The Road (32 page)

1881 Alexander II assassinated by members of The People’s Will (Narodnaya Volya) terrorist organization.

1891 Beginning of construction of Trans-Siberian Railway.

1905 The wave of mass political unrest known as the 1905 Revolution leads to the establishment of the Duma (a parliament) and a limited constitutional monarchy. Birth of Vasily Semyonovich Grossman.

1910–12 Grossman and his mother live in Geneva.

1914–19 Grossman attends secondary school in Kiev.

1917 Tsar Nicholas II abdicates after the February Revolution. Workers’ soviets (councils) are set up in Petrograd and Moscow. Lenin and his Bolshevik Party seize power in the October Revolution.

1918–20 Russian Civil War, accompanied by the draconian economic policies known as War Communism. Although there were many different factions, the two main forces were the Red Army (Communists) and the Whites (anti-Communists). Foreign powers also intervened, to little effect. Millions perished before the Red Army, led by Leon Trotsky, defeated the Whites in 1920. Smaller battles continued for several years.

1921 After an uprising in March 1921 by sailors at the naval base of Kronstadt, Lenin made a tactical retreat, introducing the at-least-relatively liberal New Economic Policy (NEP), which lasted until 1928. Many of the more idealistic Communists saw this as a step backward. The NEP was not, however, accompanied by any political liberalization.

1924 Death of Lenin. Petrograd is renamed Leningrad. Stalin begins to take power.

1928–37 The first and second of Stalin’s Five-Year Plans bring about increased production of coal, iron, and steel.

1928 Grossman marries Anna (usually known as Galya) Matsuk and publishes his first newspaper articles.

1929 Collectivization of agriculture begins. Grossman graduates from Moscow State University and starts work as an engineer in the Donbass region.

1930 Birth of Grossman’s daughter, Yekaterina Vasilievna (Katya).

1931 Grossman returns to Moscow, where he works in a pencil factory. Grossman and Galya are divorced.

1932–33 Between three and five million peasants die in the Terror Famine in Ukraine.

1933 Hitler comes to power in Germany. Grossman’s cousin Nadya Almaz is arrested in Moscow.

1934 Founding of Union of Soviet Writers. Grossman publishes “In the Town of Berdichev” and the novel
Glyukauf
, about the life of the Donbass miners.

1935 Mussolini invades Ethiopia. Grossman’s mule (the hero of “The Road”) takes part in the campaign.

1936 Grossman marries his second wife, Olga Mikhailovna Guber.

1936–38 Approximately half the members of the Soviet political, military, and intellectual elite are imprisoned or shot. Roughly 380,000 supposed kulaks and 250,000 members of various national minorities are killed. The period from September 1936 until November 1938 is known as the Great Terror, or Yezhovshchina—after Nikolay Yezhov, then head of the NKVD (the Soviet secret police).

1937 Grossman is admitted to the Union of Soviet Writers.

1937–40 Publication, in installments, of Grossman’s second novel,
Stepan Kolchugin.

1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is signed. Beginning of Second World War.

1939–41 Death of 70,000 mentally handicapped Germans in the Nazis’ euthanasia program.

1941 Hitler invades the Soviet Union. Leningrad is blockaded and Moscow under threat. Grossman starts work as a war correspondent for
Red Star
(
Krasnaya zvezda
), the Red Army newspaper.

1941–42 An estimated two million Jews are shot in western areas of the Soviet Union. Grossman’s mother is one of approximately 12,000 Jews killed in a single day at the airport outside Berdichev.

1941–44 Two and a half million Polish Jews are gassed in Chelmno, Majdanek, Bełzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz.

1942 Publication of Grossman’s novel
The People Immortal
.

1942–43 The Battle of Stalingrad was the first important German land defeat of the war. Grossman spends nearly three months in the thick of the fighting.

1944 Between April and June, 436,000 Hungarian Jews are gassed at Auschwitz, in only fifty-six days.

1945 End of Second World War.

1946 Nuremberg Trial of the Nazi leadership. In the Soviet Union, Andrey Zhdanov tightens control over the arts. Grossman’s play
If You Believe the Pythagoreans
is fiercely criticized.

1948 Destruction of the plates for the Soviet edition of
The Black Book
, a documentary account of the Shoah in the Soviet Union and Poland, compiled by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman between 1943 and 1946.

1951 Death of Andrey Platonov. Grossman gives the main speech at his funeral.

1952 Secret trial of members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Publication in
Novy mir
of Grossman’s novel
For a Just Cause.

1953 Publication of article in
Pravda
in January about the Jewish “Killer Doctors.” Preparations continue for a purge of Soviet Jews.
For a Just Cause
is attacked in
Pravda
and elsewhere. Death of Stalin on March 5. On April 4, official acknowledgment that the case against the “Killer Doctors” was fabricated.

