Tetradki

Towards the end of today's Start the Week, a weekly topical programme on Radio 4, Tiffany Watt Smith seems to suggest that schadenfreude doesn't have a real equivalent in 'genuine' English.

But isn't it simply gloating?

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Labels: BBC, English, German, language, Radio 4, schadenfreude, Start the Week

Tolstoy based Dolokhov, a curious secondary character in 'War and Peace", on several real-life men. One of them was Fyodor Tolstoy the American (Толстой-Американец), Leo Tolstoy's cousin-uncle. As a young boy Tolstoy the future writer knew him personally and was very impressed by his personality and the legends that surrounded him.

Fyodor Tolstoy, among other things, killed eleven people at duels and was demoted to the ranks several times but got restored after feats of heroism in Russia's many wars of the time, including the main battle with Napoleon in 1812, the Battle of Borodino. He got the nickname 'Amerikanets' after taking part in a round-the-world sea expedition.

There is a portrait of Fyodor Tolstoy as a young man in Leo Tolstoy's Moscow house, now a museum.

The new TV adaptation of 'War and Peace,' currently running on BBC 1 and cable channels around the world, plays up the characters of Dolokhov and Sonia to the point of overshadowing the main characters, Pierre, Andrei and Natasha.

At first glance, it may seem a fault with the script author Andrew Davies and director Tim Harper. However, a more careful look at the character of Fyodor Dolokhov makes it clear that 'reading up' Dolokhov is a valid choice that may explain a lot in Leo Tolstoy's novel and the reappraise the comparative weight of characters in the book.

In a sense, Dolokhov is as much a Leo Tolstoy as Pierre, into whom the writer and thinker put most of himself, as conventional interpretation tells us. A writer, especially a great one, cannot help splitting his soul and putting bits of it into the characters he creates. Dolokhov is a kind of horcrux of Tolstoy himself. He reflects the character of Tolstoy the man as much as the floppy humanist Pierre. The cold fury, the anger against conventions, the scornful nationalism, the desire to be accepted rivalling only the desire to humiliate the accepting, the grand society, — those are the traits that were driving Leo Tolstoy too, in life and in writing.

The writer, before his marriage, was not alien to excessive drinking, partying with the gypsies and losing and winning, though mostly losing, in card games.

Tolstoy's appearance and peculiar mannerisms bear striking resemblance with that of Dolokhov. Here is how WS Maugham describes Tolstoy:
"He was irritable, brutally contradictory and arrogantly indifferent to other people's feelings. Turgenev has said that he never met anything more disconcerting than Tolstoy's inquisitorial look, which, accompanied by a few biting words, could goad a man to fury."

Tolstoy challenged Turgenev to a duel and friends had difficulty in preventing him from actually fighting while reconciliation took more than ten years. Tolstoy's stare, that unnerved Turgenev so much, is the same as Dolokhov's: "Dolokhov looked at Pierre with clear, mirthful, cruel eyes, and that smile of his which seemed to say, 'Ah! This is what I like!'" (from Garnett's translation.) This is from the scene at the English Club in Moscow when Pierre challenges Dolokhov to a duel.

That same straight, cruel inquisitional look follows Dolokhov in all his appearances in the novel, all the way to the last episode with him, when he orders that no French prisoners should be kept alive. Before that final scene with Dolokhov, he and Denisov, both commanders of small partisan troops that raided Napoleon's army behind the lines, have a fierce argument about the treatment of the prisoners. It appears that Dolokhov, unlike Denisov, was systematically slaughtering them. Denisov is repulsed by that.

