A Writer at War by Vasily Grossman Read Free Book Online

the military prosecutor arrives from 50th Army [rear] headquarters. We are all drinking tea with raspberry jam while the prosecutor reports on pending cases: cowards, deserters – among them Pochepa, an old major – [also] cases of peasants accused of [circulating] German propaganda. Petrov pushes his glass aside. In the corner of the document, he approves the death sentence in red capitals written in a small childish hand.
    The prosecutor reports on another case: a woman who urged peasants to greet Germans with bread and salt.
    ‘And who is she?’ Petrov asks.
    ‘An old maid,’ the prosecutor laughs.
    Petrov laughs, too. ‘Well, since she’s an old maid, I’ll replace it with ten years.’ And he writes in the new sentence. Then they drinkmore tea. The prosecutor says goodbye. ‘Remind them to send my samovar from headquarters,’ Petrov tells him. ‘I am used to having it around.’
    Grossman clearly had far more respect for Brigade Commissar Nikolai Alekseevich Shlyapin than for Petrov.
    Shlyapin is intelligent, strong , calm, big and slow. People sense his inner power over them.
    This visit to 50th Army headquarters later proved important to Grossman’s work. During their long conversations, Shlyapin told Grossman the story of his experiences in the 94th Rifle Division during the terrible summer of the Nazi invasion. A month after the outbreak of war, his division had been part of the smashed Western Front, commanded by General Pavlov. The remains of the division had been attempting to escape encirclement in Belorussia and retreat eastwards to Vitebsk, when they were attacked by the 20th Panzer Division in late July. They had to retreat into the forest, then fight their way out. Shlyapin’s account was inevitably coloured by the Soviet formulae of the time and by exaggerated figures of enemy strengths and losses, yet the basic facts and the heroism of Shlyapin’s leadership were almost certainly accurate. Grossman used the notes from these conversations the following year in The People Immortal . Shlyapin’s death a month after the visit made him yet more determined to honour his memory.
    Shlyapin told me all this when we were lying on some hay in a shed. There was thundering all around. Afterwards in the same shed the girl Valya 3 wound up the gramophone and we listened to ‘The Little Blue Shawl’. 4 Slim aspens were trembling from explosions, and tracer bullets soared into the sky.
    At the end of the month, Grossman heard from his father that at least his daughter Katya was safe.
    My dear [Father], I’ve received several postcards at once, and two of them were from you. It was the first news that I have had for two months. I am very happy that Katyusha is well, but my sorrow about Mama is now doubled . . . I am longing to see you, but it is out of the question until the chiefs summon me back.
    1 Major-General Mikhail P. Petrov (1898–1941).
    2 General Petrov had been one of the Soviet ‘advisers’ attached under ‘ Operatsii X ’ to the Republican Army during the Spanish Civil War.
    3 Valya was probably the ‘campaign wife’ of General Petrov. Grossman later fulminates on the practice, widespread among senior officers, of selecting mistresses from their headquarters and medical staff in this way.
    4 ‘The Little Blue Shawl’ was a famous song about the promise of a soldier’s girlfriend never to forget him when he departs for the front. She is wearing a modest blue shawl as she waves goodbye. The music was by G. Peterburgsky, the words by Yakov Galitsky. It is interesting, considering Stalin’s subsequent attack on Jews as ‘cosmopolitans’, that most of the Soviet Union’s popular patriotic songs during the war were written by Jews.

FIVE
Back into the Ukraine
    On 20 September, Grossman and Troyanovsky set off southwards again, to Glukhov in the extreme north-eastern Ukraine, which they had passed through on their escape from Gomel.
    Stalin’s refusal to face up to the danger of