Newspaper Clipping Regarding Suppressed Soviet Novel

26 THE WALL STREET JOURNAI LEISURE & ARTS French Applaud Suppressed Soviet Novel a violent series of attacks on him in Febru- As the French critics point out, what By CYNTHIA GRENIER ary 1953. makes the Grossman book so exceptional Mr. Grossman was saved only by the is that the author finished it in 1960, at a Dithyrambic seems hardly an adequate death of Stalin in March of that year. He time when Solzhenitsyn's work was still to- term to characterize the French critical reaction to the publication of an 820-page was no longer the same man. His new tally unknown. "A Day in the Life of Ivan Russian novel written more than 20 years novel, "Vie et Destin,' written between Denisovitch" was published only two years then and 1960, continued the saga of his later. ago by Vassili Grossman, an author who Jewish family amid the Battle of Stalin- The book centers on the 1 fierce died in official disgrace in Moscow in Sep- grad, but in a radically different and criti- siege and Battle of Stalingrad, but the Ho- tember 1964. "A War and Peace of the Twentieth cal spirit. But while he worked on it, Mr. locaust, the awesome famines Of the Grossman was rehabilitated and received Ukraine, the destruction of the kulaks, the century," cooed L'Express. "The great Russian novel of the Twentieth century," literary awards from the state. gulags, Lubianka and other KGB prisons Finally, in 1960, Mr. Grossman brought are described with a kind of illumination intoned Le Monde. his completed and intensity that render all of these terri- Julliard published "Vie et Destin' manuscript to ble events singularly fresh and new despite ("Life and Destiny") in its "L'Age the monthly, more than 40 years of fictional and factual d'Homme" series, which is devoted to dis- Znamia, acquaintance, sident literature; simultaneously, it issued whose editor, One scene, cited by nearly all the a 220-page book on the author, "Le Cas Vadim Kojev- French critics. is that or a meeting in a Grossman" ("The Grossman Case") by Si- nikov (who Nazi concentration camp between an SS mon Markish, son of the distinguished Jew- still holds the officer and an old Bolshevik. Georges Suf- ish poet Peretz Markish, who perished in post today), fert in Le Point compares the scene to the a gulag in the 1950s. immediately discussion between the Grand Inquisitor Not surprisingly, perhaps, the only forwarded it and Jesus in "The Brothers Karamazov, French publication of note to ignore the to the cultural but says that the SS officer IS more re- publication of "Vie et Destin" was the section of the doubtable than the character imagined by French Communist Party's daily paper Central Com- Dostoevski. He doesn't question-nit L'Humanite. For the novel, as all the re- mittee. Mr. merely describes how Nazism and commu- viewers emphasized, is among the most Grossman nism are the one and the same. damning indictments of the Soviet system waited for ever written. exactly equating Nazi Ger- In France the book rapidly went onto nearly a year many and the U.S.S.R. Vassili Grossman the best-seller list and has gone into sev- before his The story behind the novel is quite as eral printings. Foreign rights have been remarkable as the novel itself, judging by manuscript was returned to him with a sold throughout the world. Collins in Brit- the account in "Le Cas Grossman.' Mr. brief statement saying the novel was "anti- ain and Harper & Row in the U.S. are Grossman, who had covered the Battle of Soviet.' sharing translation costs. "Life and Des- Stalingrad and the fall of Berlin as a So- In February 1961, agents of the KGB tiny" is scheduled for publication here next came to Mr. Grossman's home and not viet war correspondent, was very much a fall. Aaron Asher, executive editor of only confiscated the manuscript, all his literary hack, turning out novels in praise Harper & Row, reports the publishing notes and rough drafts, but went to the typ- of the great Soviet motherland laced with house paid a "substantial five-figure ad- ists who had typed the novel and seized encomia for Comrade Stalin. For his la- vance,' and is optimistic about its launch- their carbons and typewriter ribbons. The bors he was awarded the Stalin Prize. ing in America next fall. operation took two days. While still a war correspondent he was Mr. Grossman wrote a letter to the Po- the first Soviet writer to bring out a novel litical Bureau of the Central Committee Mrs. Grenier frequently reports on cul- dealing with the war, "The People Are Im- and was granted an interview with Michael tural events abroad. mortal." But then Mr. Grossman learned Suslov, the top party ideologue, who told of the existence of Treblinka and Ausch- him, "there is no question of returning nor witz, and of the death of his mother in Ber- printing the nóvel such a book could dichev, his native city in the Ukraine, not be published in the U.S.S.R. for the which was occupied by the Germans. next 200 or 300 vears. if then. Mr. Gross- In 1943, together with the writer Ilya man died of cancer three years later, a bit- Ehrenburg, he produced a "black book" on ter, broken, lonely man. the Holocaust. It was no sooner published According to the Markish book, one of than it was destroyed by order of the the leading Soviet dissidents of the second state. half of the 1970s got hold of a copy of After the war the U.S.S.R. launched an the manuscript, which Mr. Grossman had intensive anti-Semitic campaign, and after presumably put in safety during his long NAT the publication of "For a Just Cause," Mr. year of waiting for official approval. The Grossman's novel about a Jewish family dissident copied it and sent it abroad in and the siege of Stalingrad, Pravda started 1980.