Tag: Russian Literature

Maria Stepanova – In Memory of Memory

I don’t know, both because I wasn’t born then and because I still haven’t read enough, whether at any other time there has been such an obsession with memory as there is in our own age. Still, I suspect not. There have been times in the past when humanity has loved some deeper past – commonly that of the Romans, the ancient Greeks, or Renaissance Italy – but that love was always for the big things, not the small, personal, or individual. We loved soaring city gates, the idea of military triumph, or some kind of atmosphere we believed to predominate among the homes of the great and the good. We only cared about the individual insofar as we could imagine how we ourselves would make use of this environment to grow our own strength, or more sinisterly, the strength of our own state. In that sense, this past-obsession has always been egotistical, uncaring. Nobody looks back to a time of shared bread, only the great wars or cultures bread fuelled.

We are more sceptical of such ideas now, the idea of building a state or even a self according to past models. I smile wryly at those men who try to construct and conduct themselves as if they were a Roman tribune. And as for states, the evidence seems pretty conclusive – the best way to build a future is to work in the present, not reshape things according to some untransferable past or imaginary utopian scheme.

Today, though, the past retains its power – what has changed is the focus. Individual memory has now come to take the place of the wider past in prominence. Maybe it has some connection with Francis Fukuyama’s much maligned idea of the end of history – that now that the present is sorted, we only need to do a little tinkering upon the past, and all will be perfected.  “Memory brings the past and present into confrontation in the search for justice.” This is how Maria Stepanova, the contemporary Russian-Jewish writer of poetry and prose, puts it in In Memory of Memory, translated into English by the poet Sasha Dugdale. We go back, but only personally, into the past, not in search of a better world, but to bring back evidence of the past’s unjustness, that we may not repeat it, or more simply not let it form false images in our mind.

(Maybe we go back for another reason. The world of the present is now, even if we discount the wars surrounding us and mounting tensions of all sorts, strangely soft and hard to find a foothold in. To go back into memory is to find something solid, to make something solid if we do it with our own past or another past we choose. It’s another manifestation of that urge to find some small sense of power in a world that seems both crying out for goodness but also near-impossible-seeming to influence as an individual.)

Instead of a description of death camps in history books, which to one politically aligned with such things can seem a jolly good idea or else a fabrication, or even the historical novel, which sadly can always and easily be denied any impact on the heart or mind by the latter charge, what is individual and evidence-based always makes a much stronger impression, at least on me. The German writer W.G. Sebald sits strangely but centrally in this world of memory, creating fiction (?) that is both evidence-based and not, bringing in sources that were both real (most of the facts) and not (some photos), something which has led to no small amount of controversy since his death.

In Memory of Memory is post-Sebaldian. You can read descriptions of it online in catalogues and on marketplaces and nobody quite knows whether its mix of genres contains fiction or not, and if so, how much. Like a work of Sebald our narrator is in the world, wandering about, talking to people, visiting old graveyards. Like Sebald, we have a range of media – diaries, letters, notes, photos. I have no ability to question whether Maria Stepanova is telling the truth, nor any particular desire to. The work feels true and I trust the narrative voice. Is it just that sense of doubt which makes something seem fictional?

Sebald often seems to present things as such clear truths that we might want to question him, especially with his love of coincidence; Stepanova is more likely to take us into her confidence when things go wrong. At the end of the first chapter of In Memory of Memory she has just visited the remote village of Pochinky, once home to part of her family, in search of clues as to their past existence. She finds none. On the way back she remembers that she should have checked the cemetery there and calls her contact. No cemetery left, she hears, but there was a Jew still living there. “She even knew his name: Gurevich. Strangely enough it was my mother’s maiden name.” This failure (and there are many others) is enough to make me trust Stepanova, to shift my attention from the teller onto the tale in a way that we never quite can with Sebald.

So, what tale? “This book about my family is not about my family at all, but about something quite different: the way memory works, and what memory wants from me.” Stepanova can speak for herself, especially when the translation is done by a poet and is this consistently beautiful and clear throughout. On the one hand, In Memory of Memory is about Stepanova’s family. She tries to sift through documents, archives, and oral stories to create a picture of the fates of some of her relatives throughout the past hundred or so years – educated Jews for the most part, who somehow survived the worst of the 20th century. At the same time, the work stretches beyond this. It asks important ethical questions about how we treat the past and its people.

