In the 1960s, Vassili Grossman was a victim of censorship by the Soviet regime and his major work “Life and Destiny” only appeared posthumously.
The torments of the writer Vassili Grossman in the face of the censorship which strikes him can be read in the memoirs which appear for the first time in French (Memories and correspondence), this Wednesday, February 22, 2023. Calmann-Lévy editions publish or republish five books by this novelist on the same day, including his masterpiece on the Battle of Stalingrad, a turning point in the Second World War.
If Grossman had been in 1942 a reporter very appreciated in the USSR for his articles from the front, his novel written at the end of the 1950s seems much more problematic to the regime of Nikita Khrushchev. Life and Destiny shows that the propaganda around this titanic battle is not a Nazi specificity and that, worse, the Germans then stated on Stalinism some unpleasant truths to hear.
His characters are not either heroes that the story would exalt in the official way, but men prey to or guilty of the baseness imposed by survival in times of war, led by unsavory leaders. “VSThis radiography of the lie, which is not soluble in the sacrosanct dialectic, makes Life and Destiny inadmissible for the high authorities. The novel becomes a real affair of state“, says in the preface to this new edition of the 1,000-page novel Luba Jurgenson, a Russian-language aggregate of Estonian origin.
KGB raid
In Memories and correspondence, unpublished book in French, the concern of the native author of Ukraine shines through. “To my great sadness I can’t tell you anything more about the fate of the story, it was deprogrammed by the Glavlit with a crash“, he explained to a friend in April 1959, referring to the censorship organization and to Tiergartenanother fiction about the Second World War.
In the fall of 1960, Grossman submitted his great novel to the literary journal The Standard. The answer fell in January 1961: no publication “for ideological and political reasons“.”Your letter saddened me. She is not sincere“, Grossman replies to the review. He is right: he was omitted to be told that the KGB had looked into the book, only to conclude that it contained “a pernicious critique of the Soviet socialist system“. The writer took his precautions, entrusting copies of the manuscript to friends, when, in February 1961, the KGB came to search his home to seize the novel. What followed? An obstinate silence.
A tragic fate
“A year has passed since. I kept thinking about the disaster that had upset my life as a writer, about the tragic fate of my book. (…) Depriving me of my book is like depriving a father of his child“, launches Grossman in a plea sent directly to Khrushchev. It’s a waste of time: we listen to him, we don’t stop him, but any publication remains excluded. His comrades in Stalingrad distance themselves from him. “None of the fighter friends called me, I felt sad“, he confided the day after Victory Day, in May 1962.
When Grossman died of cancer in September 1964, he imagined Life and Destiny condemned to remain in the limbo of the communist regime. It was not until 1974 that the manuscript was released from the USSR, and in 1980 that it was published in Switzerland by L’Âge d’homme editions. The first French translation dates from 1983, in France at Julliard.
Calmann-Lévy recovered the rights to the novel and had it retranslated. “It is a strong commitment from the house“, explains to AFP its general manager Philippe Robinet. “When Vassili Grossman tells the pitiless truth of this war, and that there is behind the personal journey of this disenchanted communist, atheist Jew, lucid writer, we believe that it is our role to bring such a great author back to light“.