Two Writers’ Journeys to Armenia in the Early 1960s: The Views of Vasily Grossman and Simone de Beauvoir

Abstract

Vasily Grossman, the Soviet author of the novels Life and Fate and Everything Flows, travelled to Armenia in November and December 1961, to rewrite the Russian translation of a book, written in Armenian by one of the leaders of the Union of Armenian Writers, Hratchia Kotchar. Less than two years later, in September 1963, the French intellectuals Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, surrounded by local authorities, including Hratchia Kotchar, spent two or three days in this Soviet republic, at the very end of a six-week stay in the USSR.

Afterwards, Grossman and Beauvoir – but not Sartre – both wrote texts in the first-person singular recalling their stays in Armenia, and, if these texts are of very different lengths, they reflect two partly complementary observations of Armenia, its society and its literary world at a specific time: during the Thaw and de-Stalinisation. Furthermore, Grossman develops in his text an explicit comparison between Armenians and Jews, two peoples who were victims of mass massacres in the 20th century, and he thus continues his reflection on the totalitarianisms of the century. Therefore, his and Beauvoir’s texts are also revealing of the perceptions and expectations of their authors: a Soviet writer, who had become very critical of Stalinism and Leninism, marked by the collective murders of the 20th century, and seduced by the simple people in Armenia, and a French woman who remained fascinated by communism and revolutions, and spoke neither Russian nor Armenian.