‘Grossman races to Grossman…’

Abstract

The article is written in response to the 2-volume publication of Victor Grossman (1887–1978), a writer and scholar active on Moscow literary scene in the 1920s–1930s, whose career was rudely interrupted by two successive arrests in 1938 and 1948. Born of a well-off Jewish family in Odessa, Victor was happy to make friends at the gymnasium with Boris Zhitkov, Korney Chukovsky, Vladimir Poplavsky, and his own first choice was a philological faculty. But then he took up law and had a remarkable career as a lawyer, which afterwards he left for literature. He had developed a reputation as an expert on Pushkin’s life and work and wrote adaptations for stage of Pushkin’s prose till he suffered an abrupt end to his activities. The article presents Grossman’s life after his liberation from camp in 1955 when he settled down in the city of Vologda. In the new collection, one volume incorporates Grossman’s works on Pushkin written in his later years and mostly never published. The other is given to nonfiction: memoirs by Grossman, his correspondence with old friends and people involved in the not-so-easy-going publication of his novel on Pushkin — Arion. I. Shaytanov also shares a story of his personal acquaintance with Grossman.