There’s a lot here. Not too much for itself, but too much for a blog post. In Memory of Memory is an incredibly rich work and one of the most brilliant I’ve read in recent years. Stepanova may tell us of a man expecting a knock on the door at any moment during the Great Terror who throws all his documents into the fire, but in spite of this and other incidents of destruction she manages to achieve a great deal – but never so much that her reconstructions seem unfairly wrought. To give an example, we have a chapter which is just descriptions of about twenty photos. The point, as I took it, was to undermine the idea that photographs are perfectly truthful or helpful documents. (Even before we talk of Stalin’s love of airbrushing). If we know no context, do not even know the people in the photos, then photos are strangely reluctant to provide any useful information.

Meanwhile, in the various “Not-a-chapters” scattered throughout the book we have other documents, typically letters, with what context Stepanova can provide for them.  In one, from 1947, we have a single letter, which makes reference to “our appalling conversation” but gives no more clues as to its meaning. There are, I think, clues elsewhere in the book, but only faint ones. Again, the purpose seems to be to emphasise that sometimes the past refuses to be receptive, to answer our requests for a complete story, a neat takeaway. Letters are missing, things are not written down, life is not neat. A diary which sets the book going has nothing personal in it at all until the odd message, the last one included in In Memory of Memory, where the writer notes “sleep is my salvation.” With Sebald, we feel the danger of forgetting; with Stepanova, we fear things have already been forgotten without possibility for return.

Only one chapter is story-like in its construction and conclusive in its ending. Where in other places absent information is like rust that has eaten away too much at the structure, here the absences we have make the text spongey, so that the imagination can enter into it all the better. It is the longest chapter in the book, and the most horrible. “Lyodik, or Silence”, is the story of a young man, Lyodik, who is in the Leningrad region during the siege. Stepanova has not only his own letters, but also the memoirs of those who were fighting in the region or just trying to survive, such as the writer and critic Lydia Ginzburg. Using these other sources to provide context, she uses Lyodik’s letters back home to give a kind of negative of Lyodik’s life, where what is important is what is not said, or said indirectly: a hospital visit he claims is for tonsilitis is almost certainly because of a war wound; the starvation and deprivation of the civilians (including relatives he visits in the besieged city) is something he can only hint at. And then finally, alongside a description of a battle from a memoirist, we have the official letter confirming Lyodik’s death. And then the death of his father, also fighting, soon afterwards. Such hammer blows need no further context or commentary. They are the kind of thing that makes you put the book down and step outside.

In Memory of Memory has its innocent working hypothesis, that everyone survived, that all was well in spite of the 20th century’s storms, but Stepanova’s discoveries in the end do not lead in this direction. (The Second World War / Great Patriotic War was always going to be the exception by the sheer weight of bodies it took into itself.) In the book’s third part the correction to the other notions comes. There’s a relative among the hundreds of thousands of Jews murdered by the Romanians when Odessa was occupied, and another, a manufacturer in Kherson, who seems to survive the changes in power during the Revolution, but at the cost of everything he owned. While looking for clues, Stepanova finds a comic note in an article but little more: “in his old age the former factory owner Gurevich, sitting in the warm sun, said laughingly that he remembered the war and the revolution, but he couldn’t recall making a present of his factory to the Communist Petrovsky”.

Another relative manages to survive the Revolution by joining the “special task units”, a kind of volunteer militia for the new state. There are no photos or documents, but “the terrible scars on his stomach and back, traces of something that pierced him through, are proof enough.” This man, later, burns his documents and paintings in 1938 because he believes that he will soon be taken away to an interrogation that may end his life. It does not happen. A doctor in the family, at the time of the “Doctors’ Plot”, where Stalin began systematically murdering Jews in the medical profession, somehow survives that too. (Thankfully, Stalin croaked first).

What may be a simple hypothesis is undermined by the sense that it does not really cover what matters. They survived, yes, but traumatised. The man who lost his factories also lost his family, who didn’t seem to want anything to do with him for reasons we cannot even guess for lack of evidence. There were the older familial patriarchs who watched in anguish as newer generations left the Jewish faith and even married other ethnicities. And then there are the smaller traumas, the people who won’t or can’t talk to each other for whatever reason. Can we really speak about a happy family when Stepanova’s conclusion is that “the more I think about our family history, the more it seems like a series of unfulfilled dreams.”

