The People Immortal Read online

  VASILY SEMYONOVICH GROSSMAN (1905–1964) was born into a Jewish family in Berdichev, Ukraine. In 1934 he published both “In the Town of Berdichev”—a short story that won him immediate acclaim—and the novel Glyukauf, about Donbass miners. During the Second World War, he worked as a reporter for the army newspaper Red Star; his vivid yet sober “The Hell of Treblinka” (1944), one of the first articles in any language about a Nazi death camp, was used as testimony in the Nuremberg trials. Stalingrad was published to great acclaim in 1952 and then fiercely attacked. A new wave of purges was about to begin; but for Stalin’s death in 1953, Grossman would likely have been arrested. During the next few years Grossman, while enjoying public success, worked on his two masterpieces: Life and Fate and Everything Flows. The KGB confiscated the manuscript of Life and Fate in February 1961. Grossman was able, however, to continue working on Everything Flows, a novel even more critical of Soviet society than Life and Fate, until his last days. He died on September 14, 1964, on the eve of the twenty-third anniversary of the massacre of the Jews of Berdichev in which his mother had died.

  ROBERT CHANDLER’s translations from Russian include works by Alexander Pushkin, Teffi, and Andrey Platonov. He has also written a short biography of Pushkin and has edited three anthologies of Russian literature for Penguin Classics. He runs a monthly translation workshop at Pushkin House in London.

  ELIZABETH CHANDLER is a co-translator, with her husband, of Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter and of several several works by Vasily Grossman and Andrey Platonov.

  JULIA VOLOHOVA is an independent scholar. She has been researching the life and work of Vasily Grossman since 2014 and she works as an editor for the Laboratory of Unnecessary Things at the Independent University of Moscow.

  OTHER BOOKS BY VASILY GROSSMAN

  PUBLISHED BY NYRB CLASSICS

  An Armenian Sketchbook

  Translated by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler

  Introduction by Robert Chandler and Yury Bit-Yunan

  Everything Flows

  Translated by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler and Anna Aslanyan

  Introduction by Robert Chandler

  Life and Fate

  Translated by Robert Chandler

  The Road

  Translated by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler and Olga Mukovnikova

  Stalingrad

  Translated by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler

  THE PEOPLE IMMORTAL

  VASILY GROSSMAN

  Translated from the Russian by

  ROBERT CHANDLER

  and ELIZABETH CHANDLER

  Original Russian text edited by

  JULIA VOLOHOVA

  Introduction and afterword by

  ROBERT CHANDLER

  and JULIA VOLOHOVA

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Russian text of The People Immortal and all excerpts from Vasily Grossman’s notebooks and articles copyright © by the Estate of Vasily Grossman

  English translation copyright © 2022 by Robert Chandler

  Introduction, afterword, appendices, and notes © 2022 by Robert Chandler and Julia Volohova

  All rights reserved.

  First published in serial form in 1942 as Народ бессмертен (Narod bessmerten).

  This translation first published as a New York Review Books Classic in 2022.

  Cover image: A Soviet T34 tank abandoned during Operation Barbarossa, c. 1942; photograph: Galerie Bilderwelt / Getty Images

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Grossman, Vasiliĭ, author. | Chandler, Robert, 1953– translator, writer of introduction, writer of afterword. | Chandler, Elizabeth, 1947– translator. | Volohova, Julia, editor, writer of introduction, writer of afterword.

  Title: The people immortal / by Vasily Grossman ; translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler ; original Russian text edited by Julia Volohova ; with an introduction and afterword by Robert Chandler and Julia Volohova.

  Other titles: Narod bessmerten. English

  Description: New York : New York Review Books, [2022] | Series: New York Review Books classics

  Identifiers: LCCN 2022010794 (print) | LCCN 2022010795 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681376783 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681376790 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1939–1945—Fiction. | LCGFT: Historical fiction. | Novels.

