Life And Fate

VASILY GROSSMAN

Vasily Grossman was born on iz December 1905 in the Ukrainian town of Berdichev, the home of one of the largest Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. After studying chemistry at Moscow University, Grossman worked in a mine in the Donbass as an engineer and expert on safety precautions. In 1933 he moved to Moscow, where he was 'discovered' by Maxim Gorky; with the latter's support, he published his first novel, Glüchkauf. It was followed by a long novel, Stepan Kolchagin, and several volumes of short stories, mostly evocations of the Civil War and the life of the workers. Despite an occasional vivid detail or slightly risky piece of philosophizing, these works are typical of the official Soviet literature of the time.

During World War II Grossman worked for Red Star, the leading army newspaper. Grossman personally witnessed the disastrous retreats of the first year, the defence of Stalingrad and the capture of Berlin. As a war correspondent, he was second in popularity only to Ilya Ehrenburg.

He was also one of the first witnesses of the consequences of the Holocaust. His articles on this theme were mostly published in Unity, a newspaper produced for international distribution by the Jewish anti-Fascist committee. In the Russian journal Znamya he published 'The Hell of Treblinka', the first journalistic account of a German death-camp in any language. Together with Ilya Ehrenburg, Grossman was on the editorial committee of the Black Book, a massive anthology – yet to be printed in the Soviet Union – of documents relating to the Holocaust.

It was this collective tragedy – together with the death, at the hands of the Germans, of his own mother – that led Grossman to become conscious of his Jewish roots. His mother, a schoolteacher, had stayed behind in Berdichev in order to look after a sick niece. She apparently continued working even after the Jews had been confined to the ghetto. Her fate is evoked with extraordinary eloquence and power in one of the most moving passages of Life and Fate.

As the Cold War began in the autumn of 1946, Grossman was viciously attacked by several of the most authoritative Soviet literary critics. The occasion was the publication of his play, If You Believe the Pythagoreans. Ideologically unorthodox views put in the mouth of an extremely negative character were taken as an expression of Grossman's own beliefs. However orthodox these were at that time, his naturally philosophical cast of mind was a danger to him; it was hazardous to present unorthodox views in any guise – even if one then went on to refute them.

In 1943 Grossman had begun work on an epic novel about Stalingrad. In 1952 it was published in instalments in Novy Mir under the title For a Just Cause. Grossman enjoyed the full support of both Tvardovsky, the editor of Novy Mir, and Fadeev, the General Secretary of the Writers' Union. The initial reviews were highly favourable.

In February 1953, however, as a new series of purges, directed particularly at Jews, gathered momentum, Grossman was again attacked, possibly at the instigation of Stalin himself. During the following months he was repeatedly and hysterically denounced as a Jewish nationalist, a reactionary idealist alienated from Soviet society; Fadeev himself took part in these attacks. Grossman was saved from almost certain arrest not by his own 'letter of repentance', but by the change in the political climate following Stalin's death in March 1953. In 1954 For a Just Cause was republished in book form, once again with Fadeev's seal of approval.

The remaining years of the fifties were a time of public success for Grossman. For a Just Cause, acclaimed as a Soviet War and Peace, was republished several times, together with collections of his stories and articles written during the thirties and forties. In 1955 Grossman was awarded the important decoration 'The Banner of Labour'. Meanwhile he was writing his two great works, Life and Fate and Everything Flows.

Grossman completed Life and Fate in 1960. Originally intended as a sequel to For a Just Cause, in the event it was written in an entirely different spirit and can best be seen as a separate novel that happens to portray many of the same characters. For a Just Cause has pretensions towards the epic quality of Tolstoy, but is deadened by its ideological conformity; Life and Fate is the true War and Peace of this century, the most complete portrait of Stalinist Russia we have or are ever likely to have. The power of the other great dissident writers – Pasternak, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Solzhenitsyn – derives from their position as outsiders in Soviet society; Grossman's power derives from his extraordinarily intimate knowledge of every level of Soviet society.

Grossman delivered the manuscript to the editors of the journal Znamya. One can speculate on his reasons for doing this; it is possible that he seriously imagined the novel to be publishable – this was, after all, the height of Khruschev's 'thaw'. In any case, the editors wasted no time in handing over the manuscript to the Cultural Section of the Central Committee. A year later it was returned to Grossman with a brief note to the effect that the novel was anti-Soviet. In February 1961 two KGB officers came to his home with orders to confiscate the manuscript. They took away every scrap of paper they could lay their hands on, even sheets of used carbon paper and typewriter ribbons; Grossman told them the whereabouts of any remaining copies or fragments.