But where does Tolstoy, the great humanist, stand in that argument? Curiously, when Pierre meets Prince Andrew on the eve of the Battle of Borodino and listens to his friend's famous monologue on the 'latent patriotism' of the Russians, Prince Andrew says exactly what later Dolokhov says to Denisov, even with greater clarity and ferocity: "One thing I would do if I had the power," he began again, "I would not take prisoners. Why take prisoners? It's chivalry! The French have destroyed my home and are on their way to destroy Moscow, they have outraged and are outraging me every moment. They are my enemies. In my opinion they are all criminals. And so thinks Timokhin and the whole army. They should be executed!" And later, in the same monologue: "Take no prisoners, but kill and be killed!" Pierre looks at Andrew, both frightened and compassionate, but agrees with everything he said.

Horcruxes are from JK Rowling's Harry Potter. They are magical objects where the dark wizard hides parts of his split soul. In Somerset Maugham's essay on Tolstoy in the book 'Great Novelists and Their Novels' (1954) there is a shrewd observation:
"There is a point in the writer's psychology that I have never seen mentioned, though it must be obvious to anyone who has studied the lives of authors. Every creative writer's work is, to some extent at least, a sublimation of instincts, desires, daydreams, call them what you like, which for one cause or another he has repressed, and by giving them literary expression he is freed of the compulsion to give them the further release of action. But it is not a complete satisfaction. He is left with a feeling of inadequacy. That is the ground of the man of letters' glorification of the man of action and the unwilling, envious admiration with which he regards him."

Applying this to Dolokhov, it becomes apparent that the character is part of Tolstoy, the part that the writer couldn't admit in himself or couldn't allow in himself, and so decided to give it to his literary creation.

And yes, JK Rowling took her Antonin Dolohov, a Death Eater, one of the cruellest wizards, from Tolstoy's 'War and Peace.'

Note: Wikipedia has an article on Maugham's book, referring to it as 'Ten Novels and Their Authors' of 1954. My American paper edition of the book is titled 'Great Novelists and Their Novels' with copyright dated 1948.

In this video Dolokhov and Pierre duel, from Sergey Bondarchuk's cinema version (1965-67) -

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The Borodino Battle, 1972 series, Prince Andrei's monologue with 'No quarter!' at 24 min. into the video -

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Labels: BBC, Dolohov, Dolokhov, Harry Potter, JK Rowling, literature, Tolstoy, War and Peace

BBC's investigative Panorama programme on Monday (25 Jan 2016) looked into allegations of corruption against Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Brave or meek, sensationally revealing or we-knew-it-all-along, it left quite a few questons unanswered.

One of them, with which non-Russian friends bombarded me, was about the nickname that is allegedly referring to Putin in coded conversations — 'Mikhail Ivanovich.'

One friend asked, all right, Mikhail Ivanovich, I get it, but what is his surname?
Without thinking, I replied: Toptygin (Топтыгин).

Mikhail Ivanovich Toptygin is one of the many affectionate, or not very affectionate folklore names for the Bear. The bear in Russian imagery is always the biggest of them all; he can be stupid, funny, clumsy, threatening; he can be a secondary character, or the main character, the Big Boss. Russian dictionaries have numerous entries on the bear and his nicknames. And the name, Mikhail-Michael, is quite common. Gorbachev is Mikhail Sergeevich. Kutuzov, the Russian army commander in history and in Tolstoy's 'War and Peace,' was Mikhail Illarionovich.

In 'War and Peace', Pierre, Anatole and Dolokhov get drunk, borrow a bear from the gypsies for fun, and, when a gendarme arrives, they tie them back-to-back and push the two in the river. The Bear appears in Pushkin's 'Eugene Onegin' chasing Tatiana in her dream (see in English here, Chapter 5, XII, Russian text here). Saltykov-Schedrin, the great 19 Century satirist, has a tale of three bears serving as governors of different regions with the rank of Major. One of them, the cleverest, even gets promoted to Colonel. Each of the three have the same name Toptygin: Toptygin I, Toptygin II and Toptygin III. And at least one of them is Mikhail Ivanovich (Ivanovich being the patronymic, or middle name, with the stress on A). Chekhov wrote a one-act comedy sketch 'The Bear' (summary in English and text in Russian) in 1888, in which a burly land-owner challenges a young widow to a duel, after which they fall in love. The play was made into a film by Isidor Annensky in 1938.