  Classification: LCC PG3476.G7 N313 2022 (print) | LCC PG3476.G7 (ebook) | DDC 891.73/44—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022010794

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022010795

  ISBN 978-1-68137-679-0

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Biographical Notes

  Also by Vasily Grossman

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Names of Ukrainian and Belarusian Towns and Cities

  List of characters

  Introduction

  Order no. 270

  Timeline

  THE PEOPLE IMMORTAL

  Photograph of last page of Grossman’s manuscript

  Afterword

  Appendices

  Material confiscated from German and Italian prisoners of war

  Note on Russian names

  Note on the peasant hut

  Notes

  Further reading

  Acknowledgements

  Biographical notes

  NAMES OF UKRAINIAN AND BELARUSIAN TOWNS AND CITIES

  The transliteration of Ukrainian and Belarusian names is a sensitive issue. If I were writing in my own name, or translating a contemporary writer, I would call the Ukrainian capital “Kyiv” and its second city “Kharkiv”. Grossman, however, used the conventional Russian spellings of his time – “Kiev” and “Kharkov”. These were the standard spellings during the war years and – in most cases – for the next fifty years. Retaining these spellings is to stay true both to history and to Grossman himself – a Ukrainian Soviet Jew who wrote in Russian, and to whom war between Russia and Ukraine would have been inconceivable.

  Here below are the names used by Grossman, followed by the contemporary equivalents in the relevant language:

  Bielostok – Białystok

  Bobruisk – Babruisk

  Berdichev – Berdychiv

  Chernigov – Chernihiv

  Chertkov – Chortkiv

  Dnepropetrovsk – Dnipro (since 2016)

  Glukhov – Hlukhiv

  Gomel – Homyel

  Lvov – Lviv

  Marchikhina Buda – Marchykhyna Buda

  Mozyr – Mazyr

  Proskurov – Proskuriv (until 1954), Khmelnytskiy (since 1954)

  Shepetovka – Shepetivka

  Stanislavov – Ivano-Frankisvsk (since 1962)

  Vilna – Vilnius

  Vinnitsa – Vinnytsia

  Voroshilovgrad (1935–58 and 1970–89) – Luhansk (before 1935; 1970–89; 1989 to present day)

  LIST OF CHARACTERS

  (not including characters mentioned only a single time)

  MILITARY SOVIET

  Yeromin, Viktor Andreyevich Lieutenant General, Front C-in-C

  Cherednichenko Divisional Commissar, Member of the Front Military Soviet

  Ilya Ivanovich Major General, the chief of staff

  Piotr Yefimovich Colonel, Head of Operations

  Section, deputy to chief of staff

  Murzikhin Ord
erly

  Orlovsky Battalion Commissar, Secretary to the Soviet

  Samarin Major General, commander of an army group

  VILLAGE OF MARCHIKHINA BUDA

  Cherednichenko, Maria Timofeyevna (her name evokes that of Matriona Timofeyevna, one of the peasant heroines of Nekrasov’s long narrative poem Who is Happy in Russia)

