The Road by Vasily Grossman Page A

the majority of the population behind his regime.
    Grossman had devoted himself to
The
Black Book
for much of the preceding four years, and in late spring 1945 he had taken over from Ilya Ehrenburg as head of the editorial board. What he must have felt when
The
Black Book
was finally aborted is hard to imagine.
    ***
    In 1943, Grossman had begun work not only on
The Black Book
but also on the first of his two epic novels centered on the battle of Stalingrad. Six years later, in August 1949, Grossman submitted this novel, then titled
Stalingrad
but soon to be retitled
For a Just Cause
, to the journal
Novy mir.
In what seems strangely like a literary reenactment of the battle, Grossman appears to have had to fight with his editors over every chapter, if not every paragraph, of his novel.
    The battle lines are laid out in an exchange in December 1948 between Grossman and Boris Agapov, one of the members of the editorial board:
    Agapov: “I want to render the novel safe, to make it impossible for anyone to criticize it.”
    Grossman: “Boris Nikolaevich, I don’t wantto render my novel safe.”
    Even though Konstantin Simonov (chief editor of
Novy mir
until February 1950), Aleksandr Tvardovsky (chief editor of
Novy mir
from February 1950), and Aleksandr Fadeyev (general secretary of the Writers Union for most of the period from 1937 until 1954) seem genuinely to have admired
For a Just Cause
, its publication was repeatedly postponed. The Russian State Archives now contain no less than twelve different typed versions. The first six are Grossman’s own early versions; the last six were produced, between 1949 and 1952, in response to editorial “suggestions.” These suggestions range from the most trivial to the most sweeping; one of the more extraordinary was that Grossman should remove from the novel the central figure of Viktor Shtrum—because he was Jewish. At one point Tvardovsky suggested that Grossman should make Shtrum the head of a military commissariat rather than an important physicist; in reply, Grossman asked what posthe should give Einstein. On another occasion Grossman was asked to remove all the “civilian” chapters; the editors appear to have thought that a documentary, or near-documentary, account of the fighting would be “safer” than a work of fiction. The novel was set in type three times, but on each occasion the decision to publish was countermanded and the type broken up—although it seems that, at least on two of these occasions, a very few copies were, in fact, printed. The April 30, 1951, entry in Grossman’s “Diary of the Journey of the Novel
For a Just Cause
through Publishing Houses” reads, “Thanks to the splendid, comradely attitude of the technical editors and printing-press workers, the new typesetting was carried out with fabulous speed. I now have in my hands a new copy: second edition; print run—6 copies.”
    The reason for the anxiety shown by Grossman’s editors is that the Soviet victory at Stalingrad had acquired the status of a sacred myth—a myth that legitimized Stalin’s rule. With regard to a matter of such importance, there could be no room for even the slightest political error. Tvardovsky and Fadeyev found it necessary, even when they themselves were satisfied with the novel, to ask for approval from a variety of different bodies: the Writers Union; the Historical Section of the General Staff; the Institute of Marx, Engels, and Lenin; the Central Committee of the Communist Party. They were afraid of offending Nikita Khrushchev, who is portrayed in the novel in his role as a senior political commissar at Stalingrad, and they were, no doubt, still more concerned about Stalin’s reaction; they could not have forgotten that Grossman had twice been nominated for a Stalin Prize—for his novel about the Revolution,
Stepan Kolchugin
, in 1941, and for
The People Immortal
, his novel about the first year of the war, in 1943—and that his candidacy had been vetoed