1954
For a Just Cause
is published as a book.

1955 Grossman sees Raphael’s
Sistine Madonna
on exhibit in Moscow before it is returned to the Dresden Art Gallery.

1956 Millions of prisoners are released from the camps. Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress marks a high point in the more liberal period known as the “Thaw.”

1957 A Russian dog, Laika (her name means “Barker”), travels into space on
Sputnik 2
.

1958 Publication abroad of
Doctor Zhivago
. Under pressure from the Soviet authorities, Pasternak declines the Nobel Prize.

1961 The KGB confiscates the manuscript of
Life and Fate.

1962 Publication of Solzhenitsyn’s
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
.

1964 Fall of Khrushchev. Grossman dies on September 14, of lung cancer.

1970 Publication in Frankfurt of an incomplete Russian edition of
Everything Flows
.

1974 Solzhenitsyn deported after publication in the West of
The Gulag Archipelago
.

1980
Life and Fate
is published in Russian, for the first time, in Lausanne.

1985 Mikhail Gorbachev comes to power. Beginning of the period of liberal reforms known as perestroika; the next few years see the first publication in Russia of Grossman’s
Life and Fate
and
Everything Flows
, and of important works by Krzhizhanovsky, Platonov, Shalamov, Solzhenitsyn, and many others.

1991 Collapse of the Soviet Union.

PART ONE: The 1930s

*
abroad to study
: John and Carol Garrard,
The Bones of Berdichev
(New York: The Free Press, 1996), 31 and 376.

*
an uprising in Sebastopol
: Fyodor Guber,
Pamyat'i pis'ma
(Moscow: Probel, 2007), 7. The Garrards suggest that Grossman’s father, Semyon Osipovich, was active in the Jewish Labor Bund, but this is no more than a supposition, based on the fact that Geneva was, at the time, a center for Bund activities.

*
lost his interest in science
: He was quick, a decade later, to grasp the importance of nuclear physics; one of his notebooks for 1944 includes a diagram of a nuclear chain reaction [Guber, 39]. It is not for nothing that Grossman chose to make Viktor Shtrum, the central figure of
Life and Fate
and in many respects a self-portrait, into a physicist.

*
found in her possession
: See Garrard, 109. Serge had been arrested for a second time two months before this, in February 1933. He may have been the first person to refer to the USSR as a “totalitarian” state.

*
in Astrakhan
: After spending three years in exile in Astrakhan, Nadya was given another three-year sentence, this time in a labor camp in the far north. She returned to Moscow in 1939. See Guber, 20; and Garrard, 112 and 129–30.

*
Glyukauf
: this is derived from the German
Glück auf
(“Luck up!” or “Good luck!”), a phrase used to greet a miner just brought up to the surface.

*
Literaturnaya gazeta
: See A. Bocharov,
Vasily Grossman
(Moscow: Sovetsky pisatel', 1990), 11. This excellent monograph is an expanded version of a study first published in 1970.

*
and Boris Pilnyak
: See Semyon Lipkin,
Kvadriga
(Moscow: Knizhny Sad, 1997), 516. Babel apparently said, “Our Yid capital has been seen through new eyes.” Lipkin then quotes Bulgakov as saying, “Don’t say it’s really been possible to publish something worthwhile!” This has been understood to mean that he too admired the story, but it was probably no more than a polite response on Bulgakov’s part. An English translation of “In the Town of Berdichev” was included in John Lehmann’s
New Writing
2 (Autumn 1936): 131–45. Five Soviet writers were represented in the first two issues of this journal: Grossman, Pasternak, and Sholokhov, and the now-lesser-known Ognev and Tikhonov.

*
in danger himself
: Grossman’s friends proved remarkably loyal. According to Fyodor Guber, who obtained access to his father’s NKVD file, “When questioned by the investigator about Vasily Grossman, my father replied, ‘Nothing compromising is known about Grossman.’ The other former members of Pereval gave similar answers.” [Gruber, 32.]

*
the NKVD
: The Soviet security service was renamed many times; the most important of its names and acronyms, in chronological order, are the Cheka, the OGPU, the NKVD, and the KGB.

*
chief executioner
: See Lipkin, 518. Tzvetan Todorov has written that “Grossman is the only example, or at least the most significant, of an established and leading Soviet writer changing his spots completely. The slave in him died, and a free man arose.” [Tzvetan Todorov,
Hope and Memory
(London: Atlantic Books, 2005), 50.] Impressive though this may sound, Todorov is mistaken: Grossman showed great courage and independence throughout his life.