Stepanova, like Sebald, is memory-obsessed. Like Sebald, she lives like a ghost in the narrative, an “I” which is more “eye” than flesh-and-blood actor. Where she differs from the German is in her unease, which grows in the book. She goes back, she finds answers, she crafts narratives, tells stories. But the whole project seems to rot as she writes it. She realises that even as she is trying to remember, to bring justice, she’s also doing something wrong. She sees herself as a kind of exploiter of trauma, a little bit like the accusations that have been thrown at Sebald since his own death. “The dead have no rights: their property and the circumstances of their fate can be used by anyone and in any way.”

That is the theory, but it is not a moral thing to take lives and manipulate them, even when that manipulation is just an attempt to tell the truth. Stepanova sees the dead as being another group which we must soon come to treat with respect, the same way humanity had to come to treat slaves, and women, and certain ethnic, sexual, or religious groups with respect. What this would look like, I’m not sure either of us knows. What is clear is that “we, the people of the past and the present, are endlessly vulnerable, desperately interesting, utterly defenceless. Especially after we are gone”. That is precisely why things must change. There’s a powerful moment when she is trying to force her father to let her include some letters he wrote in a “not-a-chapter” section and he refuses, saying that the past was not really as he wrote it. “I was prepared to betray my own living father for the dead text.” Unlike the dead, he has a voice to refuse. The obvious implication is that they too, if they could, would have their reservations.

In Memory of Memory is not just the story of a Russian Jewish family, nor yet alone Stepanova’s reflections on the ethics of memory. The book is so much broader than that in its range. With its dialogues with French, American, German cultures and cultural figures (among others), it’s a book that consciously refuses the box some might prepare for it: as “Russian culture”, or “Jewish memory culture”. I learned, for example, about the box maker, Joseph Cornell, the photographer Francesca Woodman, the artist Charlotte Saloman. This is a book about trauma and the past, not just in the Russian or Russian-Jewish context. Its questions and answers touch all of us, drag all of us into the whirlpool.

“Kill the yids and save Russia”, a charming stranger says to Stepanova at a railway station, shortly after the Soviet Union has collapsed. It’s all still here, this trauma, this need, this obligation, to remember, to do better, not just for the Jews, but for all of us. At least we can be grateful that we have such a beautifully written and powerfully argued book to help us begin to do so.

Ideas of Emancipation in Lou Andreas-Salomé’s Fenitschka

Lou Andreas-Salomé is someone I had long imagined I would only encounter through the words and biographies of others. Perhaps the most important woman Nietzsche knew, and certainly the only one to whom he ever proposed – as many as three times, without success – and a lover and confidante to Rilke who taught him Russian and introduced him to Tolstoy, before finally becoming a significant figure in psychoanalysis, where she worked alongside Sigmund Freud, Andreas-Salomé found herself at the centres of German-language culture practically from the moment she was born in 1861 to her death in 1937.

A Russian, born in St Petersburg of mixed Huguenot and German ancestry, Andreas-Salomé had everything she needed to succeed as a woman in her age. Her father maintained an intellectual atmosphere at home, including letting his daughter attend her brothers’ classes. Then, when he died young, he left his daughter enough money for a certain amount of choice in how to live. The most important thing for her, however, came from within – the will to choose her own destiny, everything else be damned. She eventually married for affection rather than desire, spending her entire life in what today we might call an open relationship, passing from one rapturous affair to the next, never settling for too long or surrendering her independence to the men she adored. Deeply intellectual, deeply passionate, and finally heroic in her own choice of life, she seems a person it would be great to get to know.

What a relief it is, then, to learn she wrote some books. They aren’t easy to come by, either in the original German (Andreas-Salomé spent most of her adult life in Germany) or in any other language (though, in one of the quirks of translation, Goodreads seems to suggest she has become quite popular in Turkish). Still, I wanted to hear her words. I bought a slim and tiny Reclam edition of Fenitschka, one of her best-known novellas. I thought it would be as good a place as any to start with.

As a work of literature, Fenitschka excels in the subversion of our expectations. This stretches from the novella’s title, to its genre and characters. It appears at first glance to be a traditional bildungsroman, a story of education. We follow Max Werner, an Austrian flaneur on the streets of Paris who encounters the mysterious Russian woman, Fenia or Fenitschka, while at a bar. His destiny, from the moment he lays eyes on her, seems to be to unite himself in marriage with her. Marriage, after all, is the key moment in traditional works of the genre, as it provides a synthesis of all the education that has gone on before. And Max, who thinks of himself as something of a psychologist, appears to have undertaken all the other “education” needed – all that remains is the marriage.

