An Armenian Sketchbook

by Vasily Grossman

  VASILY SEMYONOVICH GROSSMAN was born on December 12, 1905, in Berdichev, a Ukrainian town that was home to one of Europe’s largest Jewish communities. In 1934 he published both “In the Town of Berdichev”—a short story that won the admiration of such diverse writers as Maksim Gorky, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Isaak Babel—and a novel, Glyukauf, about the life of the Donbass miners. During the Second World War, Grossman worked as a reporter for the army newspaper Red Star, covering nearly all of the most important battles from the defense of Moscow to the fall of Berlin. His vivid yet sober “The Hell of Treblinka” (late 1944), one of the first articles in any language about a Nazi death camp, was translated and used as testimony in the Nuremberg trials. His novel For a Just Cause (originally titled Stalingrad) was published to great acclaim in 1952 and then fiercely attacked. A new wave of purges—directed against the Jews—was about to begin; but for Stalin’s death, in March 1953, Grossman would almost certainly have been arrested himself. During the next few years Grossman, while enjoying public success, worked on his two masterpieces, neither of which was to be published in Russia until the late 1980s: Life and Fate and Everything Flows. The KGB confiscated the manuscript of Life and Fate in February 1961. Grossman was able, however, to continue working on Everything Flows, a novel even more critical of Soviet society than Life and Fate, until his last days in the hospital. He died on September 14, 1964, on the eve of the twenty-third anniversary of the massacre of the Jews of Berdichev in which his mother had died.

  ROBERT CHANDLER is the author of Alexander Pushkin and the editor of two anthologies for Penguin Classics: Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida and Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov. His translations of Sappho and Guillaume Apollinaire are published in the Everyman’s Poetry series. His translations from Russian include Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, Everything Flows, and The Road (all published by NYRB Classics); Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk; and Aleksander Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter. Together with Olga Meerson and his wife, Elizabeth, he has translated a number of works by Andrey Platonov. One of these, Soul, won the 2004 AATSEEL (American Association of Teachers of Slavonic and East European Languages) Prize. His translation of Hamid Ismailov’s The Railway won the AATSEEL Prize for 2007 and received a special commendation from the judges of the 2007 Rossica Translation Prize.

  ELIZABETH CHANDLER is a co-translator, with her husband, of Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter; of Vasily Grossman’s Everything Flows and The Road; and of several volumes of Andrey Platonov: The Return, The Portable Platonov, Happy Moscow, and Soul.

  YURY BIT-YUNAN was born in Bryansk, in western Russia. He graduated from the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow, and completed his doctorate on the work of Vasily Grossman. At present he is lecturing on literary criticism at the the Russian State University for the Humanities while continuing to research Grossman’s life and work.

  AN ARMENIAN SKETCHBOOK

  VASILY GROSSMAN

  Translated from the Russian by

  ROBERT and ELIZABETH CHANDLER

  With an introduction and notes by

  ROBERT CHANDLER and YURY BIT-YUNAN

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © by E.V. Korotkova-Grossman and F.B. Guber

  Translation and notes copyright © 2013 by Robert Chandler

  All rights reserved.

  An Armenian Sketchbook is translated from the text of Dobro vam published in Vasily Grossman, Sobranie sochinenii v 4-h tomakh (Moscow: Agraf, 1998).

  Cover image: Vasily Grossman in Armenia, with ruins of the Hellenistic temple of Garni in the background

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

  Grossman, Vasilii, 1905–1964.

  [Dobro vam. English]

  An Armenian sketchbook / by Vasily Grossman ; translated by Robert and

  Elizabeth Chandler ; with an introduction and notes by Robert Chandler and

  Yury Bit-Yunan.

  pages ; cm. — (New York Review Books classics)

  ISBN 978-1-59017-618-4 (alkaline paper)

  1. Grossman, Vasilii Semenovich—Travel—Armenia (Republic) 2. Armenia (Republic)—Description and travel. I. Chandler, Robert, 1953–, translator, writer of added commentary. II. Chandler, Elizabeth, 1947–, translator. III. Bit-Yunan, Yury, writer of added commentary. IV. Title. V. Series: New York Review Books classics.

  PG3476.G7D613 2013

  891.73'42—dc23

  2012039197

  eISBN 978-1-59017-635-1

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  AN ARMENIAN SKETCHBOOK

  An Armenian Picture Album

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Further Reading

  Introduction

  AN ARMENIAN SKETCHBOOK, written in early 1962, two years before Vasily Grossman’s death in September 1964, is unlike anything else Grossman wrote. It is deeply personal and has an air of spontaneity; Grossman seems simply to be chatting to the reader about his immediate impressions of Armenia—its people, its mountains, its ancient churches—and digressing, almost at random, onto subjects that range from the problem of nationalism to his views on art and even his difficulties with his bladder and bowels.

  The underlying cause of these physical problems was that Grossman was in the early stages of cancer, soon to be diagnosed in one of his kidneys. Just as Everything Flows, which he began in the mid-1950s but continued to expand and revise during his last years, is Grossman’s political testament, so An Armenian Sketchbook is his personal testament, a discussion of the values he holds dearest—in art and in life. It seems likely that, at some level, Grossman sensed he did not have long to live.