*
Olga Mikhailovna was released
: For Grossman’s astutely phrased letter to Yezhov, see Garrard, 122–25 and 347–48. See also Guber’s afterword to the present volume.

*
in the Ukraine in 1932–33
: In August 1931, when the hunger was only just beginning, he had written a coded (his own word is “Aesopian”) letter about this to his father [Garrard, 93–95].

*
the Soviet government
: Ibid
.,
348.

*
I wish to triumph?
: Lipkin, 516.

*
then rejects again
: A study of Grossman’s manuscripts suggests that he was aware of the delicacy of the ideological balancing act he was performing. The story ends with Vavilova abandoning her baby and rushing out to join some Red Army cadets as they march suicidally toward the advancing Poles. Magazanik and his wife, Beila, in whose home Vavilova has been lodging, are watching. The published version ends as follows:

Not taking his eyes off Vavilova, Magazanik said, “Once there were people like that in the Bund. Real human beings, Beila. Call us human beings? No, we’re just manure.”

Alyosha had woken up. He was crying and kicking, trying to get out of his swaddling clothes. Coming back to herself, Beila said to her husband, “Listen, the baby’s woken up. You’d better light the Primus—we must heat up some milk.”

The cadets disappeared around a turn in the road.

In the manuscript, however, there is one more sentence: “Beila sighed and said loudly, “A Tatar, an ignorant Tatar!” (The Russian is simply “Nu, Tatarin!”—a phrase that is oddly difficult to translate. In English we say “He/she is a real Tatar” of someone we see as fiercely disciplinarian; we do not use the phrase simply to indicate savagery. Adding the word “ignorant” seemed the only way to make the words sound plausible on both occasions.) Beila has already, once before, called her husband a Tatar—and so her words carry weight. As well as criticizing Vavilova for having abandoned her baby, Beila is criticizing her husband for appearing to condone Vavilova’s behavior. Evidently either Grossman or his editors decided that this ending was too dangerous. Grossman’s uncertainty about the story’s conclusion is still more clearly shown by the changes he introduced when, at some time between 1934 and 1939, he wrote a film script based on the story [RGALI, fond 1710, opis' 1, ed. khr., 95]. In the published story Vavilova is a fanatic; in the script she is a devoted mother who has little choice but to leave her baby
for a short time
. In the story—and only in the story—Grossman poses an important question with shocking sharpness. Soviet literature of the 1920s and ’30s contains many examples of people sacrificing a husband, wife, or parent, but only Grossman asked whether it is right for a mother to abandon her newborn child for the good of the cause. Contemporary critics were evidently ill at ease with this question. Even though the story was praised in Soviet journals, there was almost no serious discussion of the dilemma it poses.

Grossman’s script was never made into a film; it is not to be confused with Aleksandr Askol'dov’s
The Commissar
, based on the same story. Made in 1967,
The Commissar
was banned for two decades but won two international prizes on its release in 1988. Curiously, just as
Life and Fate
was more thoroughly banned than any other Soviet book, so
The Commissar
may have been more thoroughly banned than almost any other Soviet film. Askol'dov was told that the only copy had been destroyed. In the Gorbachev era, however, it was discovered that workers in a film archive had preserved a copy. What made
The Commissar
so unacceptable was, no doubt, its final sequence (not, of course, corresponding to anything in Grossman’s original story) about the Shoah.

All the above—the importance of the repetition of “Nu, Tatarin!,” the differences between story and script, the reaction of contemporary critics—is summarized from an article by Yury Bit-Yunan to be published in 2010 by
Voprosy literatury
.

*
his professional career
: At one point in “A Tale About Love,” a long story written in 1937, a film director and a scriptwriter talk about their joint project. They agree that Chekhov’s “The Steppe”—a story in which almost nothing appears to happen—is “real art.” In the context of Soviet literature from the 1930s, this discussion is startling.

“In the Town of Berdichev”

Written in 1934; first published in Literaturnaya gazeta (April 2, 1934).

*
pointed Budyonny helmet
: Semyon Budyonny (1883–1973) was a hero of the Russian civil war. His name was given to a helmet worn by Red Army soldiers between 1918 and 1921.

*
voluntary working Saturdays
: There was a Soviet tradition of voluntary working Saturdays (
subbotniki
). Lenin himself participated in the first all-Russian
subbotnik
(May 1, 1920), helping to clear building rubble from the Kremlin. These days soon ceased to be voluntary—if ever they were.