Yet just as the novella places Max as the hero, ready for marriage, it undermines Max’s education. Max’s “psychology”, is really just an excuse for him to stare at women. When on an evening walk with Fenitschka, who has taken herself through a degree in Zurich, she talks about the importance of education for female emancipation, Max shows very little enthusiasm or understanding for what she’s talking about. By this point he has decided to seduce her. He abuses his right as a man to ensure a lady is taken home safely to her hotel by taking her back to his hotel, then actually locks her in his room to make sure he gets what he wants. It appears he knows the theory of seduction, but as for the reality…

Fenia tells him to get lost and leaves. Not only that, but she calls him “the first indecent man” she has ever met. Rather than happily enjoying the fruits of his manliness, Max is not just denied what he thinks is his by right, but he also finds his own sense of self and knowledge challenged by this stranger. It’s a remarkable scene insofar as the supposed hero is acting the villain, while the readers watch in increasing discomfort. The education Max has received is not proved through marriage, but undermined by showing that he is an asshole.

We wait a year for the action to continue. Max is in Russia for his sister’s marriage when he encounters Fenia again. She refers to their “love affair” (Liebesroman) with a certain mockery, born of her increased confidence from being a little older (she has finished her studies) and from being in her own country. For that is what the first section of Fenitschka is – a love story that has the wrong ending. The remaining sections of the novella are only more different to what we expect.

Max follows Fenia to St Petersburg to meet her family, as a friend, that is. (He reveals to her at the wedding that he is himself engaged, but readers smile knowing an engagement can always be broken off). We might expect that having failed at the “affair” part, Max might have a go at the “love” part of his “love affair”. For a reader, Max is still the person we follow, and we always have in mind the novella’s title – Fenitschka is the central figure, and we expect such figures to get married. Regular references to love, such as through quotes from the Russian poet Lermontov’s long poem The Demon, and a sense that Max is finding Fenitschka ever more physically attractive, make us think that he and she will soon end up together. But this is not what happens. Instead, Max discovers that Fenitschka is herself conducting a secret affair, and assumes the (traditionally female) role of confidant.

While Max has his moments when it seems he realises his worldview is limited, he is still very much that voice of tradition which lurks behind apparent liberal outlooks. When Fenitschka’s lover insists they get married, he encourages her to go ahead with it. But this is precisely what she does not want, as it would constrain her. The novella ends with her rejecting the lover, but with gratitude for their time together – a very modern moment.

We think that this is Max’s story. He is referred to always as “Max Werner”, as if to highlight his solidity and manly importance in contrast with the fragile female Fenitschka. The novella’s title, Fenitschka, is itself a diminutive, turning the independent woman into a cutesy figure. Her real name is Fenia, and the narrative shifts between the two to emphasise that she has two identities – one imposed from outside, and the other that she is crafting for herself. We see a similar situation in Nadezhda Kvoshchinskaya’s The Boarding School Girl, where “Lelenka” becomes “Elena” once she has achieved independence.

The comparison with Kvoshchinskaya’s work is worth exploring. One key similarity is in their narrative structures. In both works we have stories that are seemingly about men – the exiled revolutionary Veretitsyn and the flaneur Max Werner – who we expect to marry the titular female figures, but who are soon revealed to be far less impressive than their female counterparts, who instead move beyond them. Veretitsyn is supposedly a progressively-minded revolutionary, but is shocked when Lelenka becomes an artist and lives independently in St Petersburg. Werner claims to be up to date in psychology and has long discussions with Fenia about women’s rights, only to try to persuade her to marry her lover after all. Like Lelenka, Fenia instead prefers to be alone – in her case as a professor.

Where these works differ is in their treatment of the obstacles facing women in the 19th century. The Boarding School Girl paints a miserable picture of Lelenka’s home life, where she is essentially sold into a marriage she does not want. The enemies are mainly her family – father and mother – and the way out is self-education. Fenitschka instead focuses on the shortcomings of male figures who are not even aware of what they do. While certainly the novella makes the typical stabs at the empty “faultless mechanism of coming and speaking and moving on” of society evenings, and Fenia has an uncle who is something of a toady, freedom through education is still available to Fenia to ignore all of that. Instead, the real enemy is Max, precisely because he has no idea that he is one, believing himself liberal and sensible. Whether trying to seduce her or marry her, he continues to “demonise or idealise” her, rather than viewing her as a human being, and force her into traditional roles.

