20 Facts About Vasily Grossman

Vasily Semyonovich Grossman was a Soviet writer and journalist.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Vasily Grossman was engaged as a war correspondent by the Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda; he wrote first-hand accounts of the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, and Berlin.

Vasily Grossman's father Semyon Osipovich Grossman was a chemical engineer, and his mother Yekaterina Savelievna was a teacher of French.

Vasily Grossman's father had social-democratic convictions and joined the Mensheviks, and was active in the 1905 Revolution; he helped organise events in Sevastopol.

Young Vasily Grossman idealistically supported the hope of the Russian Revolution of 1917.

In January 1928, Vasily Grossman married Anna Petrovna Matsuk; their daughter, named Yekaterina after Vasily Grossman's mother, was born two years later.

Vasily Grossman began writing short stories while studying chemical engineering at Moscow State University and later continued his literary activity while working running chemical tests at a coal-mining concern in Stalino in the Donbas, and later in a pencil factory.

Vasily Grossman quickly had himself registered as the official guardian of Olga's two sons by Boris Guber, thus saving them from being sent to orphanages.

Vasily Grossman then wrote to Nikolay Yezhov, the head of the NKVD, pointing out that Olga was now his wife, not Guber's, and that she should not be held responsible for a man from whom she had separated long before his arrest.

When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Vasily Grossman's mother was trapped in Berdychiv by the invading German Army, and eventually murdered together with 20,000 to 30,000 other Jews who had not evacuated.

Vasily Grossman was exempt from military service, but volunteered for the front, where he spent more than 1,000 days.

Vasily Grossman became a war correspondent for the popular Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda.

Vasily Grossman described Nazi ethnic cleansing in German-occupied Ukraine and Poland and the liberation by the Red Army of the German Nazi Treblinka and Majdanek extermination camps.

Vasily Grossman interviewed former Sonderkommando inmates who escaped from Treblinka and wrote his manuscript without revealing their identities.

Vasily Grossman participated in the compiling of the Black Book, a project of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee to document the crimes of the Holocaust.

Vasily Grossman sent me a note saying I had been right after all.

Vasily Grossman criticized collectivization and political repression of peasants that led to the Holodomor tragedy.

Vasily Grossman died in 1964, not knowing whether his greatest work would ever be read by the public.

Vasily Grossman was buried at the Troyekurovskoye Cemetery on the edge of Moscow.

The late novel Everything Flows, in turn, is especially noted for its quiet, unforced, and yet horrifying condemnation of the Soviet totalitarian state: a work in which Vasily Grossman, liberated from worries about censors, spoke honestly about Soviet history.