Vassily Grossman. A TV Documentary.

Elena Yakovich, a well-known Rusian tv-journalist, has just released a documentary on the story of the arrest by the KGB, safe-keeping, publishing and the final return to world-wide reading public of Vassily Grossman's great novel 'Life and Fate.'

It was broadcast on the Russian tv-channel Kultura (Culture). I have written several times about 'Life and Fate' and its story. Here, in the film, it is unbelievably touching to put a face to many of the characters of this drama. It includes daughters and sons of Grossman and his friends, the writer Vladimir Voinovich, who helped to smuggle the manuscript to the West, and finally the KGB/FSB archives chief handing over boxes and boxes of the original work to literary experts.

The film is in Russian but those who followed the story will recognise the characters.

'Wait for Me'. The Russian Day of Sorrow.

The day Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, 22 June, Sunday, can never go out of Russian memory, the feeling of catastrophe, universal suffering, separation, the Armageddon, — and in the end, the Victory.

Konstantin Simonov, the famous Russian poet, novelist and editor, reads the poem 'Wiat for Me' that he wrote in 1941 when so many men went missing, so many families got separated, that desperation was settling in.

'Wait for me, don't believe those who sit down and drink to my memory, I will come back,' millions repeated after him. This recording is from 1977.

Grossman's Life and Fate comes to Russian TV.

Russian version of this post is here and a review of the film is here (in Russian)

The Russian TV series based on Vassily Grossman's Life and Fate, the greatest Russian novel of XX century, begins today at 21:25 Moscow time (GMT+3). 

Rossiya 1 channel online is here, click on the red button Прямой эфир to switch to online TV.

This is the first screen version of the novel that was 'arrested' by the KGB in 1961 — all copies were confiscated, carbon paper and type-writer ribbons too. A communist party boss promised that the book will not be published for another 200 years. 

A friend of Grossman saved one copy and hid it in a shoulder bag at his dacha. In the 70s it was smuggled out on microfilm. The English translation of the novel by Robert Chandler's was published in 1985. A few years later it came out in Russia during Gorbachev's glasnost.

But it was only in 2000s when Grossman's incredible epic started slowly gaining recognition. A year ago the BBC ran a week-long radio play based on Life and Fate.

The film is available on YouTube — 

Militera, an excellent Russian resource

I'd like to recommend a comprehensive Russian resource on military literature – "Военная литература" or Militera. Their home page is here.

The site is in Russian, but if you are a student of Russian history or enjoy reading in Russian, do bookmark, note down or otherwise remember it.

Militera has full texts of practically all Russian books on the second world war, fiction and non-fiction, biographies, memoires, academic studies, novels and poetry. Texts are indexed alphabetically by the author and by the subject (prose, poetry, military history etc.). There is a forum where questions can be posted. Most of the material covers the last war, the Great Patriotic war, as it is known in Russia, which is only natural for the nation that lost 27 million people during 1941-1945.

I found there the full text of Simonov's epic The Living and the Dead and Grossman's Life and Fate. It was a pleasure to see there good Russian translations of my favourite historical books: Antony Beevor's Stalingrad and especially Berlin, which caused some contorversy in Russia; Stephen Ambrose's D-Day and Eisenhower; and Barbara Tuchman's  The Guns of August.

The site is well-maintained and nicely laid out.