An Armenian Sketchbook, by Vasily Grossman – review

Vasily Grossman, a Ukranian-born Jew, was a war correspondent for the Soviet army newspaper Red Star. His dispatches from the front between 1941 and 1945 combined emotional engagement with independent-minded commentary. A solitary, questioning spirit, Grossman set out always to document truthfully what he saw and heard. His report on the vile workings of the Treblinka death camp, ‘The Hell of Treblinka’, remains a masterpiece of controlled rage and unsparing lucidity.

Unsurprisingly, Grossman was mortified when the man who had prevented Hitler’s annihilation of Jewry was suddenly set on their extinction. In early 1953, Stalin announced in the pages of Pravda that a plot to murder Kremlin members had been unmasked among Jewish doctors and intellectuals. Jews like Grossman were now condemned as a self-regarding, supra-national sect, inimical to the interests of Mother Russia. It made no difference to Stalin that Grossman had fought courageously against Hitler; he was reduced to the status of a non-person. But worse was to come.

In 1960, Grossman’s great novel of Russia during the Hitler war, Life and Fate, was confiscated in typescript by the KGB. This was done at the height of the Khrushchev ‘thaw’, when a new political tolerance was supposedly in the air. Grossman’s crime had been to draw parallels between Nazism and Soviet Communism. The Hitler and Stalin regimes (as Trotsky had pointed out as long ago as 1936) were totalitarian twins that bore a ‘deadly similarity’. Grossman had been dead for 24 years when, in 1988, Life and Fate was finally published in the Soviet Union.

An Armenian Sketchbook displays all the humanity and candour of Grossman’s Red Star journalism, but with a difference. Grossman was in the early stages of cancer when he wrote the book in 1962 and the prose has acquired a death-haunted tone.