Grossman’s grave at the Troekurovskoye Cemetery, Moscow (from Robert Chandler’s personal archive)

Vasily Grossman may always be best known as the author of his two great novels centered on the Battle of Stalingrad. His last, shorter works, however, are equally remarkable. If Stalingrad and Life and Fate are comparable to Shostakovich’s symphonies, the short novel Everything Flows and the stories Grossman wrote in his last three years are like Shostakovich’s quartets—more concise, more enigmatic, more abrupt in their transitions of tone and subject matter. The short novel Everything Flows is a quarter of the length of Life and Fate, but its historical and moral scope is still broader.
The story “The Road” (1961–62)—the long winter campaign culminating in the Battle of Stalingrad told from the perspective of an Italian artillery battery mule—is a poetic distillation of Life and Fate. “Mama”—based on the real-life story of the adopted daughter of Nikolay Yezhov, head of the NKVD at the height of the Purges—takes us still deeper into the heart of evil. Once again, though, the perspective is unusual. We see Yezhov from the perspective of a small, loving girl and her peasant nanny, who has no understanding of the mass murders being carried out in the country but who feels pity for Yezhov, thinking that “his eyes looked confused, pathetic, lost.”
Three of these last stories contain pointed repetitions of the phrase life and fate. The words are like markers—or like tolling bells, telling the reader how much the loss of his great novel dominates Grossman’s thoughts.

When: Wednesday, 24 September, 18:30-20:00 (BST)
Where: Trinity Hall, Main Lecture Theatre, Trinity Lane, Cambridge CB2 1TJ
Language: English
Format: In-person & Online via Zoom
In-person tickets: £9 – Standard, £6 – CamRuSS Members and Concessions
Zoom tickets: £5 – Standard, free – CamRuSS Members, and Students
Access to the video recording is included with all ticket purchases
Video recording only: £5, free – CamRuSS Members
This event will be followed by a drinks reception.
Please book via AllEvents

Robert Chandler (right), Grossman’s daughter Katya Korotkova-Grossman (center), and the Italian scholar Pietro Tosco (left) at a Grossman conference in Moscow, 2014 (from Robert Chandler’s personal archive).

Robert Chandler first began learning Russian at the age of 15. At 20, he spent a year in Voronezh as a British Council Exchange scholar—the city where Andrey Platonov was born and where Osip Mandelstam was exiled. It was there that he first read these two writers, who have remained central to his work and life.
Among the many authors he has translated are Sappho, Apollinaire, Alexander Pushkin, Teffi, Andrey Platonov, Vasily Grossman, the Uzbek novelist Hamid Ismailov, and the underappreciated poet Lev Ozerov, a Russophone Jew from Ukraine. Chandler has also edited and co-translated three anthologies for Penguin Classics: of Russian poetry, Russian short stories, and further Russian poetry.
In addition to his translation work, he runs workshops in London, teaches at an annual summer school, and has mentored younger translators. Before committing to translation full-time, he worked for eight years as a teacher of the Alexander Technique—a discipline focused on voice, breath, and movement.