Roskina does not say who told her this it is likely, though, that she has borrowed from Ehrenburg, just as Taratuta borrowed from Lipkin. It was exclusively the fact that Grossman never sought Stalin’s love.” She continues, “It was Stalin who deleted the novel from the list of laureates.” “It was certainly not love for Lenin,” she writes, “that was the reason for Grossman being constantly in disgrace. I was told that it was Stalin himself who deleted his story The People Immortal from the list of books nominated for the prize.” And he goes on to say that Stalin must have hated Grossman for “his love of Lenin, for his genuine internationalism.”Īnd in 1980, in a memoir published in Paris, Natalya Roskina, a younger friend of Grossman, both disagreed with Ehrenburg and repeated his central assertion. In it he wrote, “The star under which Grossman was born was a star of misfortune. In 1966, Ilya Ehrenburg published the third volume of his influential memoir People, Years, Life.
Once again, however, we find the writers of memoirs invoking Stalin’s personal hostility toward Grossman. It’s detailed and hard to summarize here are a few paragraphs to give the idea: Yury Bit-Yunan and Robert Chandler have a long and convincing LARB article refuting the idea that the great Vasily Grossman, author of Life and Fate (which I reviewed here), was a dissident persecuted by Stalin.
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