It is worth noting that the only other book to have merited such serious attention from the Soviet authorities is The Gulag Archipelago, a work of history rather than imaginative literature. Pasternak, for example, made no attempt to conceal the existence of Doctor Zhivago. He gave copies to friends and editors and even trusted the manuscript to the Soviet postal service. The attacks on Pasternak were unleashed not by the discovery of the novel's existence, but by its eventual publication abroad.

Grossman wrote to the Politburo to request the return of his manuscript. In response, Suslov, the principal Party ideologist, told him that there could be no question of Life and Fate being published for another two hundred years. Many people have commented on the extraordinary presumption of this remark; the emigre writer Vladimir Voinovich, on the other hand, has said that what he finds most striking is Suslov's unquestioning recognition of the novel's lasting importance.

The fate of the manuscript during the next twenty years is uncertain. There are reports that Grossman wanted to do further work on the novel, and that he complained bitterly to a friend that the absence of even a rough version was unbearable. It appears that the KGB did indeed confiscate every copy of the manuscript. Nevertheless, as Simon Markish has said in Le Cas Grossman (Julliard/L'Age d'Homme, 1983): 'We know now from a reliable source that one of the principal dissidents of the mid-seventies – who wishes not to divulge his name in view of possible harmful repercussions on other people – somehow obtained a copy of the manuscript, copied it and had the microfilm smuggled abroad.'

And, in a speech made at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1984, Vladimir Voinovich admitted that it was he who had brought the microfilm to the West.

Little is known about Grossman's last years. He died of cancer on 14 September 1964. It appears he was deeply depressed, that he suffered great physical pain, and that he lived in a state of poverty and isolation. Worst of all, he had no assurance that his masterpiece would ever see the light of day. One of his few friends of the time reports him lamenting the confiscation of the manuscript and saying: 'They strangled me in a doorway.'

He did, however, continue writing until the end of his life. In the first place he completed the short novel Everything Flows which he had begun in 1955. [1] This part novel, part meditation on the fate of Russia contains a brief study of the camps (a Gulag Archipelago in miniature), some of the most eloquent and moving pages ever written on the fate of the Russian peasantry, and Grossman's reflections on Lenin and Russian history. Grossman was the first Soviet writer to argue Lenin's responsibility for the evils of Soviet society; other writers had laid the blame only on Stalin.

During his last years Grossman also wrote several short stories that have yet to be published either in the Soviet Union or in the West, and 'Peace Be with You', an account of a journey to Armenia. This fine essay, Grossman's literary testament, has been published in the Soviet Union, though only in a censored version.

There are a large number of important 'Soviet' writers who were brought up as members of the pre-Revolutionary intelligentsia: Pasternak, Bulgakov, Mandelstam, Akhmatova… Grossman, however, is a Soviet writer in a deeper sense; he will be remembered as both the first and the greatest of the dissidents of the post-Stalin era, the generation of dissidents who emerged from within Soviet Russia and who are themselves products of Soviet Russia.

LIFE AND FATE

The structure of Life and Fate is similar to that of War and Peace: the life of a whole society is evoked by means of a large number of different sub-plots centred around one family. Alexandra Vladimirovna is an old woman whose spiritual roots are in the Populist traditions of the pre-Revolutionary intelligentsia; it is her children, together with their own families, who are the central figures in the novel. Two sub-plots, set in a Russian labour-camp and a Physics Institute, revolve around the former and present husbands of Lyudmila Nikolaevna, Alexandra Vladimirovna's elder daughter. Two more sub-plots trace the careers of Commissar Krymov and Colonel Novikov, the ex-husband and the present fiancé of Lyudmila's sister Yevgenia: Krymov, an Old Bolshevik, ends up in the Lubyanka; Novikov, after commanding a tank corps that plays a crucial role at Stalingrad, also falls foul of the authorities. Other sub-plots concern friends and relatives of the family working at the Stalingrad power station, serving at the Front, attempting to organize rebellions in a German concentration camp, and being transported by cattle-truck to the gas chambers…

Like War and Peace, Life and Fate contains many of the author's own reflections on history and philosophy. It is perhaps these reflections, even more than the devastatingly accurate portrayal of Stalinist Russia, that appalled the authorities. No other writer has so convincingly established the identity of Nazism and Soviet Communism. The parallels between the two systems are drawn repeatedly: between the career of a typical German Party functionary and that of a typical Russian Party functionary, between the thoughts of a German dissident and those of a Russian dissident, between a German concentration camp and a Russian concentration camp.