Of course, we smile at the thought that the so-called psychologist is unable to view his subject properly. But in Fenitschka we see the more subtle pressures placed upon women, compared to parents telling them what to do. Calling the incident in Paris a “love affair” gives it a recognisable narrative shape, and thus pressures both of their existences to follow this same shape. When they encounter the Lermontov (“All on this earth I give to you. / Just love me, you have to love me!”), Fenia notes that the quotes are hanging in near-enough every house in the city, ready for impressionable girls and boys to learn their roles: the one to love, the other to submit to its force. In this way, the novella shows that our traditional understandings of narrative, shaped by culture, are also a subtle barrier to emancipation.

In both Khvoshchinskaya’s novella and Andreas-Salomé’s, the women choose independence, but in both works there remains a certain ambiguity – the loneliness that comes with the rejection of ties. Max hears Fenia reject her lover, but never sees her again, just as Veretitsyn ends his story descending from Lelenka’s apartment, not sure what to do with himself. Yet in the almost fifty years between the novellas, (The Boarding School Girl is from 1861, while Fenitschka was published in 1898) there is a sense that the victories of the women are quite different. Lelenka has fought off the suitor her parents provided and is now an independent artist, but it has come at a cost – she is now rational and cold, as if she has had to adopt qualities from the men who aimed to control her in order to control her own freedom. Fenia, however, retains both her emotional side and her intellectual side when she achieves her freedom: “I thank you! I thank you!” These are emotional words, but they are also the words of someone choosing to be a professor – an eminently rational pursuit. To put it another way, Fenia appears to be achieving a more complete existence as a free person compared to Lelenka.

When we see this synthesis, we realise that Fenitschka was indeed a kind of bildungsroman after all. It was not Max who needed to grow, develop, and get married. He only learned, and probably not well enough, of his own mistakes and limitations. But Fenia grew, finally demonstrated her independence, and achieved a kind of synthesis in her own life – one that required no marriage at all. Here we have a model for growth without shortcuts. There may be challenges ahead for the Russian, but she is now well-set to face them. Of all the many heroes and heroines we know who end their books married instead, of how many can we really say their marriage will last?

As literature, Fenitschka has certain issues – it’s a little weak in terms of language, and I find the idea that a young woman would forgive so readily the man who locked her in his room to try to seduce her a little unbelievable – but it’s quite an exciting look at the challenges and opportunities for self-discovery available to women (or anyone) in the late 19th century. And with its emphasis on the idea that marriage and conformity are less important than being true to yourself and your ideals, it’s a work with a message that is as fresh now as it was then. It’s especially worth seeking out if you want to experience for yourself the voice of the “free spirit” Nietzsche once truly loved, and see how she imagined emancipation for herself.

What Truth can we write under Stalin? Grossman’s Stalingrad

“It’s not enough to say, “I wrote the truth.” The author should ask himself two questions: “First, which truth? And second, why?” We know that there are two truths and that, in our world, it is the vile and dirty truth of the past that quantitatively preponderates. But this truth is being replaced by another truth that has been born and continues to grow” – Maxim Gorky, to Vasily Grossman.

This quote, which I find more harrowing than almost anything else I have read recently – and I have just finished Snyder’s Bloodlands – comes from the introduction to the new translation of the Jewish (ethnicity) – Ukrainian (birthplace & upbringing) – Russian (language & literary tradition) – Soviet (time) writer Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler. The novel was first published as For a Just Cause (За Правое Дело), which I think is also a great (if ironic) title, but Grossman preferred Stalingrad, which is why the Chandlers chose this one.

Whether in the complexities of the author’s identity, or in Gorky’s twists and turns, or in the novel’s title and the many changes between editions to account for a shifting censorship environment, we can see one of the central problems of the work – truth itself. The great Russian critic, Vissarion Belinsky, once wrote that literature was the finest place for discussing the problems of the day because at that time it was less rigorously policed than philosophy or the papers. Belinsky, however, never met Stalin.