The image of Russia as a bear, both in the West and in the East, is so strong that it merited a separate Wikipedia article. President Putin himself described the Bear as the master of the forest in October 2014.

But Mikhail Ivanovich the Bear, is he as strong in the Russian mind as Mikhail Ivanovich the Boss? Yes and no.

On top of Mikhail Ivanovich there is also the cute Mishka, the 1980 Moscow Olympics mascot, and there is also a Mikhail Ivanovich the 'Chef' in the popular 1969 comedy 'The Diamond Arm' by Leonid Gaidai (summary in English on Wikipedia). Thanks to Valery Adzhiev for the reminder!

In fact, the film is so popular that the actual name of a character in the film, Mikhail Ivanovich the police officer, a Captain later promoted to Major, shifted to the wicked smugglers' ring-leader, the Chef. It must be thanks to the scene, when one of the gangsters disguised as a cab driver, learns that the police are on their trail and rushes off to call the Chef.
'You mean, Mikhail Ivanovich?' asks the main character.
'Yes, yes, him!'

This is how 'Mikhail Ivanovich' travelled from the Bear to the Boss.

'I must call Mikhail Ivanovich' scene from 'The Diamond Arm' -

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Vladimir Putin on the Master of the Taiga forest (from RT YouTube channel) -

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Labels: BBC, BBC Panorama, cultural references, Russian bear, Russian cinema, Russian cultural references, russian words in English

BBC 2016 series reviewed in New Yorker

Louis Menand in New Yorker compares the BBC 1972 adaptation with the currently running one.


"War and Peace" is not the longest novel, Richardson's "Clarissa", for example, is longer in word count in English.

Serfs were emancipated in Russia in 1861, not in 1862 as mentioned in the article.

The hunt scene was not omitted, it was in Episode 4 just now, and beautifully done.

This last musical quote also explains, partly, why they chose to play it at the height of the Cold War in 1974 (in fact, it was the height of Brezhnev-Nixon's detente): it was hardly ever played in the Soviet Union for the simple reason that this great piece of patriotic umpapah includes the tsarist anthem. Popular in the West, it was a no-no for the ruling communists.

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Labels: BBC, cinema, New Yorker, War and Peace

(The Hussars' Ballad)

I know what I really-really miss in BBC's new TV adaptation of Tolstoy's 'War and Peace', it's the music.

Many greatest scenes in the novel, and in previous screen versions, are accompanied by great musical background: Natasha singing and dancing, armies marching and the great ball with the Emperor. In the first two episodes of the BBC series there is hardly any music, if at all.

BBC's guide to War and Peace and the new TV series has a dedicated page here. Don't get lost in Russian names and complicated narrative.

The lack of music on the one hand, and the obvious 'sexing-up' of Tolstoy in the new adaptation reminded me of a tremendously popular Soviet musical comedy 'The Hussars Ballad' ("Гусарская баллада", Wikipedia article in English here). Eldar Ryazanov's film is based on a play 'A Long Time Ago' ("Давным-давно") by Alexander Gladkov with original score by Tikhon Khrennikov.

The story is a comedy of errors. Shurochka (Alexandra), a young patriotically minded girl runs away from home dressed up as a hussar cornet (second lieutenant, like the young Churchill) and joins the Russian army fighting Napoleon's invasion in 1812. There, she finds her own true love, gets decorated with a medal, meets field-marshal Kutuzov and the hussar hero of the war Denis Davydov (Davyd Vassiliev in the film and Vassily Denisov in Tolstoy's novel). All along she and others sing beautiful songs.

The film and the musical numbers are still very popular and Poruchik (lieutenant) Rzhevsky, the main male character, since the film has started a folk lore life of its own as a hero of numerous bawdy jokes. This is where the 'sexing-up' reference comes in.