The real battle portrayed in the novel is not the clash between the Third Reich and Stalin's Russia, but the clash between Freedom and Totalitarianism. At Stalingrad the Russian people believed they were fighting against Totalitarianism in the name of Freedom; the freedom they won, however, lasted only as long as the final outcome of the war remained undecided. Grossman movingly describes the development of a genuine spirit of camaraderie and egalitarianism among the defenders of Stalingrad; he also shows how this spirit was stamped out by Party functionaries who saw it as a greater danger than the Germans themselves.

'The clash between Freedom and Totalitarianism', however, is too grand and abstract a phrase. Grossman sees no value in fighting for freedom unless one can do so in a spirit of humility, a spirit of love and kindness. The battle Grossman portrays is the battle we must fight each day in order to preserve our humanity, the battle against the power of ideology, against the power of the State, against all the forces that combine to destroy the possibility of kindness and compassion between individuals.

The victors in this battle are not the Soviet military commanders, not General Chuykov who finally crosses to the East bank, after his heroic defence of Stalingrad has culminated in the German surrender, only in order to attend a banquet celebrating the 25 th anniversary of the founding of the Soviet Secret Police. The true victors are the Russian peasant woman who takes pity on a wounded German soldier while his comrades are shooting her friends and relatives, the woman who sacrifices her own career and happiness in order to send a food-parcel to the Lubyanka – everyone whose actions, however historically insignificant, are motivated by the spirit of senseless, irrational kindness. It is these spontaneous, dangerous acts of kindness that Grossman sees as the truest expression of human freedom.

In Le Cas Grossman, Simon Markish quotes an anonymous Russian friend's opinion of Life and Fate: 'Yes, all this is noble, elevated, morally irreproachable, but I don't need a follower of Leo Tolstoy.' The novel is indeed a remarkably old-fashioned one. It could, paradoxically, be described as the greatest work of fiction to have been written according to the Soviet doctrine of Socialist Realism. Even its faults are typical of Socialist Realism: an occasional tendency towards sententious philosophizing, a certain long-windedness and lack of sparkle.

Grossman has succeeded in achieving what every other Socialist Realist has merely pretended to do: he has portrayed the life, not of a few individuals, but of an entire age. All the characters endure fates that are typical of their generation. Each character, however vividly realized, is somehow typical of a particular group or class: Krymov and Mostovskoy the Old Bolsheviks, Getmanov the successful Stalinist functionary, Novikov the honourable and talented officer whose talents were never acknowledged before the war, Shtrum the Jewish intellectual. There is nothing eccentric about the novel, either stylistically or in the action and characterization. Probably no great novel of the last sixty years is so untouched by the influence of Modernism.

Grossman reached adolescence only after the Revolution and he had little contact, even through reading, with the West. Unlike Solzhenit-syn with his idealization of nineteenth-century Russia, he never tried to break free of his age. His power as a writer is that of an insider, that of a man who speaks from within Soviet society and in its own language. It is perhaps only through writing in its own style that one can portray an entire age; it would surely be impossible to portray the world of Jane Austen in the language of Joyce, or the world of Beowulf in the language of Jane Austen. It is interesting to note that Ilya Ehrenburg, many of whose books are modernist in technique, chose to write his novel about Stalinism, The Thaw, in the same slightly ponderous style, the style that is so characteristic of Socialist Realism.

THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

From January 1941 Stalin had received repeated warnings of Hitler's intentions, both through his own intelligence network and through those of Britain and the United States. He chose to ignore these warnings, to do everything in his power to appease Hitler, to avoid scrupulously any action that might be construed as provocation.

Possibly he was playing for time, aware that the Soviet Union was unprepared for war, both militarily and industrially; more likely he was simply burying his head in the sand, expecting his own wishes automatically to take on the status of objective reality. In any case, he clung desperately to the Nazi-Soviet pact. As a result the Soviet armed forces were taken largely unawares by the German offensive of 22 June 1941.

During the ensuing months the Soviet forces were thrown into headlong retreat. Armies that attempted to hold their ground were for the most part encircled. By late October the Germans had taken nearly three million prisoners, had isolated Leningrad, and had breached the outer defence line of Moscow itself. Meanwhile more than 1500 factories, not to mention entire universities and scientific institutes, had been evacuated by rail to the Urals, Siberia, the Volga and Central Asia.

