Little by little, Vasily Grossman seems to be working his way into the consciousness of the modern world. If his name already means something to you, and especially if you have read his novel Life and Fate, you may share my view that it is only a matter of time before Grossman is acknowledged as one of the great writers of the 20th century. If today is the first time you have encountered his name, take note of it, for your life may be about to change.
All I can say is that my own life has changed. Late last year, a colleague asked me if I had read Life and Fate. I had not; the author’s name meant nothing to me. My friend thought that Grossman had written the 20th-century equivalent of War and Peace. I was intrigued. I looked in bookshops and found the historian Antony Beevor’s new collection of Grossman’s journalism, A Writer at War. The novel, though, was harder to come by.
Eventually, I found a copy of Life and Fate. Or, to be more accurate, I found two of them. I bought both and gave one to my eldest son, saying I had heard good things about the book and thought he might find it interesting. It was my understatement of the year. Over the past month or so, the two of us have devoured its 880 pages in parallel, endlessly exchanging favourite bits and observations.
Along the way I seem, by chance, to have discovered a new generational bonding technique. But Life and Fate is a book that demands to be talked about — as a somewhat startled Menzies Campbell, the leader of the United Kingdom Liberal Democrat Party, discovered the other day when I started rhapsodising about Grossman’s novel to him in the middle of a central London street.
Grossman was born in Ukraine in 1905. He grew up amid the German invasion of World War I, the Bolshevik revolution and the Russian civil war. But the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 provided the adult Grossman with a front-row seat at the defining events of 20th-century Europe.
Grossman volunteered for battle but ended up with one of the most awesome journalistic postings of all time, as a correspondent for the Red Army newspaper at Stalingrad. Through the winter of 1942/43, he reported from the craters and cellars of the front line as the besieged Russians turned the tide and encircled Hitler’s forces. His writings made him a national icon.
After the German surrender, Grossman rode west with the Red Army, providing the first and most authoritative eyewitness report from Treblinka. In May 1945, Grossman was at the Brandenburg Gate as Berlin fell. In Hitler’s bunker, he pocketed stationery from the führer’s desk for souvenirs.
All this would have ensured Grossman’s status as one of the key witnesses of the war. Yet, from 1945 until his death in 1964, Grossman’s life entered a richer creative phase. He became a dissident, writing with ever deepening truth about the essentials of the Soviet experience. Much of this is informed and defined by Grossman’s experiences as a Jew. After the war he worked with Ilya Ehrenburg on the fate of Soviet Jews under the Nazis, but soon came under Stalinist anti-Semitic attack. Grossman did not always respond as honourably as he should. Viktor, the closest thing to a central character in Life and Fate, goes through similar humiliations.
All these epic experiences and pressures came together in a creative climax in the late 1950s in Grossman’s most important work. Life and Fate is set in the shadow of the battle of Stalingrad — many gripping descriptive episodes are set there — but, as the novel develops, the battle fades into the background. The book’s real subject is the daily endurance of the human spirit amid the monumental pressures of absolute war and totalitarian rule, communist as well as fascist. There are terrible scenes, searingly described. And yet, if it were possible to distil the subject matter into one word — and it is so rich a work that the attempt is probably futile — that word would be freedom. This is a novel about what it is to be a free human being.
No wonder that when he submitted it for publication during the relative thaw of the Khrushchev years, Grossman was told by the Kremlin that his novel could not be published for 200 years. The Soviet Union and freedom could not coexist. But, although the KGB attempted to destroy all copies of the manuscript, miraculously a single copy survived; the novel was first published in the West in 1980, in English in 1985 and, finally, in the Soviet Union in 1988.
The echoes of War and Peace are deliberate and hard to miss. Yet the writer who seems to be Grossman’s inspiration is not Tolstoy but Chekhov. (Life and Fate could be stunningly adapted for the stage.) There is a wonderful passage where Grossman allows a character to proclaim why Chekhov matters to him.
From the old believers through Tolstoy to Lenin, he explains, Russian humanism has always been cruel, intolerant and sectarian. ”But Chekhov said: let’s put God, and all these grand progressive ideas, to one side. Let’s begin with man. Let’s be kind and attentive to the individual man — whether he’s a bishop, a peasant, an industrial magnate, a convict in the Sakhalin islands or a waiter in a restaurant … That’s democracy, the still unrealised democracy of the Russian people.”
The same spirit runs through Life and Fate. It is an epic novel, but it is about people, the face they present to the world, the often different thoughts behind the face and the need to speak one’s mind. It is, certainly, a dissident and anti-Soviet novel. Very little nice happens to its characters. No one escapes their fate. And yet, as with Chekhov, there is nothing remotely narrow-minded about its spirit. In spite of Hitler and Stalin, Auschwitz and the Lubyanka, humanity goes on wanting to be free and kind.
The novel ends, as The Divine Comedy begins, in a forest. Two minor characters stop and listen to the silence. ”In it,” writes Grossman, ”you could hear both a lament for the dead and the furious joy of life itself.” And that’s also how you feel when you have read this 20th-century masterpiece. — Â