«Тонко, деликатно, грустно». О рассказе Гроссмана «Несколько печальных дней» (1940–1963)

There are still no critical editions of Vasily Grossman’s short stories and novels, and the different versions of his works that are kept in the archives (in Moscow as well as at Harvard), with a few rare exceptions, are still waiting to be studied. In this article, we present a comparative reading of three different versions of the short story A Few Sad Days, the typewritten version and the printed text. Comparing the first two versions (which most likely trace back to 1940) with the printed one (1963) allows us to understand how in the Thirties, at the beginning of his career, the writer “se sent avant tout soviétique”, “vivant ‘dans la légère brume du mythe officiel’, et célébrant ‘la fornication du travail’, dans le goût de la littérature productiviste stalinienne” (as G. Nivat wrote), and then, after two decades, he managed to become “le premier dissident authentique de la littérature russe” (S. Markish).