"Why we must re-read Vassili Grossman, Ukrainian and lover of Russian literature"

Salomon Malka is a journalist and writer.

He is the author of

The Life and Destiny of Vassili Grossman

Elena Ferrante, In Search of the Prodigious Friend

I once wrote that Europe was the name of a continent where Vassili Grossman was possible.

I would add today that Putin's Russia is the name of a continent where Grossmans have become impossible.

What would the author of "Life and Destiny" say, if he were still alive, in the face of the massacres of the Ukrainian population by the Russian armed troops, he whose first short story published and hailed by Gorki, was devoted to Berdichev, the city ​​of his childhood, he who was also the first to document the famine in Ukraine orchestrated by Stalin?

What would the thinker say about

- that he always opposed to institutional good, that of doctrines, dogmas and tyrannies – in the face of this surge of fire which falls on cities, bridges, hospitals, schools?

How would he react to what threatens to happen precisely in Berdichev, in Odessa, in kyiv, and in all these places which have been the cradle of a Judaism that he loved (even if he was an unbeliever) since that day? where, anticipating the upheaval to come, her mother wrote to her in a letter that she had discovered a very strong bond with those around her who were destined for death?

He was Ukrainian.

He loved Tolstoy and Russian literature.

He was in love with Europe and its culture.

Solomon Malka

He was Ukrainian.

He loved Tolstoy and Russian literature.

He was in love with Europe and its culture.

He was a humanist to his core, a follower of the Enlightenment, a believer in democracy, a friend of philosophers.

All of this shattered in the middle of the night, a little over sixty years ago.

On February 15, 1961, three high-ranking KGB officers broke into the writer's apartment in Moscow and demanded the manuscript of

.

Olga Gruber, his second wife, said it was one o'clock in the morning when the police rang the doorbell.

.

The housekeeper, in shock, stammered:

.

Olga again reported that Vassili was pale and that she accompanied him to the kitchen to give him medicine.

Before his eyes, the agents took out all the sheets, the manuscripts, and even the typewriter ribbons which they loaded into a car.

She continues her story:

He died on September 14, 1964, of generalized cancer.

And Semion Lipkine, his closest friend who dedicated a book of memories to him, says that the trauma suffered three years earlier, on February 15, 1961, during this famous intrusion of the KGB in his home, is responsible for it.

The seizure of his work killed him.

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It took a good few years before this book, in which Grossman proposed, using Tolstoy's formula,

, finally appeared in the West (sent in the form of a micro -films made thanks to the entourage, Sakharov and Elena Bonner).

But what about Russia itself?

He was obviously rejected, forgotten, marginalized, even totally scotomized.

It is not on the school curriculum, neither in history nor in literature;

tells us Emilia Koustova, a specialist in Russian history and civilization, whom we met in Strasbourg, during a symposium on Grossman which was held recently.

'

' was broadcast

says our specialist who adds:

The writer passed away, victim of the immense grief caused by the confiscation and imprisonment of his book.

"He was never in prison, but his book was," said his daughter Katya Grossman.

Solomon Malka

The loop is thus closed.

The writer passed away, a victim of immense grief caused by the confiscation and imprisonment of his book.

said his daughter Katya Grossman.

And his novel also died out slowly but just as surely under the Putin era as under the Soviet era.

Time, Grossman's big business, took on the task of separating the wheat from the chaff, of bringing light or darkness alternately.

As in

, his last novel (if we except his testimony on Armenia);

in which a man, a Zek, who has spent half his life in a gulag and who returns to Moscow and Leningrad after 30 years of detention, discovers that the

If Vassili Grossman came back to us, which side would he be on?

It's not hard to imagine.

Raised in the KGB, Putin resembles the censors he has faced throughout his life.

And Zelensky carries the hopes that he himself has always nurtured.

Katya Grossman, Vassili Grossman's daughter, I met her three times in my life (twice by phone and once by email).

The last one was four years ago, through my guide who ended up locating her and sending me her answers (I don't know where she is now, or even if she's still alive) .

I knew that the family was "split" between Ukraine and Russia.

How did she feel about the confrontation between the two countries?

His response as we speak (four years ago):

I remind him that his grandmother, his father, spoke French, German, English.

Did they consider themselves Europeans?

She confirms;