Story lines in the film are reminiscent of Tolstoy's many subplots and there really was a woman in 1812 who sneaked in disguise into the Russian cavalry during the war.

The film is available in full on the Mosfilm's YouTube channel here. (no subtitles, but you won't need them). And here is the Song of King Henry IV from the film, the whole Napoleonic invasion of 1812 in 100 seconds (lyrics unrelated to the story).

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Labels: BBC, Davydov, film, history, jokes and anecdotes, Tolstoy, War and Peace

(epsiode 2)

Dolokhov (Tom Burke) banging Helene (Tuppence Middleton) on a dining table is definitely the high point of Episode 2 in the new BBC adaptation of Tolstoy's novel.

NB: wine in glasses and carafe in the foreground wasn't moving! How does one achieve that, I don't know.

Pierre is wonderful and Andrei still disappointing.

Picture: Colonel Alexander Figner (1887-1813) on whom Tolstoy is said to have based the character of Dolokhov. (wikipedia)

According to BBC, the adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's novel averaged 6.3 million viewers, peaking at 6.7 million. It was up against ITV's Endeavour and spy drama Deutschland 83 on Channel 4, which averaged 4.4 million and 1.2 million viewers respectively.

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Labels: BBC, film, literature, Tolstoy, War and Peace

BBC 1 (TV) started a new TV adaptation of Tolstoy's epic 'War and Peace' (by the way, not rpt not the longest novel ever) with Lily James (Downton's Lady Rose) as Natasha, Paul Dano as Pierre and James Norton as Andrei. (article about the cast in Radio Times)

Actors playing leading characters admitted to not having read the book before, and Andrew Davies (script) and Tom Harper (director) skipped a few crucial bits in the opening episode.

I'll give them the benefit of the doubt, it’s a 6-part series. Prince Andrei, a central character, was only sketched through his dislike of women, while his dislike of the high society and his ideas on Napoleon have all but disappeared; and with Pierre-Helene they modified the entrapment scene, leaving out the most exciting moment, Pierre's feeble declaration of love, in French, which they had in the 1972 TV series with Anthony Hopkins.

Rebecca Front (wikipedia about her) as Anna Mikhailovna Drubetskaya, a very minor character in the novel, definitely upstaged all others in the first episode in her confrontation with Prince Vassily (Stephen Rea, wikipedia). Front, a very well-known British comedian and actress, has such a strong presence that everybody else around her somehow disappears into the shadows.

Some viewers were also puzzled by the skull on Natasha's cleavage seen on a very steampunk promotional poster (here). What is it? Steampunk or not, it may be interpreted, at least jokingly,
as a surreptitious hint on Pierre, him becoming a free mason in the course of the book, with the skull, or Adam's head, being the masons’ secret symbol. Tolstoy devotes much attention to masons in the novel. Let's see how the makers of the film tackled this, or not tackled at all.

Pierre and Helene entrappment scene ("Je vous aime") from the 1972 series —

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Labels: Anthony Hopkins, BBC, film, Lily James, Rebecca Front, reviews, Tolstoy, War and Peace

A BBC correspondent has just tweeted from Russia, with alarm, that the #BBC hashtag has entered the top-trending list for the country. As it turns out, it's not for the British Broadcasting Corporation. The acronym BBC is in Cyrilic and reads VVS – veh-veh-ehss – voenno-vozdushnye sily, or Russian Air Force.

Tomorrow, 12 August, the centenary of the force will be widely marked in Russia. On this day in 1912 tsar Nicolas II signed a decree forming the first Imperial Air Force unit.

Among journalists, and sometimes among listeners as well, the BBC is often jokingly referred to as Veh-Veh-Ehss. In Soviet times the rule was to cyrillize Western acronyms, either with or without translating the name. BBC was transcribed phonetically without translating its name as Би-би-си and, for example, the CIA as ЦРУ - Центральное разведывательное управление.

