UNDER SIEGE.(A Writer at War)(Book review)

In the terrible winter of 1938, just before the last of the Moscow show trials, the Soviet secret police arrested a woman named Olga Guber for having failed to denounce her anti-Soviet husband. It was an error. The husband she was to have denounced--the poet Boris Guber, arrested a year earlier--was no longer her husband. The novelist Vasily Grossman was her husband. Desperate, Grossman sent a carefully composed letter to Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the N.K.V.D. He wrote that Olga had severed all ties with Guber long before. This was not really true. Then he wrote, "I obtained a diploma from a Soviet high school, received my degree in chemistry from Moscow State University in 1929, and worked as a senior research scientist . . . in the Donbass. I have been a full-time writer since 1934. . . . All that I possess--my education, my success as a writer, the high privilege of sharing my thoughts and feelings with Soviet readers--I owe to the Soviet government." That part was true; or, at least, Grossman meant it. He basically meant it.

Grossman went on to write "Life and Fate" and "Forever Flowing," novels that in their warmth of feeling and their historical sweep stand alongside "The Gulag Archipelago" as the most anti-Soviet books of all time. Yet here is this letter, which the American scholars John and Carol Garrard dug up and published in their 1996 biography of Grossman. Was it pro-Soviet? Consider that Grossman was born in 1905 in Berdichev, a large town in the Pale of Settlement. When he was twelve years old, the Revolution wiped out residence restrictions for Jews, allowed them equal entry into elite universities, and even took a great many of them into the secret police. Furthermore, by the time he wrote to the N.K.V.D. Grossman had gone from being a penniless chemistry student to being an established writer, with two published novels and, courtesy of the Soviet Writers' Union, an apartment in the center of Moscow. He had cause to be grateful.

He also had nowhere else to go. He knew French, but he wasn't of the Russian generation that corresponded with Rilke and sat for Picasso. He had no reason to be nostalgic for the Tsar's Russia, obviously. So he was making the best of things. His literary career began, as he told Yezhov, in 1934, with the publication of the story "In the Town of Berdichev." It was about a hard-as-nails Bolshevik commissar who, having become pregnant during the civil war, is bivouacked with the Magazaniks, a poor Jewish family in Berdichev, while she gives birth. As Polish forces approach Berdichev, she decides that she will stay with her little Alyosha rather than retreat with her regiment. But at the last minute she sees a group of workers marching, suicidally, in the Poles' direction, and she remembers Red Square a few years earlier, and hearing Lenin speak, and being indescribably moved. She runs out of the house and follows the workers to their deaths; the Jewish family will raise her child. Watching her, the old worker Magazanik says to his wife, "There used to be people like that in the Bund. Those are real people, Beyla. Whereas us? We're not people. We're shit." His wife tells him to be quiet and heat some milk for the child.

The details of the story save it from sentimentality; or, rather, the sentimentality is distributed evenly, between the touching Jewish family and the dream of world revolution, so that there's an honesty to the setup. The commissar really thinks she's going to stay with her child, and maybe she should. And maybe she shouldn't.

"In the Town of Berdichev" was greeted with genuine enthusiasm. The fashionable novelist Ilya Ehrenburg, then in Paris, thought Grossman's work reminiscent of Babel, and Babel himself was charmed by the story. Even Mikhail Bulgakov, unflappably haughty toward all things Soviet, seemed to like it. "Excuse me," he said, "do you mean to say that something worthwhile can still be published?" That year, Russian literature entered the darkest period in its history. It must have looked as if Grossman had found a solution to the problem of socialist realism--by combining a realist method with an unintrusive sympathy for the revolutionary movement--and he continued to pursue this in stories and, most notably, in his novel "Stepan Kolchugin," about a coal miner turned revolutionary. It wasn't that he was a believer--a cousin ...