Vasily S. Grossman, A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941-1945 (Book Review)

Vasily S. Grossman, A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941-1945, trans, and ed. Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova. 416 pp. New York: Pantheon, 2006. ISBN-13 978-0375424076. $27.95. One would be hard pressed to identify any glimmer of light amid the darkness that befell Soviet society in the summer of 1941. One of the few rays was the rediscovery of self-assertiveness by Soviet servicemen, which had been dulled by more than a decade of terror, indoctrination, and humiliation. Few were more indelible than the famous trio of writers-turned-frontline correspondents: Il'ia Ehrenburg, Konstantin Simonov, and Vasilii Grossman. Their candid and often moving reports from the front were a breath of fresh air for millions of citizens accustomed to the dreary dullness of Soviet reportage. Later, the publication of Ehrenburg's and Simonov's memoirs were events whose significance went far beyond their literary tributes. (1) Yet it is Grossman, the one who never had the chance to record his memoirs or even wimess the publication of his great wartime masterpiece, who towers above them ail. Universally recognized as one of the finest writer-philosophers of the 20th century as well as an uncompromising thinker, Grossman today is widely read and well known, in sharp contrast to his two politically savvy fellow writers. Even those who have not read his novels are familiar with the KGB's confiscation and ban of his epic, Life and Fate, an episode that embittered Grossman's twilight and was epitomized by Mikhail Suslov's cynical remark that the book could well be published in the Soviet Union ... only in 200 years or so. Grossman died shortly after the encounter; Suslov lived much longer. But the novel saw the light in Suslov's lifetime, first outside the Soviet Union in 1980 and then inside it in 1989. Grossman, it would seem, would have the last laugh, albeit posthumously. But would he?