Vasilii Grossman: A cosmopolitan writer depicts the murder of the Jewish people

Abstract

This essay identifies and explains intellectual influences in Soviet Jewish writer Vasilii Grossman’s representation of the Holocaust. In his 1943 essay ‘Ukraine without Jews’, Grossman described murdered Jewry as a people defined by their unique culture, history and experience of World War II. An unpublished diary of Grossman’s reading notes from the 1930s provides fragmentary evidence of his pre-war ideas about Jewish people and history. Using a microhistorical approach, Grossman’s reading notes citing Johann Gottfried von Herder in 1938 are interpreted as clues that help explain the content of ‘Ukraine without Jews’, written five years later. This essay shows that Grossman was a cosmopolitan thinker who derived some of his ideas about Jewish history from European thinkers, and that these ideas influenced his depiction of the Jewish victims of Nazi genocide.