When Vasily Grossman completed
his magnum opus, the monumental novel Life and Fate he submitted
the manuscript to the magazine of the Literary Association of Writers
of the Red Army.
Shortly after this submission
in 1959, the KGB entered his apartment and confiscated the draft manuscript,
his notebooks and even the ribbons from his typewriter. Grossman was
reduced to writing a desperate letter to Nikita Khruschev asking for
“freedom for my book… the book I dedicated my life to.” The only
response he received – from the Politburo ideology chief - was that
the book could not be published “for at least 200 years.”
This curious comment, as much
acclamation as condemnation, proved false. The book was published abroad
in 1980 from smuggled microfilm copies. The Glasnost era brought the
first publication on Russian soil in 1988, by which time Grossman had
been dead for almost a quarter of a century.
Vasily Grossman was widely
held to be the greatest Russian writer of the Second World War. His
words are carved in granite on the walls of the colossal Mausoleum of
Stalingrad. So it seems strange that his masterpiece – a thousand
page novel centred on the battle for that city – was for decades suppressed
and ignored, the ‘Russian Hero’ rebranded a ‘Dissident Ukrainian
Jew’.
The novel’s scope, theme
and bombastic title inevitably invite comparison with that other great
Russian novel War and Peace. For panorama and scale, Life and Fate has Tolstoy’s ambition
and humanity and almost his breadth and depth. The intimidating “List
of Chief Characters” runs for seven closely set pages in my edition but
this belies the book’s accessibility. The action centres around a
handful of nuclei.
There is the nuclear physicist
Viktor Shtrum, and his family – Ukrainian Jews and thinly veiled portraits
of Grossman and his family. There are a group of inmates in a Russian
Gulag, and a group in a German Concentration Camp. There is a group
on their way to the gas chamber. Then there are the nuclei in and around
Stalingrad : a Ukrainian Tank Corps, members of the Air Force and embattled
Russian troops in the close-quarter combat of the city itself.
It's a book of
history and a book of ideas and on neither count did it go down well.
It’s the history that comes
first, and Grossman’s gaze is unflinching. He writes the history that
the history books would not for years to come, unspeakable and unpublishable.
He had been writing on the Holocaust since he first learned of it with
the Red Army as they liberated the Ukraine. His articles Ukraine
without Jews (1943) and The Hell of Treblinka (1944) are among the earliest descriptions of the Holocaust. The latter article
– composed from interviews of survivors and locals - contains the
first published material in any language on Nazi death camps and was
used as testimony in the Nuremberg trials.
The author’s Mother, Yekaterina
Grossman – to whom the book is dedicated – was one of the 30,000
Jews of Berdichev massacred by the Einsatzgruppen in 1941. It’s her
voice that we hear in the beautiful, shattering letter to Viktor Shtrum
from his Mother, Anna Semyonovna, a record, memorial,
celebration and lament for the Jews of the Ukraine and for a Mother’s
love.
If Grossman had written about
the Holocaust alone, he would perhaps have been allowed to publish.
Committed to his task, he wrote about all that he saw.
The Great Purge and The General Collectivisation are discussed, sometimes
directly and sometimes not. There is an almost encyclopaedic depiction
of life under Stalin – from the petty bureaucratic hurdles and impasses
of everyday life through to the ever-present terror of denunciation
by one’s friends, neighbours, relatives or co-workers. We see those
who are denounced deported to slave-labour camps or worse, given the
sentence of “Ten Years Without Right Of Correspondence” from which
no-one returned. We hear the conversations of Russians in the gulags,
uncomprehending of why they are there, many of them true patriots, war
heroes and fervent believers in Communism. In the interrogation chambers
we see them, with despair as Grossman says, “like drowning in warm
black milk.”
Inside Stalingrad, the battle
is raging in what the Germans famously called “Rattenkrieg” –
War of the Rats. The hunger, cold and brutality of that fighting is
legendary and described here vividly. Around Stalingrad, things are
no better. We are shown divisions of men massacred by artillery and
machine-guns on the crest of a hill because they cannot withdraw to
the lee-side under Stalin’s command : “Not One Step Back.”
If Grossman’s documentation
of History was unacceptable to the Soviet censors, his ideas were anathema.
Like Tolstoy, Grossman lapses into the essay form as
he struggles to explain the inexplicable, an era of massacres
and genocides of incomprehensible magnitude. His most stark observation
is that Communism and Fascism amount to the same thing. Trite in our day but gulag-worthy in Grossman's and he was saved from that or worse fate only by Krushchev's "thaw". The assertion builds through the
mass-horrors perpetrated throughout the novel before it's stated bluntly.
Is this camp that’s being described so vividly a Soviet Labour Camp
or a Concentration Camp? Is this train that’s being loaded filling
with Kulaks bound for Siberia or Jews bound for the gas chamber?
Grossman’s message ultimately
hangs between two characters, Viktor Shtrum the Physicist and Ikonnikov,
a former Tolstoyan in a German Concentration Camp.
It’s Shtrum
who is tortured by the equation of Communism and Fascism as he
struggles to understand the New Physics, the discoveries that will
culminate in the American atomic-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In
his madly spiralling thoughts, the theories coalesce. The New Physics
and the New Politics declare an individual particle an unknowable,
irrelevant chaos. They acknowledges only aggregates, at which level the
behaviour of a group of particles become orderly, predictable and
meaningful.
Ikonnikov, in the Concentration
Camp realises the purpose of the structures that the inmates are being
forced to construct. Finding a Priest he asks him, in the broken, jumbled,
creolised language of the Camp : “Que dois-je faire mio padre? Nous
travaillons dans una Vernichtungslager.”
Refusal to work will mean death. Before making his decision, Ikonnikov
writes a letter completing the arc of Viktor Shtrum’s thought. There
are grand and noble teleologies that have given birth to
the greatest slaughter mankind has ever seen:
I saw people being annihilated
in the name of an idea of ‘good’ as fine and humane as the ideal
of Christianity…. I saw trains bound for Siberia… from every city
in Russia… filled with hundreds of thousands of men and women who
had been declared the enemies of a great and bright idea of social good…
Now the horror of German Fascism has arisen… and even these crimes,
crimes never before seen in the Universe – have been commited in the
name of good…
But Ikonnikov falls back from an easy nihilism. He preaches something else, that he calls “a
kindness outside of any system of social or religious good.” It’s
here that he breaks down, becoming rambling and repetitive, almost incoherent.
He gives examples. The kindness of a man who hides a Jew in his loft
at the risk of his own life. Senseless kindness. The kindness of a Russian
peasant woman who gives water to a Nazi soldier who has been shot in
the stomach. “Mad, blind, stupid kindness.” The instant when two
soldiers in the carnage of Stalingrad find themselves blown into the
same crater and clasp each other for comfort to find, when
the smoke clears, that they are on opposing sides.
There is nothing new in what
Ikonnikov says or in his finding in pitch despair,
moments of reprieve. Grossman
has the fellow prisoner who reads this letter react with disgust
and contempt. Nonetheless, if there is a message in
Life and Fate,
it’s Ikonnikov who carries it. Grand teleologies permit atrocities in
the name of a greater good - but it's in some feeble and futile
kindness, in the unknowable chaos of an individual entity and act
and moment that we find a kernel of essential value.
Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate. With translation and introduction by Robert Chandler.
Portrait :
'Vasily Grossman' by Robert Chandler, Prospect Magazine September 2006,
issue 126
(online)