Tag: Vasily Grossman

Vasily Grossman – Life and Fate

Life and Fate is so good I almost can’t write about it. Despite its concentration camps, its scenes in the Gulag and the death camps, the interrogations in Lubyanka and all the deaths coming so early for characters we want to live forever, the tears that came to my eyes while reading were tears of joy – and when I punched the air it was not with rage but as a spontaneous expression of awe at the work’s titanic mastery. In quite important ways, it does more than War and Peace. But Life and Fate is not an epic like that work; rather, it is its negative.

An epic creates myths; Grossman destroys them. Tolstoy’s work created ideas of Napoleon and the War of 1812 which remain sticky to this day even as he tried to destroy the idea of the “Great Man” shaping history. The central ideologies of the mid-20th century, Nazism and Stalinism, also aimed at mythmaking – the Thousand Year Reich, the October Revolution. Life and Fate annihilates these myths while still retaining the hallmarks of the epic form – a vast canvas, a willingness to philosophise, and the detached tone of a writer who sits beside God. It’s probably one of the best books I have read – or ever will.

This idea of Life and Fate as an anti-epic, or perhaps alternatively as an epic of humanism, is one way to approach the book. I wrote about Grossman’s earlier Stalingrad, which I read immediately before Life and Fate (together they must be a little longer than Tolstoy’s book), within the context of truth-telling. But if that book, written under Stalin’s last years, attempted to push truth through the gaps in the censors’ red ink, Life and Fate instead tells it straight out. The reading experience is vastly improved as a result, with characters humanised by their ability to experience such feelings as doubt or a desire for infidelity. But we might also say that if we were dutiful Soviet citizens we needed both works to experience their full impact – Stalingrad to begin weakening our trust in the regime’s narrative, and Life and Fate to replace its totalising narrative with many individual ones.

The two works share a core cast of characters, centring around the Shaposhnikov family. There are limited physical overlaps in this work as it begins with them scattered where in Stalingrad they were initially together, but there are enough connections – even if it is just a character thinking of another – to make us feel as if we are observing a shared world. In a world at war, after all, people cannot be together. In my post on Stalingrad I called that work panoramic, with its vision stretching to miners in the Urals and the full range of Soviet citizens inhabiting the city of Stalingrad itself. Yet immediately upon reading Life and Fate I felt embarrassed at giving it that designation. To say something is panoramic is almost to close the book and say that we don’t need any more voices – it’s a statement that mutes others.

In Life and Fate we hear many of these voices that are lost. There’s Karimov, a Tatar intellectual who cries over the murder of so many of his people’s brightest stars in the early years of the Soviet Union; there’s Kristya, the Ukrainian peasant woman who lost her family during the Holodomor yet saves the Russian soldier Semyonov from starvation; there’s Abarchuk, trapped in the Gulag. Grossman, with a bravery that is hard to appreciate from here, names everything evil that he can. Whether Gulag or death camp (and he was among the first to reach Treblinka), mass deportation (of the Crimean Tatars and others), the arbitrary famines during collectivisation, the mass murders of innocents in 1937, or just the lies of Russian nationalism and the pervasive Soviet anti-Semitism, in Life and Fate we have a kind of record of it. Akhmatova, in her Requiem, regretted that she could not name all the victims of The Terror by name. Grossman, it feels, gets pretty damn close.

In Stalingrad, the Germans were portrayed in a way that left the perceptive reader aware that Grossman’s criticisms against them could easily be reflected back to the Soviets. Here, we are explicit. SS Officer Liss tells the captured old revolutionary Mostovskoy that they are basically one in the same. Later we might find another parallel – Mostovskoy expects to be tortured during questioning, but it is commissar Krymov who is tortured instead – and by his own people in Moscow. Through the story of Viktor Shturm, the novel’s Jewish hero, we see the arbitrariness of state power. At first he is praised for his scientific discoveries, but then the political mood changes and Shturm finds himself cast out of his job. A few weeks later and Stalin decides he doesn’t want to be behind on building a nuclear bomb and Shturm’s fortunes are restored yet again.

