Vasily Grossman was born in 1905 in the Ukranian town of Berdichev, home to one of the largest Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. He published his first novel, Glyukauf, in 1933, as well as the story In the Town of Berdichev, which received praise from a number of significant writers, including Babel, Bulgakov and Gorky. During the Second World War Grossman worked for the Army newspaper Red Star, reporting on the defence of Stalingrad and the fall of Berlin. He was an eyewitness to the consequences of the Holocaust, and writing from what he saw and experienced, he published the first journalist's account of a German death camp in any language. In 1960 Grossman completed his major work, Life and Fate, and submitted it to an official literary journal. A year later two KGB officers arrived at his home with orders to confiscate the entire manuscript. Grossman was told that the novel would not be published for at least another 200 years. However, with the assistance of Andrey Sakharov, a copy of the manuscript was microfilmed, and then smuggled out to the West. Grossman died in September 1964, leaving his short novel, Everything Flows, unfinished. A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941-1945, a collection of Grossman's journalistic writings and notebook entries, was published in the UK in 2005 by Harvill Press.
Bibliography:
NOVELS.
Gluckauf (written and published in 1934)
Stepan Kolchugin (unfinished, published in 1941)
People are Immortal (written and published in 1942)
For a Good Cause (written in 1949, published in 1952)
Life and Fate (written in 1959, published in 1980 by Collins Harvill, complete text published in 1990, Harvill)
BOOKS WHERE OTHER WORKS WERE PUBLISHED
1. The Old Teacher. Stories. Published by "Sovetskiy pisatel'." Moscow 1962
2. Collection of stories. "Sovetskiy pisatel'" 1950
3. Stories. Essays. "Voenizdat" Moscow 1958
4. The Years of War. "The State Fiction Publishers". 1946
5. A Few Days of Sorrow "Sovremennik" Moscow 1989
6. Late Works. Forever Flowing. "Slovo" Moscow 1994
7. Collected Works in four volumes. Volumes 3 and 4
8. The Years of War. "Pravda" Publishers, 1989
SHORT STORIES. Numbers in brackets show in which collection, from the list above, a story was published.
- Comrade Fyodor (1, 7)
- The Mass (1,2,3)
- Spring (1,2,3,7)
- Four Days (1,2,3,7)
- Happiness (1)
- Frontier guard (1,7)
- Cook (1,2,7)
- Ceylon Graphite (1,2,7)
- Security Inspector (1,2,7)
- At Night (1,2,7)
- A story about love (1,7)
- A dream (2,3)
- The Son (2)
- Life (2,3,7)
- Infantry-man (3,7)
- Anyuta (3,7)
- The Road (5,6,7)
- At War (5,7)
- A Few Days of Sorrow (5,6,7)
- The Young and the Old (5,6,7)
- Elk (5,6,7)
- Tiergarten (5,6,7)
- Out of Town (5,6,7)
- Out of the bus window (5,6,7)
- A little life (7)
- The autumn storm (5,6,7)
- Fledglings (5,6,7)
- A Dog (5,6,7)
- Avalanche (5,6,7)
- In Kislovodsk (5,6,7)
- Within the big ring (5,6,7)
- Phosphorus (5,6,7)
- The lodger (5,6,7)
- The Sixtine Madonna (5,6,7)
- Mother (5,6,7)
- At the Eternal Repose (5,6,7)
- Forever Flowing (6,7)
- Goodwill (6,7)
The War Essays (1941-1945) (3,4,8)
The War Notebooks. 1941-1945 (8, pages 244-457)
In English the war notebooks were edited by Antony Beevor and published under the title;
A Writer at war. Vasily Grossman and the Red Army. 1941-1945. Harvill Press, London 2005
The Black Book. Compiled by Vasili Grossman and Ilya Erenburg. YAD. Vilnius. 1993
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