  There are relatively few memoirs of Grossman, and there is no other work, by Grossman or anyone else, that gives us so clear a sense of the man he was. Three qualities stand out: an unusual openness to other people, and especially to those who are not members of the Soviet elite; a clearheaded skepticism, directed sometimes towards others but more often towards himself; and a quiet, modest persistence. Grossman never deliberately sets out to be original, either with regard to literary style or with regard to content; his originality emerges only gradually, as he doggedly continues to see with his own eyes and to think his own thoughts. And the remarkable coherence of these thoughts emerges equally gradually; the different threads of this apparently casual memoir are deftly interwoven.

  Russian writers, unable to travel freely outside the Russian (or Soviet) Empire, have often been attracted to the Caucasus, and they have left us a number of fine travel sketches: Alexander Pushkin’s Journey to Erzurum and Osip Mandelstam’s Journey to Armenia are the two most remarkable.[1] Grossman, however, does not mention either of these works; the inspiration for An Armenian Sketchbook came not from literature but from the circumstances of his life.

  In October 1960, Grossman had submitted the manuscript of Life and Fate to the editors of a Soviet literary journal. It was the height of Khrushchev’s “thaw” and Grossman seems genuinely to have believed that Life and Fate could be published in the Soviet Union, even though a central theme of the novel is that Nazism and Stalinism are mirror images
of each other. In February 1961, three KGB officers came to Grossman’s apartment and confiscated the typescript and everything bearing any relation to it, even carbon paper and typewriter ribbons. The Soviet authorities were evidently determined not to repeat the mistake they had made three years earlier with Boris Pasternak; by persecuting Pasternak when he was awarded the Nobel Prize after the publication of Doctor Zhivago, they succeeded only in bringing him unprecedented international attention. They dealt with Grossman more shrewdly; rather than making a martyr of him, they simply took his book away.

  Grossman did not know that his work would survive, let alone be published. According to his friend Semyon Lipkin, “Grossman aged before our eyes. His curly hair turned grayer and a bald patch appeared. His asthma. . .returned. His walk became a shuffle.”[2] And the writer Boris Yampolsky reports Grossman himself as saying, “They strangled me in a dark corner.”[3]

  Later that year Grossman agreed to rewrite a clumsy literal translation of a long Armenian war novel—a task that would entail spending two months in Armenia. He evidently felt that he needed the money: After completing the work, he wrote to his wife, “I’m glad that I have been able to escape from material difficulties, that I haven’t got into debt, that I haven’t had to borrow money from well-wishers.”[4] He may also simply have wanted to get away from Moscow; his difficulties at this time included not only the “arrest” of his novel but also the near breakdown of his marriage. He may have hoped that the combination of disciplined work and a trip to somewhere exotic would do him good.

  It needs to be said, however, that this story is more complicated than is immediately apparent and has yet to be fully researched. No previous scholar or memoirist has mentioned that an entirely competent Russian translation—by a different translator, Arus Tadeosyan—of an earlier, shorter version of this novel, Hrachya Kochar’s The Children of the Large House, had been published in 1955 (by Sovetsky pisatel′) and again in 1956 (by Voenizdat), only five years before Grossman’s visit to Armenia. Kochar may have hoped that a new version, by someone important, would bring more attention to his novel, but it is surprising that neither Lipkin nor Grossman appear ever to have mentioned the earlier version. Grossman would certainly have known about it; Sovetsky pisatel′ and Voenizdat were two of the most important Soviet publishers. Both were based in Moscow, and both had brought out editions of Grossman’s first novel about Stalingrad, For a Just Cause.

  The most plausible explanation of the decision by the Soviet literary authorities to commission a new translation of Kochar’s novel is that it was an attempt to buy Grossman off, to compensate him—at least in financial terms—for the non-publication of Life and Fate, and so lessen the danger of his contacting foreign journalists or sending manuscripts abroad. According to Kochar’s daughter Meri, it was Vardkes Tevekelyan, the chairman of the very important Literary Fund, who first introduced Grossman to her father.[5] Tevekelyan may simply have been wishing to do Grossman a favor, or he may have been acting under instructions from some still-higher authority.

  Grossman began work (in both his letters and his memoir he follows the standard Soviet practice of referring to the work of improving a literal version not as “editing” but as “translation”) some time in the summer, and by mid-October he was halfway through the novel. On October 13, he wrote, “Today I’ve finished the first volume—690 pages! I’m a translator! Still, this work really is good for me—the rhythm, the systematic nature of it, the hours I devote to it every day—all this is calming and strengthening.”[6] In early November, he traveled to Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, in order to work more closely both with the literal translator, Hasmik Taronyan, whom he refers to in his memoir as Hortensia, and the author, Hrachya Kochar, whom he calls Martirosyan. In mid-December, he wrote to Lipkin:

