26 January 2025
by Ed Glezin
Source: Facebook
37 years ago, the first ever Soviet publication of Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate appeared in the January 1988 edition of the Oktyabr literary journal. Suslov’s prediction that, as he had promised the author, Grossman’s ‘subversive literature’ would not see publication for another 300 years turned out to be false.
After completing the novel in 1960, Grossman submitted it to the journal Znamya. As a result at first he came under pressure from the literary bureaucracy and then KGB officers confiscated the work.
Seven of copies of his manuscript were seized from his flat and from other addresses to be held in the KGB’s archives. The following year, Vasily Grossman wrote to Khrushchev, requesting that his manuscripts be returned to him, even meeting with the Soviet Union’s ideologue-in-chief, Mikhail Suslov, who informed him that it was impossibile for his novel to be published on the grounds it would be as destructive for the USSR as American atomic bombs.
Yet two manuscript copies evaded capture, guarded by Grossman’s friends. The first was trusted to Semen Lipkin, who hid it in his brother’s Moscow apartment on Armyansky Lane. The other had been given to his close friend Vyacheslav Ivanovich Loboda, who carted it off to the town of Maloyarolslavets.
On the evening of 29 March, the regulars at the Maloyaroslavets Edinstvo club expressed surprise that they had known so little of the history of Maloyaroslavets, which Galina Ivanovna Grishina, head of the cultural-enlightenment circle, was revealing to them. How many cultural and artistic figures turned out to have links with this town, unbeknownst to the people living there!
This was no coincidence.
Maloyaroslavets was one of the towns on the other side of the 101st kilometre from Moscow. Beyond this limit, many writers, artists and thinkers were exiled, and many chose to live, to weather out times of cultural oppression, keeping their views to themselves rather than expounding them on stage or in print.
Although they sometimes they were able to work in high schools.
Their aim was to preserve the culture they were a part of until more favourable times arrived.
One could liken them to a seed which, in order to bring forth new life, must hide itself for a time in the soil.
However, although Vyacheslav Loboda, a graduate of Moscow State University’s faculty of history and ethnography, did not hide away, there is no doubt he belonged to this group. Loboda purchased a house in Maloyaroslavets for his wife and daughters after the family returned from Chukotka and their Moscow communal apartment of seven square metres could not accommodate them all. Loboda had gone to distant Chukotka (where he worked as a local historian, a headteacher, and a local education official) for the same reason that many others later went to live in Maloyaroslavets. At the end of the 1930s his brother had been arrested and shot on a charge of Trotskyism.
Vyacheslav Loboda’s family hid the manuscript of Life and Fate for almost thirty years. In late 1974, Semen Lipkin sent Vladimir Voinovich the manuscript which had been kept at his brother’s, to be photocopied and sent to the West. However, the results did not amount to much – the publication of a small extract in the journal Kontinent. The second attempt to have the novel sent to the West resulted in a complete edition being published in Switzerland in 1980. Unfortunately, defective photocopying meant that the work’s text could not be fully deciphered. It was not until 1988 that the first copies of the ‘Moscow edition’ were published in Oktyabr and translated into other languages.
In a contemporary article, Lev Annensky lamented that the published novel was an incomplete version, and that the author’s true conception could never be fully restored.
This was a call to action for Fedor Guber and those in Maloyaroslavets who had kept the manuscript of the novel. Grossman’s stepson and Liudmila Loboda took a complete copy of the manuscript to the publisher Knizhnaya palata, who then in 1989 published the edition which is regarded as canonical today.
In 2011-2012, Sergei Ursulyak filmed a TV series of Life and Fate based on Edward Volodarsky’s screenplay (the latter’s final work).
Translated by Friedrich Berg