Yet if this work were only negative, only critical, it would be miserable. Dismissing that world – the world of the Soviet Union in the years of the war against Hitler – too readily is itself an evil. A lot of people died to defeat Hitler, far more than perhaps needed to, but in many cases those people volunteered quite readily to defend their homelands against invasion. During the war they displayed great strength and fortitude. There were heroes among them, even if their state was not always playing the role of hero. Grossman’s love for the defenders of Stalingrad is real. The defence of the city itself was, at least in part, truly epic. But where Stalingrad ends with a celebration of that very heroism, Life and Fate as usual goes further. One of the most chilling parts of the book is the growing menace we perceive as the Soviet authorities realise they have the Germans on the back foot. It is at that point that the state decides it is time to exact its revenge, and all those fates which had seemed so positive are turned to ashes under the Stalinist, KGB gaze.

In such a nuanced view of the war, Grossman differs significantly from Tolstoy, who is both mentor and rival in Grossman’s two novels. One thing I noticed rereading it at the beginning of last year was how naïve, how sentimental War and Peace seems, how disgusting even the light nationalism of its later parts is. The Russian soul is not the hero of Life and Fate, unless that soul means the desire for a people to defend its homes. In War and Peace, ultimately, we have some delightful aristocrats who are trying to work out how to live, with the war just providing some novel opportunities for engaging with a problem which is ultimately mainly a concern for a man or woman of money, leisure, and time for reflection.

Life and Fate is concerned with a much more pressing matter, one that comes long before we can start thinking about how to live in the Tolstoyan sense. That concern is how to survive, how to live under totalitarianism pressure, how to protect the self from a state and society that are attempting at every stage to enchain or annihilate it. This is not a concern that is any less relevant now, even if many of us are less at risk of getting shot. Simply put, it is about human dignity and its preservation.

This is something we like to say, or used to like to say, about the great writers of Russia’s nineteenth century. Tolstoy celebrates the peasant, but ended up in later years having vitriol for the aristocrat or bourgeois. The Ukrainian Gogol celebrated the little man, but only so long as he was Russian. Against Dostoevsky we can let Karimov speak, who says “I’m a Tartar who was born in Russia and I cannot pardon a Russian writer his hatred of Poles and Yids.” Dostoevsky might tell us interesting things about people, but dignity is not part of it. Who then do we have?

The answer, for Grossman, is Chekhov, whose understated style we also see in Life and Fate with its short chapters and almost entirely dislocated impressionistic stories. Here is why, according to another one of the characters:

“Chekhov brought Russia into our consciousness in all its vastness – with people of every estate, every class, every age… More than that! It was as a democrat that he presented all these people – a Russian democrat. He said – and no one had said this before, not even Tolstoy – that first and foremost we are all of us human beings. Do you understand? Human beings!” People were themselves before they were their identities, regardless of these identities – ethnic, religious, material. Of all the Russian writers Chekhov is the one whose project to care and depict was not led off course by ideas about how the world should be. Or, as he famously said himself “The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.”

The spirit of Chekhov infuses this book, and it is because of this spirit that Life and Fate feels impossibly modern in the same way that Chekhov himself does. We judge the characters – Grossman doesn’t do that, he just depicts them. Grossman instead judges the powers and ideas that put characters into the positions they are in, where they show their best and worst sides. Because the book is dedicated to social justice in the most serious sense of that phrase, and because the world it shows is so manifestly unjust, we can’t help but agree with him about what’s going wrong, while still standing in awe at all of the people and faces he somehow manages to fit in.

In a time of war, in the very same places as described in Life and Fate, and with the same peoples in the trenches but now on different sides, this book is more important than ever. Written in Russian by a Jewish writer from Ukraine, with its central hero a Jewish man from Ukraine, this is a great novel of tolerance, of pluralism, of dignity. In the war we have now, where nationalist tempers are high on both sides, nuance denied, and memory readily distorted for political aims, Grossman’s book, more than any other I have read, shows the kind of spirit we all need to have to build a lasting peace, for all the people who live in these lands.   

But first, I suppose, there’s more killing.

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.