  I’ve finished with the awful, illiterate literal version. I’ve reached the final page, the 1,420th. Now I’ll be reading through and revising the text as it comes back from the typists. I’ve read through 100 pages already. Compared with working on the literal version, this is like being on the staff of Red Army Soldier after being with Gorokhov’s men in Stalingrad in October 1942. It’s a rest for the soul. . . . I’ve already got used to the author’s almost sleepy indifference to the way an elderly gentleman is working on his book so diligently that by evening his face and brow are covered in purple blotches. Two weeks ago I found this astonishing, but what would most astonish me now would be to hear the words “Thank you!”[7]

  A letter written two weeks later, on December 30, tells us more about Grossman’s difficulties with the author of the novel:

  I’m so exhausted that, apart from nervous upset and a senseless desire to weep, I feel nothing at all. It’s as if everything’s come loose inside me. There have been sharp words between me and my client. He is no fool; he understands that I have helped him, but at the same time he can’t help hating me—like a wild animal that has fallen into the clutches of Doctor Moreau. And Doctor Moreau truly has cut him up and crumpled him a great deal and taken him several steps up the ladder of literary evolution. But he, of course, finds this painful: “Where’s my hair? Why’s my tail been chopped off?” And, at the same time, he’s pleased.[8]

  This brief vignette of Kochar is memorably witty, but Kochar’s mixed feelings are understandable. No one has yet carried out a detailed comparison of Grossman’s “translation” with the Armenian original, but it seems likely that Grossman put a great deal of himself into the final Russian version. His version ends with a soldier telling a young woman by the name of Anik that the Germans are gone. Anik, who is pregnant, feels her child moving inside her; hearing the sound of distant artillery, she momentarily imagines that they are firing a salute in honor of this child. It would be hard to imagine a more “Grossman-like” ending; the tension between motherhood and human destructiveness is a central theme throughout his work. It seems that Grossman may have been attempting to compensate himself for the “arrest” of Life and Fate; unable to publish his own novel about the Second World War, he may have seized the opportunity to rewrite someone else’s.

  This same letter of December 30 also includes a first mention of the memoir that Grossman titled Dobro vam (literally “Good to You”) and that we have titled An Armenian Sketchbook.[9] Grossman continues, “Yesterday I finished this bone-breaking work—and today I’ve begun writing, noting down my Armenian impressions. I’m like George Sand, who finished a novel at four in the morning and, without going to bed, began a second one there and then. Though there is, admittedly, a difference—she was being published. My own behavior, in contrast, is hard to understand. Why should I be in such a hurry?”[10] Two weeks later, in a letter written from Sukhumi, on the Black Sea, where he stopped on his way back to Moscow, Grossman referred again to his need to work: “For me, this New Year has begun, like all my life: well and happily, and bitterly and anxiously, confusedly, with joy in my heart, and with the desire to work—a desire as irrational as the life instinct, as senseless and invincible.”[11] It seems likely that an additional reason for Grossman’s eagerness to begin work on the memoir was the desire to be writing in his own voice again. In a letter to his wife, he wrote, “I dream of finishing work and resting in silence. Once again I’ll be myself—not a translator.” And in another letter he wrote, “But, you know, I really do find all this translation work very hard. It demands a great deal of strength, and it is emotionally difficult. I like to be myself, however difficult and complicated this may be. And this need to be myself only gets stronger over the years. And I respect it; I shan’t become a translator.”[12] The self-revelation of An Armenian Sketchbook seems, at least in part, to have been a reaction to the self-effacement required of a translator—even of a translator who treats his original text with considerable freedom.

  After completing his Armenian memoir in the first half of 1962, Grossman submitted it to the journal Novy Mir. The editor, Aleksandr Tvardovsky, accepted it. The censor, however, insisted on the omission of
around twenty lines about anti-Semitism from the penultimate page.[13] By then Grossman had come to feel deeply ashamed of the many compromises he had made in the course of his life and he refused to agree to this demand. As a result, Dobro vam was not published until 1965, eight months after Grossman’s death—and then only with the omission of whole chapters.[14]

  The complete text was published in November 1988 in the journal Znamya. It is this text, prepared from the manuscript by Grossman’s daughter, Yekaterina Korotkova, and republished in Russia several times, that we have used for the present translation. It should be noted, however, that we cannot be certain that it reflects Grossman’s final wishes in every detail. We cannot take it for granted that every passage missing from the 1965 version was omitted at the insistence of an editor or censor; Tvardovsky was a skilled editor and, for all we know, Grossman may have willingly agreed to some of the cuts he suggested.

  The passages omitted from the 1965 version (and also from two editions in 1967) fall into four main categories. There are the passages about Stalin—for example, the whole of the second chapter—which might have been acceptable in 1962, while Khrushchev was still in power, but which were certainly no longer acceptable three years later, after Khrushchev had been deposed. There are the long discussions of nationalism; chapter four, for example, was also entirely deleted—a useful reminder to the modern reader that Grossman’s thoughts about nationalism were, at the time, controversial. There are passages that might have offended particular individuals—for example, some of the more ironic mentions of “Martirosyan” and “Hortensia.”[15] Lastly, some of the passages about Grossman’s physical problems are greatly abridged. Until recently, Russian writers have tended to shy away from descriptions of physiological matters. In addressing such potentially humiliating problems, Grossman was being characteristically bold.[16]