Stalingrad is an attempt to write a great novel under Stalin and it is about as good as is possible, given that constraint. The Chandlers’ translation pulls together scraps from the various drafts and editions of the novel to approximate what Grossman might have wanted for his work and reveal its real brilliance. Their notes at the novel’s end are in depth and fascinating, highlighting just how major and minor the censorship could be. Characters and whole chapters disappear or are added, bodies that touched in the manuscript remain chastely apart. The closer we get to publication, the fuzzier we get – we go from saying someone was in a camp, to a euphemism for the same, then at times to merely a blank space.

The story of Stalingrad concerns the lives of the Shaposhnikov family. There’s a matriarch, three sisters and a brother, and various grandchildren, husbands and ex-husbands. Through them, we have a kind of cross-section of Soviet society, ranging from kolkhoz volunteers to power plant operators, researchers and soldiers, doctors and teachers. The Soviets wanted a Soviet War and Peace. While in many ways this novel is worse than Tolstoy’s, one area where Grossman vastly outstripped Tolstoy was in actually showcasing an entire society. During the war, he worked as a war correspondent, so he really did see everyone and everything. (He was among the first to write about Treblinka).

As stories go, Stalingrad is fine – the problem lies in the characters. There are too many of them, and not enough plot, which makes it all hard to follow. The characters we have are also fairly flat. Both nuance and doubt are impossible here. A general can burst into tears while looking at an enflamed Stalingrad, but never can he feel scared or want to turn back. We read that Krymov, one of the sister’s ex-husbands, has had to execute several “traitors”, but Grossman can do nothing to suggest that there might be something wrong with this. (In Life and Fate, early on we have a meeting of powerful people where one of them makes a slip up about Stalin, and the sheer force of the menace that immediately arises is enough to send shivers down your spine – but here Grossman could not even get close to writing this).

The central topic of the book is the Battle of Stalingrad. It comes to consume everything, and everyone, whether they are fighting or fleeing. This sense of onrushing history keeps us reading by papering over the less interesting bits and the occasional limp characterisation. But war is, in some ways, a bad topic for literature. Such a war as the one against the Nazis refuses much by way of nuance.  

Here’s Sofya Osipovna, a Jewish friend of the Shaposhnikov’s: “You’re wrong. I can tell you as a surgeon that there is one truth, not two. When I cut someone’s leg off, I don’t know two truths. If we start pretending there are two truths, we’re in trouble. And in war too – above all, when things are as bad as they are today – there is only one truth.” This dialogue is on the same topic as Gorky earlier. Now, from a literary perspective, allowing for two truths at least presupposes a conflict, a need to clarify. But this novel is mainly about one truth instead – that the Germans are evil, and the Soviets – good. Nothing that makes the Soviets, or at least the Russians (the official line), look bad can be written. Looting and collaboration are carefully removed by the time of publication.

What kind of nuance is left to the author? Obviously, Grossman thought the idea of Gorky’s truth was hogwash. So how could he hint at something else?

The first way is by the act of hinting itself, by forcing the reader to connect the dots. One of the great lacunae of Stalingrad concerns the fate of the Jews. For Grossman, this was personal – his mother was murdered in his hometown of Berdichev (Berdychiv). Viktor Shturm, one of the key Jewish characters of the novel, receives a letter from his own mother, written before she was executed. But we never read it. Only in Life and Fate, a novel that could not be published in the Soviet Union, could Grossman say what the letter said. Yet we know the letter exists, and the reader would have to fill in this gap for themselves.

At another point, a German character flies over the terrain east of Warsaw:

“Forster had glimpsed a thread-like single-track railway, running between two walls of pine trees to a construction site where hundreds of men were swarming about amid boards, bricks and lime. Something of strategic importance was evidently being built here.”

Those last words are so heavy with irony they might bring the plane down. They bring us to the second way that Grossman criticises truth – using Germans. The Soviets had one truth, the Nazis another. While he could not criticise the Soviet truth, he could break down the Nazi truth in a way suspiciously easy to adapt to the Soviet one. The camp has no strategic utility – it just annihilates people, probably Jews. Forster deludes himself, but we sense the truth. Could characters on the other side, justifying their own camps, not be similarly deluded?

