The war raging at the gates of Europe awakens the ghosts of others Conflicts, which have sometimes marked the literature. Both writers and soldiers, they recounted what they saw, wrote about their traumas and their disappointments. For this fourth text in our “Writers in the Trenches” series, The duty looks at Vassili Grossman and Curzio Malaparte.
Following the example of the Russian writer Vassili Grossman (1905-1964), the war can sometimes be for a writer the moment of a double revelation.
For the author of life and destinyone of the greatest novels of the XXe century, the Second World War was thus a turning point, both in his life and in his work.
Trained as a chemist – like Primo Levi -, writer knighted in 1934 by Maxime Gorki (“the engineer of human souls”, Stalin would say), a member in good standing of the Union of Soviet Writers from 1937, following without flinching too much the line of gone, Vassili Grossman survived the years of the Great Terror, show trials, deportations and mass executions without difficulty.
Yet the era was devastating, and writers were hard hit: of the 700 authors gathered for the first Writers’ Congress—during which the famous doctrine of “socialist realism” was proclaimed—only 50 were still alive at the time. of the second congress, in 1954. “It was a time when / Only the dead smiled, happy in their rest”, wrote Anna Akhmatova.
In June 1941, Vassili Grossman, a 35-year-old “official writer”, volunteered to fight in the Red Army, after Nazi Germany broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. The recruiting office declares him unfit – overweight, age, myopia – but by dint of insisting, the writer will be hired for the Krasnaya Zvezda (The Red Star), the official daily newspaper of the Red Army, which has millions of readers. A newspaper which Stalin himself, it seems, wanted to check every page before printing.
Like Ilya Ehrenburg, who covered the Spanish Civil War for the newspaper Izvestialike before him Isaac Babel, propagandist on the front of the Russo-Polish war of 1919 — an experience that will feed the stories of his powerful red cavalryin 1926 — Vassili Grossman became a war correspondent. He will accompany the Soviet army in order to report on the reality on the ground, recounting the lives of the soldiers, having to write day after day in all circumstances, even between two bombardments.
The ruthless truth of war
Ilya Ehrenburg and Níkos Kazantzákis during the Spanish Civil War, Orwell, Hemingway, Dos Passos and Steinbeck during the Second World War, many are the writers who fed the newspapers – and sometimes also the propaganda of the countries in question.
The Italian writer Curzio Malaparte, shock reporter on the Eastern front for the Corriere della Serafor his part knew how to powerfully transcend his experience in the face of the horror of war in Kaputt (1943). A power of evocation that is coupled with a philosophical commitment: this is where the writer reveals himself to the journalist, almost elevating war reporting to the status of a literary genre, “in the middle of a Europe corrupted by hunger, hatred and despair”.
Let us also think of the Russian writer and politician Zakhar Prilepine, whose first novels bear witness to his experience as a soldier during the two wars in Chechnya, in 1996 and 1999 (Pathologies, 2007). Through Ukrainian newspaper and Those of the Donbass (2017 and 2018), this more lucid than exalted ultranationalist also told his version of the Donbass war alongside pro-Russian separatists. Between the role of actor and that of observer, the boundary is sometimes blurred: on February 28, 2022, Prilepin was sanctioned by the European Union, like several oligarchs, because of his role in the Russian conflict. -Ukrainian and his links with Vladimir Putin.
Vassili Grossman will have spent more than 1000 days on the Eastern front, that is to say three of the four years of the “Great Patriotic War”, as the Russians call the longest and perhaps bloodiest episode of the World War II — 30 million dead, including 17 million civilians.
Under his pen, everything is imbued with his incisive and sensitive gaze, his humanity, his sincere interest in men and women, animals and nature. And it’s no surprise that we also discover that Chekhov was his favorite writer.
Considered one of the finest and most honest eyewitnesses to this war, Vassili Grossman was not spared personal tragedies: his eldest son died in combat, his mother died, like all the 35,000 Jewish inhabitants of Berdichev, Ukraine, during the German advance.
Witness of the colossal battle of Stalingrad, nearly 1000 kilometers southeast of Moscow along the Volga, he will be forced to leave the city in January 1943, soul in pain. “The city has become a living person for me,” he wrote to his father. This battle, one of the deadliest in history, is one of the major experiences of his life.
Continuing to follow the Red Army, through Belarus and Poland, and to Berlin in ruins after the crushing of the German army, Vassili Grossman will be the first in the world to describe an extermination camp and to collect testimonials on the spot (Treblinka Hell, in 1944). Relentlessly, the writer wanted to put in black and white what he thought was “the pitiless truth of war”, gradually losing his political naivety with regard to “exterminating totalitarianism”.
A dangerous game
Grossman’s fascinating notebooks, filled hot and to the brim throughout the war, now partly published, could have cost him his death if the authorities had known about them. They will nourish all his work to come, forming the matrix of a monumental fresco in two parts: For a just causewhich will appear in 1952 in serial form in the review Novy Mirbut above all life and destiny, an “anti-Soviet” novel on which the writer worked for 15 years. Both novels center around the Battle of Stalingrad and the fate of the Shaposhnikov family. In life and destinythrough which Grossman takes a ruthless look at Russian totalitarianism, the writer suggests that there is no difference in principle between Hitler’s Nazism and the Stalinist regime.
“I don’t believe in good,” says Ikonnikov’s character at the start of life and destiny, I believe in kindness. And also: “There are no innocents among the living.” »
In 1961, after submitting his manuscript to the Writers’ Union, the KGB knocked on his door and “arrested” life and destinyseized all typed copies of the manuscript, notes and drafts, as well as the tapes and carbons used by the secretary who typed her manuscripts.
“The locking up of a novel is the highest distinction that state power can bestow on a literary work,” writes Efim Etkind in his preface to life and destiny : the author’s imagination is placed at the level of reality. »
Thanks to two copies that the writer had secured with friends, as well as the complicity of Andrei Sakharov and his wife, the novel was published in Russian in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1980, before this War and peace of the XXe century appeared in French in 1983, bringing its author belated fame.
Vassili Grossman died of cancer in 1964, without ever having joined the Communist Party.