The first important Soviet success was Zhukov's defence of Moscow in December 1941. This gave an important boost to national morale, destroying the myth of German invincibility. The Soviet counter-offensive of early 1942, however, was largely unsuccessful; throughout the rest of 1942 the Germans continued to hold their ground in the north and centre, while sweeping through the Ukraine towards the Volga and the oil-fields of the Caucasus. By September 1942 they were laying siege to Stalingrad, the key industrial and communications centre on the Volga. It is at this point that For a Just Cause ends, and Life and Fate begins.

From an historical point of view, Life and Fate is on the whole accurate; Grossman's observations as a journalist have clearly been supplemented by a vast amount of detailed historical research. Like Tolstoy, he includes in the novel a number of historical figures: Hitler and Stalin make brief appearances – as do Paulus, Eichmann, several important German officers, and most of the senior Russian officers at Stalingrad. Several of the minor characters are also based on real figures: Naum Rosenberg, for example, the Jewish accountant, was derived by Grossman from his researches for the Black Book.

The Jewish nuclear physicist Viktor Shtrum, perhaps the most important character in the novel, is a portrait of the author himself: his mother's death, his growing consciousness of his Jewish roots, his increasingly hostile attitude to Stalin, his agony over whether to write a letter of repentance – all these reflect the various stages of Grossman's own development. In other, more superficial respects, Shtrum is based on Lev Davidovich Landau, a brilliant physicist, not a Party member, who was dismissed from his work during the anti-Jewish campaigns of the early fifties, only to be reinstated by P. L. Kapitsa, an ex-student of Rutherford's and one of the most important Soviet physicists of the time. Kapitsa himself, at least in his eventual refusal to work on the development of the atom bomb, is clearly a model for Chepyzhin in Life and Fate.

The novel does contain one important departure from historical truth, though only in regard to chronology: Grossman considerably telescopes the rise of official anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. Symbolically, Grossman is justified in linking the Stalingrad victory to the rise of Russian chauvinism; in reality it developed more slowly, reaching its peak in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The campaign against Einstein, for example, began only in the late forties, not – as in the novel-in 1942…

THE TEXT AND THE TRANSLATION

The Russian text of Life and Fate, first published in Lausanne in 1980, is based on the collation of two incomplete microfilms. For the main part, the two microfilms complemented one another; gaps and obscurities in one could be filled in from the other. Nevertheless, there are still passages where the published text breaks off in mid-chapter or mid-sentence. No attempt has been made to conceal these hiatuses; they are indicated in this translation by a bracketed ellipsis: […]

I have also chosen to omit or abridge some of the more sententious philosophical passages. Grossman's style is occasionally repetitive; I hope that my abridgments allow the power of his thought to stand out with greater clarity. In justification of such high-handedness, I can only plead that the manuscript was never finally prepared for publication by Grossman himself, and there is evidence he himself wished to carry out further revision. The omissions amount to approximately six pages in the Russian text.

A translation of this length must always, to some degree, be a collective task. I offer my sincere thanks to the large number of people who have helped in their various ways: Igor Golomstok for first bringing the novel to my attention and suggesting I attempt a translation; George Theiner and Hugh Lunghi for publishing extracts from my translation in their admirable magazine Index on Censorship; Mark Bonham Carter, Carol O'Brien and Dan Franklin for their patience, understanding and extraordinarily conscientious editing; James Greene, David Black, Barbara Hart and Dinny Thorold for their criticisms of sections of the manuscript; Robin Leanse for his versions of the poems in Chapters 70 and 72 of Part I, which I have adopted with only slight alterations; Christine and Benito Difazio for providing me with a home while I completed the translation; Elizabeth Grimwade for retyping a number of chapters; Christopher Donnelly of the Soviet Studies Unit at Sandhurst, and Brigadier B. C. Elgood for their help with military terminology. Above all, I must thank Harry Willetts of St Antony's, Oxford, for checking the entire manuscript against the Russian; with his encyclopedic knowledge of both Soviet history and contemporary Russian idiom he has saved me from more blunders than I care to admit.

I wish to dedicate this translation to the memory of four people I would very much like to have read this book: my father Colonel R. E. Chandler; my ex-wife's father, the Russian-Jewish theoretical physicist Grigory Lazarev; Colonel G. H. Nash, a friend and expert on Soviet military history; and my former teacher, Gordon Pirie, who disapproved of dedications.

Robert Chandler March 1985