Vasily Grossman

Quotes

• “The more difficult a man's life had been before the camp, the more furiously he lied. This lie had no practical purpose; it served simply to glorify freedom. How could a man be unhappy outside the camp?”
• “National Socialism had created a new type of political criminals: criminals who had not committed a crime.”
• “We are restoring the Leninist norms of democracy. But Leninist norms are not the same as the bourgeois norms of democracy. You know yourself: when Gorky—affected by traumatic impressions, deprivation, hunger and housing difficulties in the first years after October—abandoned his revolutionary position, Lenin did not hesitate to close down his newspaper Novaia zhizn’.”
• “You believe that we have violated the principle of freedom in your case. Yes, this is so if one understands freedom in the bourgeois sense of the term. But we have a different conception of freedom. Our understanding of freedom is not identical to the one in the capitalist world—as the right to do anything without taking into account the interests of society. Only the imperialists and millionaires need this kind of freedom.”
• “Our Soviet writer must be guided in his world only by the need of the people, useful for the society.”
• “I have not read your novel but I have carefully read the reviews of your manuscript, responses to it, which contain many excerpts from your novel. Look how many quotes from them I have written down.”

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Key facts

Born

Iosif Solomonovich Grossman , ( 1905-12-12 ) 12 December 1905, Berdichev , Kiev Governorate , Russian Empire

Died

14 September 1964 (1964-09-14) (aged 58) , Moscow , Soviet Union

Occupation

Writer, journalist

Nationality

Soviet Union

Period

1934–1964

Subject

Soviet history , World War II

Notable works

Life and Fate , Everything Flows [ de ]

Spouse

Anna Petrovna Matsuk ​ ​ ( married</span>"}]]}'>m. 1928 ; divorced</span>"}]]}'>div. 1933 ) ​ Olga Mikhailovna ​ ( married</span>"}]]}'>m. 1936 ) ​

via Wikipedia infobox