In the Russian media these days the old-style Cyrillic transliteration of foreign names competes with direct Latin script. Rules are often defined in-house, different publications have different styles.

This new trend is hugely influenced by the ease of switching scripts and the Internet. In two ways. First, the use of Latin transcription of famous brand names, commercial or public, is a way of increasing global traffic to a website. It is more likely that your content will be picked up by the net spiders if they stumble on the more familiar Latin transcription than on a Cyrillic one. Secondly, many Russians use Latin letters on the Internet as though they were Cyrillic where possible. They do it for convenience, but with the resulting back-influence on the spoken language. BBC=VVS is one such example.

Here is a clip from the iconic 1980s film 'ACCA', pronounced 'AHss-ah'. The singer is Afrika, a famous 80s rocker. The man dressed in the uniform of a Soviet BBC major is in fact a member of a gang of criminals who are planning a heist in Yalta, Crimea.

[埋込みオブジェクト:http://www.youtube.com/v/bitqp-1SHhI?version=3&hl=en_US]

And this is the official Soviet march of the Air Force, 'We are born to make the fairy-tale true'.

[埋込みオブジェクト:http://www.youtube.com/v/PbW_JaCm05A?version=3&hl=en_US]

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Labels: ASSA, BBC, cinema, language, newspeak, Russian and English

Wrap-up of the Radio 4 (BBC) Dramatisation.

The longer Russian version of this review is here. To read other Tetradki posts on the novel and the Radio 4 project, click on Grossman label.

BBC's Radio 4 broadcasted an 8-hour adaptation of Vasiliy Grossman's novel Life and Fate. It is a tremendous achievement by the BBC team, an achievement that brings back to international readership a 'lost' great novel of the 20th Century literature.

Fifty years ago the KGB arrested the book, Grossman was told it will not be published for another 200 years. When Robert Chandler made the first English translation 25 years ago the book was hardly noticed. Last week it shot to the top of British bestsellers list.

There are brilliant finds in transforming the novel into a drama. Producer Alison Hindell and drama writers Jonathan Myerson and Mike Walker should be feted for bringing to radio such a huge and complex work as Life and Fate.

First, they've changed the narrative from the writer's third person to the characters' first person. It produces a surprisingly fresh, sharp effect in the Viktor and Lyuda episode narrated through the eyes of Nadya, Viktor and Lyudmila Shtrums' daughter, a minor character in the novel. The script writers, while being faithful to the novel rebuild the character to a greater importance which may well be how Grossman himself intended to develop her had he time to carry on with his epic, which he had planned to be in four parts like Tolstoy's War and Peace. Nadya is based on Grossman's own daughter Katya.

Another striking find is the first person narrative of the nazi soldier – operator of a gas chamber in the concentration camp, whose main duty is to watch Jewish inmates die. It's absolutely chilling ('I'm only closing doors').

Another brilliantly played scene is from Chapter 15, Part II, the 'theoretical discussion' between an old bolshevik Mostovskoy and an SS 'thinker' Liss, when the nazi interrogator succeeds in stirring up doubts in the head of the bolshevik. 'We are your mortal enemies, yes-yes. But our victory is your victory. Do you understand? And if you win, then we will die, but also live in your victory. It's like a paradox: by losing the war, we will win the war, we will develop into a new form, but with the same essence,' says Liss. That chapter, I think, should be republished separately, included in every anthology of modern thinking, taught and discussed everywhere where thinking and debating is still taught and allowed. And the BBC rendering does it its due credit.

Where script-writers needn't change much for the radio is Viktor's mother's last letter from the Jewish ghetto in Ukraine just before she was killed by the nazis. Grossman's own mother perished in the first wave of the mass shootings of Soviet Jews in September 1941, exactly 70 years ago. The mother's letter is read by Janet Suzman, a great British actress who comes from a South African Jewish family with a long history of campaigning for civil liberties and against apartheid.

