Vassili Grossman , born the December 12th 1905 with Berditchev in Ukraine, dead the September 15th 1964, was a Russian writer .

Biography

Its family was of comparable Jewish origin, not believing and not speaking Yiddish. He studies with Kiev, then with Moscow where he writes his first texts and obtains his diploma for the occupation of chemical engineer in 1929. He settles then in the area of the Donbass with his wife, married in 1928. But it returns little from time afterwards to Moscow and divorce in 1932. It gives up its work of engineer to devote itself to the writing with the encouragements of Gorki.

When the war bursts in the USSR in 1941, Vassili Grossman goes voluntary for the face. He becomes journalist in the Red Army and takes part in principal confrontations with the German army. He is deeply upset by the massive massacres of Jewish civilians, in particular in Ukraine, and starts to join together elements which will give rise to later the black Livre . He takes an active part in the Bataille of Stalingrad, and its accounts of the face bring it to the Soviet rank of hero.

He follows the Red Army in his offensive towards Germany. He is thus the first man to be written on the death camps Nazis while entering to Treblinka in 1943. Its account the hell of Treblinka (Треблинскийад) was used as testimony at the time of the Procès of Nuremberg. He was also the first journalist to enter Berlin in 1945. He learns that his/her mother, remained in Ukraine the first weeks of the German invasion, was assassinated in Berditchev with several thousands of Soviet Jews.

With the return of the war, it takes its distances with the mode. He which wrote novels of socialist realism becomes very critical, in particular on the person of Stalin and the fate reserved for the minorities. Its writings are disparaged by the official press. It is deeply marked by the Complot of the white blouses which is for him the demonstration of the parallel between the Nazi regimes and Soviet who finally finds themselves in the anti-semitism.

Thought

Grossman arrives at the conclusion in Any master key (1963) that the history of Russia had the opposite course of that of the Occident: instead of seeking freedom and prosperity by the democracy, Russia sought it by the power. The serfdom of Pierre Large the is thus even more brutal under Lénine. The Russian power was thus created on the force and not on freedom.

Vassili Grossman believes that any form of imposition of the " Well suprême" with humanity finishes in carnage. He thinks that only the kindness of an individual to another is possible.

The epopee of For a right cause and of Life and Destin

In 1962, Vassili Grossman finished its large novel. It sends the manuscript of it to its editor. This one, frightened, transmits the scathing attack to the KGB. A few days later, two officers as a civilian present themselves to the residence of the writer. They seize the copies, the drafts, and to the inking ribbons of the typewriters, for fear one can make use of it to reconstitute the text. Vassili Grossman protests, calls some with Khrouchtchev, then knows one period of deep depression. Eighteen months later, he dies of a cancer of the stomach. A quotation extracted the novel makes it possible to include/understand the reaction of the Soviet critics: What was played, it was the fate of Kalmouks, Tatars of the Crimea, Tchètchènes and Balkares exiled, on order of Stalin, in Siberia and with Kazakhstan, having lost the right to remember their history, to teach with their children in their native tongue. What was played was the fate of the Jews, which the Red Army had saved, and on the head of which Stalin was on the point of cutting down the sword that it had taken again with the hands of Hitler, thus commemorating the tenth birthday of the victory of the people with Stalingrad.

The novel thus is regarded as definitively lost. But in 1970, certain new texts of Vassili Grossman appear in Germany, brought by Soviet defectors. In 1980, drafts miraculeusement preserved of Life and destiny left the USSR thanks to microfilms of Andrei Sakharov. In spite of some missing passages, the novel is finally published in Switzerland the same year. It was necessary to await the Glasnost so that it appears in Russia in 1989.

Selected works

• the black Book (ЧернаяКнига), written in collaboration with Ilya Ehrenbourg, is an account complete and quantified company of extermination of the Jews of Soviet Union by the Germans.
• For a right cause (Заправоедело) is a large novel tolstoïen which has as a framework the war, of its beginnings until the battle of Stalingrad. It was published in Soviet Union in a largely censured version.
• Life and destiny (Жизньисудьба) is the major work of Vassili Grossman. This novel is the continuation (which can be read independently) of For a right cause. For Grossman, " work, it is the liberté"
• Any master key (Всетечет) is a news on the return in its country of an internee of the Gulag. The manuscript was seized by it at the same time as that of Vie and destiny .
• the Madonna Sixtine is a meditation on the beauty and the destiny having like pretexts celebrates it table of Raphaël museum of Dresden.
• Notebooks of war. From Moscow to Berlin. Texts selected and presented by Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova. Translated from English and Russian by Catherine Astroff and Jacques Guiod, Calmann-Levy, 390 p.c' is the compost of its two large novels on the war.

Theatrical adaptations

• Letter with the son , translation of Alexis Berelowitch called by Sylvie Caillaud put in scene of Bernard Martin for the Theater of the Lamp.
• " The Lettre" Last; , translation of Alexandre Berelowitch, put in scene of Frederick Wiseman, called by Catherine Samie, Studio-Theater, 2000, price of the best actress 2000.
• to also note the first world one in France of the adaptation theater of Life and destiny , by Lev Rocks. Creation on February 4th, with the troop of the Maly theater of St Petersbourg, with MC93 Bobigny. The troop worked four years on the text.

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