From Treblinka to Kolyma

From Treblinka to Kolyma. Thinking about Stalinism, along the way, Grossman understood everything about Leninism and about the socialist idea as such.
How could this happen? Censorship or ideological impotence? Two gifted, hardworking, progressive creative people, a director and screenwriter, take on Grossman's great dark novel "Life and Fate", find good actors who can imagine the style and fear of life 70 years ago, remove color, filming black and white Soviet reality, diligently transfer the dialogues and the voiceover of the author to the screen - and nothing comes out. It turns out not Grossman, but Bondarev - "Battalions are asking for fire", not even "Silence". There are many tank battles and the trenches of Stalingrad. What if permission to shoot was given solely in order to rename Volgograd and in this way, posthumously, take revenge on Vasily Grossman? There are still many scientific meetings and "separate" (precisely "separate") arrests. But what does Grossman Vasily Semenovich have to do with it? What happened is called nothing happened. This is the level of the early Nekrasov, the level of the story "In the trenches of Stalingrad", the level of the novel "For a Just Cause", which Grossman squeezed out of himself. Such a diligent, castrated film can only be made by someone who has not read “Everything Flows” or who has read it (both Volodarsky and Ursulyak must have read it), but sees the world differently than the author. And with calm confidence he imagines himself a winner, resting on his laurels. Not like these same German-fascist bastards. Well, Grossman himself understood this only at the time of writing the story “Everything flows” - a deep rethinking of the post-Stalin era.
We are no better
The screenwriter's generation is unable to accommodate this terrible truth - "we are no better", but the director's is innate, at the level of the generation of heirs of comforting common truths. It is the frantic bitterness and despair of the author, it is the off-screen “Everything flows” and the repentance that follows from this, together with everything else, that we lack. The fifth dimension, “Everything flows”, and the afterlife, astral feeling of the world of two Gulags, ours and German, two ghostly titanic Black Fortresses, between which the rest of the world fell somewhere, weak, not ready to fight back, human and human. It was not the age of the West: Munich, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Yalta conspiracy, the fate of Eastern Europe, the return of refugees by England to Stalin. Without the story “Everything flows”, no film adaptation will be reliable. Lev Dodin has it, and therefore his performance was a success.
The horror of this dilogy lies in the last proof, which, in my opinion, Grossman himself accepted with pain and horror. The scenes of the murder in the gas chamber of little David and the girl in white panties are so nightmarish that the fading consciousness of both the reader and the writer grasps at this straw: at least we did not kill children. Proof of Alyosha Karamazov. But in the story "Everything flows" carts full of children's skeletal corpses are driving around. Holodomor. And we have gone beyond this limit. But death from starvation is longer and more painful than even death in a gas chamber.
The problem with film adaptations of Grossman will always be to experience the equal despair of a self-taught person who did not read something from Orwell or Conquest, but came to everything on his own, confused, frightened, not believing himself, skinned to the blood.
Atheist and freethinker
So how did an early, but already irreconcilable dissident, who far exceeded the level of comprehension of history accessible to the sixties, come out of an ideological front-line correspondent? „

The problem with filming Grossman will always be to experience the equal despair of a self-taught person who did not read something from Orwell or Conquest, but came to everything on his own, confused, frightened, not believing himself, skinned in blood

“Grossman was lucky. He had the makings of a non-Soviet person, he had God's gift, but there was practically no Odessa sense of humor that could soften the edge of reality, help to adjust, sit out, reconcile. There was no skepticism: there was a riot. There was a tragic seriousness with which he threw himself at life. Vasily Semenovich was actually Joseph Solomonovich, he came from a rich, brilliant, secular and European Jewish family. His mother, Ekaterina Savelievna Vitis, came from a wealthy Odessa merchant family, studied in France, and wore diamonds. Father, Solomon Iosifovich, studied at the University of Bern and, not with copper money, became a chemical engineer, and the family was also rich, merchant, Bessarabian. Born in 1905, Vasily Grossman managed to taste life with Christmas trees, governesses, lace collars and velvet suits. There was something to compare. The bailiff received for Easter and Christmas "blue" (5 rubles) for a bottle of cognac, broke his hat, bowed. Even in Berdichev, no one would have dared to call such a rich bar "Yids". The uncle of the future writer, Dr. Sherentsis, patron of the arts and benefactor of the city (he built a mill and a water pump), was almost an "oligarch". He will be shot in 1937, and he will become the first in the personal account of the author, first a chemical engineer, then a writer. Before the war, he was gaining skills, although Bulgakov himself envied the honesty of his stories. His unheard-of nobility helped him recapture his beloved, Olga Guber, the wife of an arrested friend, from the NKVD. She was released and given to him.
In my opinion, he still retained remnants of Soviet enthusiasm for the war. And Grossman becomes a brilliant correspondent for the Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper. His reports are learned by heart in the trenches, they are hung out at Headquarters. But this is not an ideology or ambition: Grossman was destined to become a bloodline of fascism. His meek and educated mother was shot on September 15, 1941 in the Berdichevsky ghetto. Only then did the atheist and freethinker Grossman realize that he was a Jew. He becomes the most ardent member of the JAC - the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Under his articles, Western loans and donations were given, in 1948, when the committee was dispersed and Mikhoels was killed, this saved his life. He first spoke about the Holocaust in the book Treblin Hell. He entered the concentration camps abandoned by the Germans, he knew firsthand about the Shoah. In 1946, together with Ehrenburg, they will compile a "Black Book" about the bitter fate of the Jews. It was published only in Israel in 1980.
With his desperate non-conformism, Grossman would have quickly found himself at the wall, but on the Malakhov Kurgan Memorial his words were knocked out of the essay “The Direction of the Main Strike”. It was insurance against Stalin.
thaw borders
Fascism was crushed, Grossman began to dissect Stalinism, and along the way he understood everything about Leninism, about the entire socialist idea, and this put him outside the generation that never took this barrier. No wonder Tvardovsky asked Grossman if he was a Soviet person. In a word, he was waiting for his arrest in March 1953. In 1961, everything was ready: both Life and Fate and Everything Flows. Here already Tvardovsky asked if Grossman would like him to put down his party card. "Yes I want to!" Grossman answered honestly. He was not stopped by this fear, "a vile, caviar fear", to receive "instead of granular caviar - chum salmon." Kozhevnikov gave the novel to the KGB, and Suslov announced that it would be published in 250 years.
But death came first, a painful death from kidney cancer, and even in delirium, the writer seemed to be interrogated, and he was afraid to betray someone. It was 1964, already after the withdrawal of the novel. The thaw had its limits. Clear, wintery, icy.
Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov filmed the novel buried by Grossman in the garden in his bathroom, Vladimir Voinovich took it to God knows what place, not very decent, so the novel came out in the West in 1980 and 1983.
He came to Russia in 1988, replacing Nuremberg for us.