  Lionya Maria Timofeyevna’s grandson

  Grishchenko kolkhoz chairman

  Kotenko, Sergey Ivanov an anti-Soviet peasant

  Vasily Karpovich a cowherd

  REGIMENTAL HQ

  Petrov Colonel, divisional commander

  Mertsalov Major, regimental commander

  Kudakov, Semion Germogenovich Mertsalov’s chief of staff

  Kochetkov Major, commander of first battalion

  Babadjanian Captain, commander of second battalion

  Myshansky Lieutenant, deputy chief of staff

  Kozlov Senior Lieutenant, commander of a reconnaissance platoon

  Bogariov, Sergey Alexandrovich Battalion Commissar

  Kosiuk Lieutenant, commander of a machine-gun company

  HOWITZER UNIT

  Rumiantsev, Vasily (Vasya) Captain, commanding officer of the unit

  Nevtulov, Sergey (Seriozha) commissar of the unit

  Klenovkin Lieutenant

  BABADJANIAN’S BATTALION

  Ignatiev, Semion soldier in First Rifle Company

  Granny Bogachikha an old woman from Ignatiev’s village, a mentor to him

  Pesochina, Marusya Ignatiev’s betrothed

  Vera a beautiful young refugee in Gomel

  Sedov formerly a Moscow fitter, a friend of Ignatiev

  Rodimtsev, Ivan a collective farmer from Riazan; friend of Ignatiev

  Zhaveliov soldier in First Rifle Company

  INTRODUCTION

  In the early hours of 22 June 1941 Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Stalin had refused to believe more than eighty intelligence warnings of Hitler’s intentions, and Soviet forces were taken by surprise. Over two thousand Soviet aircraft were destroyed within twenty-four hours. During the following months the Germans repeatedly encircled entire Soviet armies. By the end of the year, they had reached the outskirts of Moscow and more than three million Soviet soldiers had been captured or killed.

  Before the German invasion, Grossman appears to have been depressed. He was overweight and, though only in his mid-thirties, he walked with a stick. In spite of this – and his poor eyesight – he volunteered to serve in the ranks. Had he been accepted – like several of his colleagues who volunteered for writers’ militia companies – he would probably have been killed within the next two or three months. Assigned instead to Red Star, the Red Army’s daily newspaper, he soon became one of the best-known Soviet war correspondents, admired not only for his powerful stories and articles but also for his personal courage. Red Star was as important during the war years as Pravda and Izvestia, the official newspapers of the Communist Party and the Supreme Soviet; many of the best writers of the time wrote for it and it enjoyed a wide readership among both soldiers and civilians. Its circulation at the beginning of the war was approximately three hundred thousand – and most copies, especially at the front, were read by a large number of people.

  David Ortenberg, Red Star’s chief editor, was clearly aware of Grossman’s gifts. In April 1942 he gave him permission to go on leave for two months in order to work on a short novel about a Soviet military unit that breaks out of German encirclement. Grossman then joined his family in Chistopol, a town in Tatarstan to which a number of Soviet writers, including Boris Pasternak, had been evacuated.

  Grossman was appalled by the falsity of the many stories and articles being published at this time about the heroism of the Red Army. On 17 June he wrote to his father: “I’m close to the end – just two chapters left. I’ll finish by the 20th and it seems I’ll leave [for Moscow – R.C.] on 21–22nd. I read my work aloud to people and receive much excited praise. People are very, very enthusiastic. But this, of course, is not because my story is so very good, but because what my poor fellow writers are now writing is so bad. Have you read Panfiorov’s story in Pravda? Naturally, after something like that, anything half-decent seems excellent.” Grossman makes similar criticisms in his wartime notebooks. In a September 1941 entry he quotes a sentence from the editorial of another military newspaper, “The severely battered enemy continued his cowardly advance.”1 In the following entry he dismisses the work of another bad journalist by repeating a joke he had heard from his colleagues: “Ivan Pupkin killed five Germans with a spoon.”2

  The People Immortal – the first Soviet novel about the war – was serialized in Red Star in July and August, to general acclaim. Grossman went on to cover all the main battles of the war, from the defence of Moscow to the fall of Berlin, and his articles were valued by ordinary soldiers and generals alike. Groups of front-line soldiers would gather to listen while one of them read aloud from a single copy of Red Star; the writer Viktor Nekrasov, who fought at Stalingrad as a young man, remembers how “the papers with [Grossman’s] and Ehrenburg’s articles were read and reread by us until they were in tatters.”3

  Grossman’s articles were republished countless times – in a variety of military newspapers, in booklets published all over the Soviet Union, and sometimes in Pravda. The Years of War – a large volume, first published in 1945, that includes a revised version of The People Immortal, Grossman’s long article about Treblinka, two short stories and twenty-one of his Red Star articles – was translated into a number of languages including English, French, Dutch and German. As a separate volume, The People Immortal was published in Danish, Welsh and most of the languages of Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe.

