One of the many unforgettable passages in Vasily Grossman’s great war novel, Life and Fate, concerns the recovery of Russian corpses from the Gestapo headquarters after the recapture of Stalingrad.
Among the starved German prisoners laying out the bodies is “a young man in an officer’s greatcoat, who had tied a handkerchief round his mouth and nose and was shaking his head convulsively like a horse stung by gadflies. The expression of torment in his eyes seemed close to madness.”
When the corpse of an adolescent girl is carried out on a stretcher, one of the Russian bystanders, a squat woman, gives a shrill cry and strides towards the Germans.
“The guard sensed what was about to happen and knew there was nothing he could do to stop the woman; she was stronger than a tommy-gun. The prisoners couldn’t take their eyes off her; the children watched her avidly and impatiently.
“The woman could no longer see anything at all except the face of the German with the handkerchief round his mouth. Not understanding what was happening to her, governed by a power she had just now seemed to control, she felt in the pocket of her jacket for a piece of bread that had been given to her the night before.
“She held it out to the German officer and said: ‘There, have something to eat.'”
Grossman was not conventionally religious; indeed, Life and Fate relegates Christianity and other organised faiths to the endless march of world ideologies that have compounded human suffering in the name of “the good”.
But the incident of the Russian woman and the German prisoner has unmistakable echoes of the paradoxical New Testament injunction: “Love your enemies and do good to those that hate you.”
As the title implies, Grossman’s masterpiece is about the struggle of ordinary, inconspicuous people against their “fate”: the vast, pulverising theatre of the Russian war and the totalitarian state machines of Hitler and Stalin.
Its closing chapter brings together the end of the Stalingrad campaign, the coming of spring and the love of a young soldier and his woman in a kind of mystical paean to the irrepressible sap of life.
Grossman’s method is constantly to remind us that the world-historical comes down to the poignant frailties of the individual flesh. A woman breaks into a nosebleed during an all-night vigil at the grave of her soldier son; in a cattle truck bound for the death camps, the Jewish child David repeatedly takes from his pocket and opens a matchbox containing the chrysalis of a moth.
For Grossman, “the soul of wartime Stalingrad is freedom”. The doomed soldiers in house 6/1 are cut off from the Russian lines and under constant air and ground attack. Yet unshackled from their officers and commissars, in a mood of crazed exultation, they seize control of their “fate” for the first time.
It is against human subjectivity that “the ceaseless violence of totalitarianism” is directed. What finally destroys Viktor Shtrum, the nuclear physicist whose travails of conscience are threaded through the novel, is not the firing squad or the Gulag, but his betrayal of a colleague at the bidding of Stalin’s academy of sciences.
If there is a “hero” in Life and Fate, it is the German concentration camp inmate, Ikonnikov-Morzh, a former Tolstoyan mystic dubbed “the holy fool” by his fellow prisoners.
His scribblings, dismissed as “the ruins of a feeble spirit” by the old Bolshevik Mostoyovsky, represent Grossman’s spiritual testament.
They begin: “What is ‘good’? ‘Good’ for whom? Is there a common good – the same for all people, all tribes, all conditions of life? Or is my good your evil? … Is good eternal and constant? Or is yesterday’s good today’s vice, yesterday’s evil today’s good?”
Down history each ideological system has spawned its own exclusive concept of the good: Buddhism, which “denies life to clothe it in goodness and love”; the distinct goods of Christianity and Islam; of Catholicism, Protestantism and Orthodoxy; the “goods of the whites, the blacks and the yellow races … More and more goods came into being, corresponding to each sect, race and class. Everyone outside a magic circle is excluded.”
And in each case these sectarian value systems deepen human misery. The Christian doctrine of peace and love becomes “the tortures of the Inquisition; the struggles against heresy … the crushing yoke that lay for centuries over science and freedom; the Christians who wiped out the heathen population of Tasmania; the scoundrels who burned whole Negro villages in Africa.”
Now German fascism has arisen, filling the air with “the cries and groans of the condemned”. Even its crimes, never before seen on earth, are committed in the name of the good.
Ikonnikov concludes that this terrible Good with a capital G “is a mere husk from which the sacred kernel has been lost” and that goodness is to be found “neither in the sermons of religious teachers and prophets, nor in the teachings of sociologists and popular leaders, nor in the ethical systems of philosophers.”
It lies in ordinary people who “are naturally full of love and pity for any living being. At the end of the day’s work they prefer the warmth of the hearth to a bonfire in a public square.”
Like an electrical arc, the spontaneous sympathy of one human being for another’s affliction leaps the gulf of race, class, nation and ideology. This “petty, thoughtless kindness; an unwitnessed kindness … senseless kindness … outside any system of social or religious good” is eternal and invincible.
“The more I saw of the darkness of fascism, the more clearly I realised that human qualities persist even to the edge of the grave, even at the door of the gas chamber,” writes Ikonnikov. “I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the face of evil, but that the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man.”
Life and Fate is studded with examples of such “stupid kindness”, including the chance encounter of the pathetic German prisoner and the Russian victim of Hitler’s Stalingrad campaign. Ikonnikov is himself shot after refusing to take part in building the gas chambers.
Grossman’s theme is as relevant now as it was when he wrote it half a century ago, and has towering implications for all those who pride themselves on their piety.
His point is that “the sacred kernel” has little to do with organised worship or doctrine, with papal infallibility, the sanctity of marriage, karma or the dietary restrictions of Judaism and Islam. It has even less to do with the persecution of homosexuals, capital punishment, the subjection of women and the slaughter of unbelievers.
“The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it,” writes Ikonnikov. “This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning.”