Authors: Frank Ellis
ISBN-13: 9780854968305, ISBN-10: 085496830X
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Berg Publishers
Date Published: December 1994
Edition: English edition
Frank Ellis is a Lecturer in Russian and East European Media, at the University of Leeds.
Vasiliy Grossman (1905-1964) is now regarded as one of the major Russian prose writers of this century whose works have been unjustly neglected. An eminent Soviet scholar said, "Solzhenitsyn writes for the hour, Grossman writes for the age" -- a view widely endorsed by other important critics and writers. His two major works, Everything Flows and Life and Fate were only recently published in the former Soviet Union -- a confirmation for many that glasnost was genuine.
This is the first major study of Grossman in English. It will be of interest not only to students of Russian literature and politics but also to those who seek a better understanding of the struggle for intellectual and moral autonomy in the totalitarian state.
Preface | ||
Glossary | ||
1 | The Life and Fate of Vasiliy Grossman | 1 |
Life and Works | 1 | |
The Genesis of Heresy | 21 | |
2 | Soviet Writers and the Great Fatherland War | 27 |
General | 27 | |
1941-1945 | 28 | |
Partisan Warfare in Literature | 33 | |
The Summer of 1941 | 34 | |
From Khrushchev to Gorbachev | 36 | |
Glasnost' and the Great Fatherland War | 38 | |
3 | The War Years: From Bryansk to Berlin | 41 |
The People are Immortal | 41 | |
The Stalingrad Sketches | 47 | |
Liberation, Genocide, Berlin | 64 | |
4 | Interpreting Catastrophe: 1945-1960 | 71 |
Rank and File | 71 | |
The New Officer | 80 | |
House 6/1 | 87 | |
The Snipers | 91 | |
Soldiers and Commissars | 93 | |
5 | Progress, Science and War | 101 |
The Pythagoreans | 101 | |
Bombs and Superbombs | 114 | |
Science and Heresy | 121 | |
Great Men and the Science of War in Tolstoy and Grossman | 133 | |
6 | Inside the Totalitarian State | 149 |
Early rasskazy and povesti | 149 | |
The Tyrant Figure: General Comments | 168 | |
The Theme of Tyranny in Stephan Kol'chugin | 168 | |
Hitler/Stalin in For a Just Cause | 171 | |
Hitler/Stalin: The Party State | 175 | |
The Heart of Goodness | 190 | |
The Final Heresy | 197 | |
The Psychology of Denunciation | 202 | |
The Cult of Lenin | 205 | |
Defenders of the Faith | 211 | |
7 | Concluding Remarks | 218 |
Bibliography 1. Vasiliy Grossman: Primary Sources | 222 | |
Bibliography 2. Vasiliy Grossman: Secondary Literature | 224 | |
Bibliography 3. Select Secondary Reading | 229 | |
Index | 235 |