Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century

In the latest biography of writer Vasyl Grossman (1905, Berdychiv – 1964, Moscow), the author, Canadian researcher Alexandra Popoff, focuses on clarifying the moral, psychological, and existential and everyday difficulties of the existence of a talented person in a totalitarian state. Referring to Grossman's correspondence with family and friends, to private interviews, relying on the texts of his novels "Stepan Kolchugin", "Defense of Stalingrad", "For the Right Cause", "Everything Flows...", especially "Life and Fate" and other works (in particular, the "Black Book", edited together with I. Ehrenburg), A. Popoff traces the main line of the writer's activity in a constant dilemma between the opportunity to respond to the ideological demand of the day and the compulsion to write in a desk drawer, "without permission", that is, the artificial necessity to choose between incomplete and complete truth, between adaptation and the desire for freedom, between ideology and life. The reader feels the scale of the price that Grossman paid for the opportunity to be himself in the surrounding falsehood of existence.