  •

  Vasily Grossman’s three war novels are recognizably the work of the same writer; all display his sharp psychological insights and his gift for descriptive passages that appeal to all our different senses. Nevertheless, the goals he set himself in these novels are very different.

  His best-known work, Life and Fate, is not only a novel but also an exercise in moral and political philosophy, asking whether or not it is possible for someone to behave ethically even when subjected to overwhelming violence. The earlier Stalingrad, mostly written between 1945 and 1947, is primarily a work of commemoration, a tribute to all who died during the war. The People Immortal, set during the catastrophic defeats of the war’s first months, is Grossman’s contribution to the Soviet war effort. Grossman successfully meets two conflicting demands. On the one hand, the novel is optimistic and morale-boosting. On the other hand, it includes much that was controversial – Grossman makes several cogent criticisms of how the war is being fought.

  The plot is simple and – at least in its general outline – conventional. What immediately grips the reader is the vividness of the details. As in the two Stalingrad novels, the minutiae of army life – the soldiers’ jokes, the layout of their foxholes and trenches, their thoughts when faced by German Panzers – are conveyed clearly and succinctly. Grossman’s descriptions of the natural world are no less convincing. His account of a detachment of peasant recruits marching at night through fields of grain not only allows us to hear, see and sense the entire scene but also allows us an unexpected insight into what this night march might mean to the men themselves: “Marching through the still unharvested fields, they could recognize the different grains – oats, wheat, barley or buckwheat – by the swish of falling seeds, by the creak of straw underfoot and by the rustle of the stalks that clung to their tunics. And this trampling of the tender body of the ungathered harvest, this sad, invisible, rain-like patter of the falling seeds, spoke more eloquently about the war, brought home its true nature more clearly to many hearts than did the great fires blazing on the horizon, the red stitches of tracer bullets creeping towards the stars, the bluish pillars of searchlight beams sweeping across the sky or the distant rumble of exploding bombs.”

  Grossman’s character sketches are simpl
e but deft. Among the most memorable are Lionya, an eleven-year-old boy, determined to hang on to his toy black revolver as he trudges for several days behind German lines, confident that he will be able to find his commissar father; Lionya’s defiant grandmother, who is shot after slapping a German officer in the face; Bruchmüller, a respected and experienced German artillery colonel who admits to being troubled by his lack of understanding of the Russian character; and Semion Ignatiev, a womanizer and gifted storyteller who turns out to be the one of the bravest and most resourceful of the rank-and-file soldiers.

  Several chapters are devoted to life in Belorussia under the Germans. Grossman shows us this world from several perspectives: from that of young Lionya; from that of two older girls who look on everything they see around them as a mad dream that simply cannot continue much longer; from that of Kotenko, a bitterly anti-Soviet peasant who initially welcomes the Germans; and from that of Ignatiev, who is enraged by the sight of German officers and soldiers eating, drinking and enjoying themselves in a village just like his own.

  Grossman spent most of the war years close to the front line and he had an unusual gift for winning the confidence of both ordinary soldiers and senior commanders. People spoke freely to him and this enabled him to create a picture of wartime life that accorded with their own experience. This edition includes not only the text of the novel itself (along with many previously unpublished passages from Grossman’s manuscript), but also a variety of background material, including cards and letters taken from German prisoners-of-war, appreciative letters sent to Grossman by Soviet commissars and commanders, extracts from Grossman’s wartime notebooks, and a page of notes Grossman wrote after reading Tacitus – the greatest historian of the Roman Empire.

  The additional material helps us to understand that this novel, at the time, was far more controversial than one might first imagine. As in nearly all his work, throughout the three decades of his professional career, Grossman was writing on the boundary of what was permissible. It is not surprising that some of his more unorthodox thoughts were deleted by his editors. It is, rather, astonishing how many criticisms of conventional military thinking he managed to introduce into the Soviet Union’s most important military newspaper.