I am not sure if merging Lieutenant Bach, a German company commander in Stalingrad, with another character, is a good idea. Bach is given the thoughts of a different character, Lennart, also a company commander, but a staunch nazi believer. Bach is a 'normal' German, has a Russian girlfriend in Stalingrad, and it seems slightly incongruous for him to report to the Gestapo chief on the moral spirit of the soldiers – 'there won't be a mutiny', the report which, in the novel, is made by the nazi party member Lennart. The Gestapo officer says words, that could easily have come from the mouth of a Soviet political officer: 'There will be no mutiny because of the genius of our leader. We've cut out the sick among us and also those who might get sick'. The nazi chief prepares to flee from the besieged city and promises Bach (in the play) a free pass out, in the novel the offer is made to Lennart. That doesn't really work quite well, I think, but, then, drama has to be concise.

I think Shtrum played by Kenneth Branagh is a bit too jovial, and both the tank commander Novikov and the commissar Krymov (David Tennant) slightly too hysterical, but, then, again that's drama.

Compositionally, Radio 4 series end with Shtrum being suck into the Soviet system of privilege for those who toe the line. Which, I think, may be even better than the ending of the novel itself. Grossman rushed it to deliver to a deadline – and after that neither he, nor other Russian editors had a chance of putting it through a proper pre-publishing editorial and review process. When the book was finally published in Russia Grossman was 24 years dead. The novel called Life and Fate that we know today, brilliant as it is, is in fact the 'writer's cut' – the final draft version.

There are a few bits to pick, which are Russia-specific. In the Soviet Union you didn't use 'citizen' as a form of address, not in your own workplace (Shtrum does). 'Citizen' is for those who are denied being a 'comrade', i.e. 'enemies of the people'. There is the usual mistaken shift in the stress in some Russian surnames. The director of an academic institute, Shishakov, in the play is pronounced as SHE-she-koff instead of Shi-shah-KOFF, making the 'boss's name', that is derived from 'shishka' or 'shishak' – the big one, the important one – sound almost the same as Chichikov (CHI-chi-koff), the comic character from Gogol's novel 'The Dead Souls', whose name resembles a chirping of a small bird.

BBC's radioplay is available for downloading as 13 podcasts from the BBC site. If you use iTunes you can download it in one go. The podcast page is here and the Life and Fate project page with additional information and links is here.

The radio adaptation is from the English translation by Robert Chandler (link to Amazon, some pages available to read).

Photo is from Deutsches Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archive), Bild 183-F0703-0217-001, by Yakov Ryumkin, ADN/TASS.

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Labels: BBC, Grossman, Life and Fate, Radio 4, Stalingrad, Vasily Grossman

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Labels: BBC, Grossman, Radio 4, Tolstoy, Vasily Grossman

BBC’s Radio 4 continues with its week-long monumental 8-hour 13-episode adaptation of Vasily Grossman’s world war II classic novel Life and Fate (based on translation by Robert Chandler, producer Alison Hindell).

Practically every reference to the novel mentions that Soviet leadership deemed the work so damaging to the communist cause that the novel was arrested by the KGB. A single copy, or perhaps two, was hidden by Grossman’s friends, smuggled to the West and published there, more than twenty years after it was written.

Here is the story of how it happened as told by Semyon Lipkin, poet and translator and a close friend of Grossman. He was one of the first readers of the book, the one who helped the writer to cut out the more politically risky chapters before presenting the manuscript to a literary journal. He was also one of the friends who saved the novel.

Grossman wrote a prequel to Life and Fate soon after the war and submitted it to the prestigious literary journal Novy Mir (New World). Originally it was titled Stalingrad. Novy Mir editor Konstantin Simonov, himself a famous war writer, rejected the novel after a year-long delay. The new editor Alexander Tvardovsky, a poet and an influential power in Soviet literary establishment, pushed the novel through censors and party bosses. After a few substantial changes – a chapter with a positive portrait of Stalin was added and the Russian-Jewish physicist Viktor Shtrum, the main character in the novel, was given an ethnic Russian mentor Chepyzhin. The novel was published in 1952 under the title For the Just Cause.