*
the Jewish nation
: Yury Bit-Yunan suggests that Grossman is alluding to a story told by Grushenka in
The Brothers Karamazov
: a wicked woman is cast, after her death, into a lake of fire. Her guardian angel remembers that she once gave a spring onion to a beggar. God tells the angel to try pulling her out of the lake with that onion. The angel almost succeeds, but the woman realizes that other sinners have caught hold of her and are hoping to be pulled out themselves. She kicks out and yells, “It’s my onion, not yours!” The stem of the onion breaks, and the woman falls back into the lake.

*
the July days
: This refers to a period during July 1917 when soldiers and industrial workers spontaneously demonstrated against the Provisional Government. The Bolsheviks eventually tried to provide leadership, but the demonstrations were repressed. Kerensky was appointed prime minister and the Bolsheviks temporarily lost much of their influence.

*
footcloths
: Lengths of cloth wound around the foot and ankle—more common in Russia, until the middle of the twentieth century, than socks or stockings. By the 1950s, however, they had largely disappeared—except in labor camps and the army.

*
Bald Hill
: Hills with this name—and there are many Bald Hills in Russia and Ukraine—were associated with witches and their sabbaths.

*
the same story each time
: Simon Petlyura (1879–1926) was the leader of a Ukrainian nationalist movement that was at its most powerful during 1918 and 1919. Anton Denikin (1872–1947) commanded the White armies in the south of Russia during the Civil War. And there were many other bands of anarchists, criminals, lawless peasants, etc.

*
the Bund
: The Jewish Labor Bund was a secular Jewish Socialist party in the Russian empire, active between 1897 and 1920.

"A Small Life”

Written in 1936; first published in Dobro vam! (Moscow: Sovetsky pisatel', 1967).

*
Central Rubber Office
: Vera Ignatyevna works at Rezinosbyt, which was responsible for the distribution of rubber products throughout the Soviet Union.

*
Air-Chem Defense Society
: The Society for the Promotion of Defense, Aviation, and Chemistry (Osoviakhim or Obshchestvo sodeistviya oborone i aviatsionno-khimicheskomu stroitel'stvu) was a “voluntary” civil-defense organization, described by Stalin as vital to “keeping the entire population in a state of mobilized readiness against the danger of military attack, so that no ‘accident’ and no tricks of our external enemies can catch us unawares.” Founded in 1927, it sponsored clubs and contests throughout the USSR; by the early 1930s it had around twelve million members.

*
Mostorg Department Store
: A portmanteau word, derived from the words for “Moscow” and “trade.”

"A Young Woman and An Old Woman”

According to one Russian edition, this was written 1938–40; another edition gives 1940–62. It is one of four stories that Grossman entrusted in 1961 to his friend Anna Berzer, the fiction editor at Novy mir. Berzer managed to publish it in the September 1964 issue of the journal Moskva; Korotkova remembers Berzer showing Grossman the proofs in the hospital, hoping this might cheer him up. How much of the story Grossman wrote in the late 1930s and how much in the early 1960s is unclear. Most of his stories, however, are based on recent experience, and during the 1930s Grossman spent several summer vacations in elite government houses of recreation similar to the one described here. It seems likely that he began the story in the 1930s, realized that the subject matter made it unpublishable, and so waited until the time of Khrushchev’s “Thaw” before completing and attempting to publish it.

*
All-Union People’s Commissariat
: “People’s Commissariat” was the term used between 1918 and 1946 for a government ministry. There were People’s Commissariats for each constituent republic and also for the Soviet Union as a whole; the latter were known as All-Union People’s Commissariats.

*
Kuntsevo
: This village on the bank of the Moscow River first became a summer resort for Muscovites during the nineteenth century. In the 1930s Stalin and other members of the political elite had dachas there.

*
long ZIS’s—beige, green, or black
: The M-1 was, at the time, a new model. ZIS is an acronym for Zavod imeni Stalina (Factory named after Stalin).

*
thorn apple
:
Datura stramonium
—a powerful narcotic, usually considered too poisonous to eat.

*
our wheat’s all burning!
: Compare: “And while they were still transporting the grain, there was dust wherever you went. It was like clouds of smoke—over the village, over the fields, over the face of the moon at night. I remember one man going out of his mind. ‘We’re on fire!’ he kept screaming. ‘The sky is burning! The earth is burning!’” [Vasily Grossman,
Everything Flows
(New York: NYRB Classics, 2009), 125.]

*
Nevraev
: His name means “not a liar.”

*
“try to get their hands on our Motherland!” said Gagareva
: In 1939 Japan and the Soviet Union fought a brief, undeclared war. Japan was defeated at the Battle of Khalkhin Gol. This is probably why Japan later chose not to ally with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union.

*
twenty-one minutes late
: During the 1930s workers were penalized harshly for absenteeism or for being more than twenty minutes late for work.