There’s a really fantastic article in this week’s New Yorker about Vassily Grossman, the author of one of the truly great books of the 20th century, Life & Fate. There’s a new translation coming out soon from New York Review Books, which you, as a lover of good books, should buy as soon as it’s available.
In the terrible winter of 1938, just before the last of the Moscow show trials, the Soviet secret police arrested a woman named Olga Guber for having failed to denounce her anti-Soviet husband. It was an error. The husband she was to have denounced—the poet Boris Guber, arrested a year earlier—was no longer her husband. The novelist Vasily Grossman was her husband. Desperate, Grossman sent a carefully composed letter to Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the N.K.V.D. He wrote that Olga had severed all ties with Guber long before. This was not really true. Then he wrote, “I obtained a diploma from a Soviet high school, received my degree in chemistry from Moscow State University in 1929, and worked as a senior research scientist . . . in the Donbass. I have been a full-time writer since 1934. . . . All that I possess—my education, my success as a writer, the high privilege of sharing my thoughts and feelings with Soviet readers—I owe to the Soviet government.” That part was true; or, at least, Grossman meant it. He basically meant it.
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