The Whisperers

* For the same reason Simonov defended the writer Vasily Grossman, whose play If We Are to Believe the Pythagoreans was savagely attacked in Pravda in September 1946. Simonov wrote to the paper’s editor, defending Grossman on the grounds that a writer who had spent ‘the whole war fighting at the front’ did not deserve to be criticized in the abusive language used by the critic, even if he had made ‘serious ideological errors’ (RGALI, f. 1814, op. 9, d. 1384, l. 2).