The novel came out just as Stalin launched his last campaign of terror, the so-called Doctors’ Plot, aimed at Soviet ethnic Jews. Grossman’s novel was denounced as anti-Soviet and ‘damaging’. There was a possibility that Grossman himself could be dragged into the Doctors’ Plot. Tvardovsky, a personal friend of Grossman, recanted, denounced the novel and declared himself in error. When Stalin died in March 1953 the Plot investigations were stopped, arrested ‘conspirators’ released and Grossman’s novel published widely to huge acclaim.

But he fell-out with Tvardovsky in a big way, remembers Lipkin. Grossman was writing Life and Fate throughout the 50s. Chapters from the novel were published in the press and there was already big interest regarding the new book without anyone realising what was in it. Novy Mir expressed interest in the novel, but Grossman wouldn’t have anything to do with the editor and friend who had betrayed him.

The editor of another literary journal, Znamya (Banner), Vadim Kozhevnikov persuaded Grossman to give the novel to him. During the summer of 1960 the novel was finished and in October Grossman submitted the typed manuscript to Znamya. Weeks passed and there was no answer from the journal. Through friends Grossman found out that the editor was hiding the novel from the staff and that something unpleasant was afoot.

That autumn he and his wife were at a writers’ resort at the Black Sea. Tvardovsky and his wife happened to be there too. The wives, who were friends independently from their husbands, arranged for them to make peace. Tvardovsky asked for a copy of the novel, ‘just to read it’. Back in Moscow, Tvardovsky came to Grossman’s flat in the middle of the night to say that the novel was greater than anything he had read, but was unpublishable. He drunk up all the vodka that was there to drink at Grossmans' and among other things told the writer that Kozhevnikov had denounced Grossman to those ‘who ought to know’, meaning the KGB – or the party, or both.

One day in February 1961, in the morning, two KGB officers, one with the rank of a colonel, came to Grossman’s flat with a warrant to seize the novel and all materials related to it. The officers acted in a polite, but firm, very efficient way. It looked as though they had precise orders about what to do. They only searched the room where Grossman worked, left alone anything that wasn’t connected to Life and Fate, but collected all copies, drafts, studies and scribbles for the novel. They then went to Grossman’s typist's flat and confiscated a copy of the novel she’d kept for proofing, carbon paper and typewriter ribbons. Tvardovsky’s copy of the book was also taken away.

A year later Grossman wrote an appeal to Khruschev asking for the book to be released. He was received by Mikhail Suslov, the party’s chief ideologue. In a meeting that continued for about three hours Suslov admitted that he hadn’t read the book himself, but decided that it couldn’t be returned to the author. Nor could it be published, not for another 200 years, he said. He promised (promise not kept), though, that Grossman’s five-volume collected works would be published and assured him that the party ‘highly valued his previous works’. Suslov based his judgements on two memos prepared for him by party aides. According to Lipkin, by Grossman’s account each memo was about 15-20 type-written pages.

Summing up what’d happened to him, Grossman told Lipkin: ‘I was strangled in a dark passageway’.

He died of cancer in 1964, his books were hardly published, the memoryof him as a writer faded and name rarely mentioned, except by friends and a few writers and scholars.

I was lucky that I had among my university professors Galina Belaya and Anatoly Bocharov, who in their lectures put Grossman among the top writers of the Soviet literature. It was from them that I first heard the name. Bocharov wrote a book on Grossman in 1970.

Semyon Lipkin’s book ‘The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman’ was published by Kniga publishers, Moscow, 1990. The text is available online here.
BBC Radio 4 page on Life and Fate dramatisation is here.
In Russian the book is here.

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Labels: BBC, Grossman, KGB, Life and Fate, Lipkin, Radio 4, Vasily Grossman