Another character, Schmidt, while under fire in Stalingrad, wonders how he might build bridges to his colleagues. He’s an old communist, and suspects he is not alone in not wanting to fight. But he cannot connect to his colleagues – to voice doubt in public or private would be to court immediate execution. It’s a similar scenario to the one the Soviets experienced in the Great Terror, of people unable to unite, even though they might manage to make change if they could, all because of the state’s power and surveillance. At another point, some soldiers declare their propaganda was always a lie: “To be honest with you – now that the war’s almost over – all this talk about the unity of the German nation is bullshit.” Here, too, could we not say something similar about the Soviets?

Yes, and no. A defensive war is generally one which unites people. To speak of Soviet unity is probably less of a lie than German unity. The Soviets, at least, knew why they were in the trenches. Grossman also does show some hints of Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis, but the collaborators were only ever a small part of the Ukrainian people, a people who mostly wanted to protect their homes and families like everyone else. Those who did collaborate often soon realised that the Soviets were bad, but the Nazis were much worse. (It’s also worth noting that many of the heroes of Stalingrad are Ukrainians, and Ukrainian itself is spoken at a few points, so this is far from an anti-Ukrainian book. And by the time he could write freely in Life and Fate, Grossman was willing to dispel Russian unity as well – see Lyudmila’s visit to Saratov in that work, where a simple bus journey is enough to show us how selfish the Russian people really were.)

The final way that Grossman begins to challenge a kind of fixed, stultifying, “Gorkian” truth, is through his treatment of death in the novel. This was another weakness, for me, of War and Peace. While in theory Tolstoy could kill any character, in reality he keeps Andrey alive long after Borodino so he gets a proper goodbye. Only Petya gets the kind of death that suggests war is stupid, unglamorous, and cruel.

Grossman is an anti-Tolstoy – he wields his scythe with relish. “All deaths are stupid,” says one of the characters, deep into the fighting. “There’s no clever way to get killed.” Instead of stupid, we might say unromantic. As soon as the Germans arrive, Stalingrad becomes something of a slasher movie: people die all the time, without warning, without any kind of authorial protection seeming to act upon them.

“There was a whistle of iron over the Volga. A thick bubbly column of greenish water leapt up just in front of the dinghy’s bow, then crashed down on top of it. A moment later, in the middle of the river, amid foaming white water, the dinghy’s tarred black bottom was shining gently in the sun, clearly visible to everyone on the launch.”

This paragraph, as sudden as the bomb itself, ends the life of a major character. They get no goodbye, not even a revelation. But that’s life, or rather death. That’s war. Here’s the grand revelation we get for the first death of the book:

As he continued up the slope, he could hear the engine struggling.

Then he heard the howl of a falling bomb. He pressed his head to the steering wheel, sensed with all his body the end of life, thought with awful anguish, “Fuck that” – and ceased to exist.

So much for the author coming in to tell us about God and meaning. “Fuck that” – probably that’s far closer to the truth of war than any adoring contemplation of trees.  

If death is not romantic, and the Germans express doubts about their purpose which are just as applicable to the Soviets as they are to the Nazis, and the topic of the Jews is constantly there in the background, as a blank space, to suggest that perhaps the Soviet narrative of the war (primarily Russian suffering) might have its own limits – then, it’s fair to say, Grossman has done a lot to give readers something to think about. After all, Stalingrad came out under Stalin! Frankly, it’s impressive how good this work is, given that.

It’s far from great, however. The limitations that censorship placed upon Grossman’s characters are too powerful. It’s like they are aware we might be eavesdropping, and thus prefer to keep silent about those things that are most likely to make them human – their doubts, their unsanctioned passions. In Life and Fate, Grossman’s modestly titled sequel, all of these shackles come off. It’s extraordinary how much better that book is, from the very first page, than Stalingrad. At about a hundred and fifty pages in I can see already that this is brushing up against War and Peace. (After finishing it, I can say it’s just as good, and far more timely reading now).

Now, an interesting thought is how the two books might fit together when considering this truth problem. Stalingrad begins to dismantle certain Soviet truths, albeit carefully, subtly. Life and Fate, with its openness to discuss the importance of autonomous kindness against totalitarian control, seems to be proposing a truth of its own. Just as they share characters (and I think Stalingrad is worth reading just to help give depth to the people and destinies of Life and Fate), they also work together on the same themes. It’s a hard ask to say we should read nine hundred pages that are merely pretty good, just to enhance another nine hundred that are definitely really good. But hopefully not an impossible one. I certainly don’t regret it.