossman off, to compensate him—at least in financial terms—for the non-publication of
Life and Fate
, and so lessen the danger of his contacting foreign journalists or sending manuscripts abroad. According to Kochar’s daughter Meri, it was Vardkes Tevekelyan, the chairman of the very important Literary Fund, who first introduced Grossman to her father.[
5
] Tevekelyan may simply have been wishing to do Grossman a favor, or he may have been acting under instructions from some still-higher authority.

Grossman began work (in both his letters and his memoir he follows the standard Soviet practice of referring to the work of improving a literal version not as “editing” but as “translation”) some time in the summer, and by mid-October he was halfway through the novel. On October 13, he wrote, “Today I’ve finished the first volume—690 pages! I’m a translator! Still, this work really is good for me—the rhythm, the systematic nature of it, the hours I devote to it every day—all this is calming and strengthening.”[
6
] In early November, he traveled to Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, in order to work more closely both with the literal translator, Hasmik Taronyan, whom he refers to in his memoir as Hortensia, and the author, Hrachya Kochar, whom he calls Martirosyan. In mid-December, he wrote to Lipkin: