Life and Fate
Grossman, Vasily
A lthough Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate is an extremely interesting novel, the story behind its appearance in the West has tended to overshadow most discussions of the book's literary merits....
...An entirely more modest sort of man, Grossman did not see himself as a prophet, nor had he in Life and Fate a political program that would bring salvation...
...Modeled in part on the real-life theoretical physicist Lev Davidovich Landau, Viktor shares Grossman's up-and-down ride on fortune's wheel, his anguish over the death of his mother LIFE AND FATE Vasily Grossman, translated by Robert Chandler Harper & Row/$22.50 Anita Susan Grossman 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1987 (murdered by the Nazis in occupied Berdichev), and his guilt over succumbing to the authorities in a moment of weakness: he signs a group letter condemning some Jewish doctors he knows to be innocent of any wrongdoing...
...Markish's original Russian text has also been published in Jerusalem as part of a two-volume selection of Grossman's writings...
...For once, the methods of "socialist realism" are used to produce not propaganda but a critique of totalitarianism...
...the disillusioned older man tells him that "no repentance can expiate what we've done," and later hangs himself...
...Driven to find the meaning of his own sufferings, he gained a deeper insight into his characters, and strove for a relentlessly honest portrait of his society, untainted by propaganda...
...The result was his masterpiece, a work of truly epic scope...
...T here are numerous other plot lines in this sprawling book, many of them converging to show a colossal historic irony: no sooner had the Russian people managed to defeat Fascism than they were once again beset by the equally terrible tyranny of their own government...
...s for the book itself, is it worth the attention of readers, apart from its curiosity value...
...The author himself had no inkling that a copy of his confiscated novel remained at large, and died believing that it would never be released from the archives of the Central Committee...
...More than with most authors, Grossman's virtues as a novelist correspond to his strengths as a human being: a writer whose work was utterly transformed by his moral awakening, he found his voice as an artist when he dared to tell the truth...
...In the meantime, American audiences can at least be satisfiedthat they have the better half by far of Grossman's Russian epic—unlike the poor Soviet readers, who are stuck with the portion published during Stalin's lifetime...
...In fact, Life and Fate possesses literary merits of a high order, but it is difficult to separate historical and political considerations from aesthetic ones in discussing the novel...
...His troubles may be said to have begun in 1946, when his play, If You Believe the Pythagoreans, was attacked by Soviet authorities...
...nevertheless he continued to write, leaving unpublished at the time of his death a powerful work of fiction which is less a novel than a series of brilliant sketches or a meditation on the tragic course of Russian history...
...In place of fanatical idealism—a failing Grossman sees as characteristically RussianChekhov embodies a tolerant, humane realism...
...They returned it to him after a year's delay, announcing that it was anti-Soviet and therefore unpublishable...
...in Life and Fate, he seemed to be writing in a new spirit...
...at the time was, if anything, worse than in 1946, for Stalin was gearing up for another major anti-Jewish purge...
...once victory was assured, the arrests began all over again...
...The most important of Grossman's characters are those who suffer some kind of moral crisis in their hitherto well-ordered lives...
...This is partly by Grossman's own design...
...Perhaps Harper & Row will tie up the loose plot threads by publishing an English translation of Grossman's earlier work...
...About the same time, the government suppressed The Black Book of Soviet Jewry, an account which Grossman had co-edited with Ilya Ehrenburg of Nazi atrocities in occupied Russia...
...Despite his return to respectability, Grossman could never forget his near encounter with disaster...
...Krymov, a fanatical Red Army commissar, similarly achieves an education through suffering after his arrest...
...Readers of Forever Flowing, a novel he wrote in secret during the last few years of his life, knew another side of Grossman: the persecuted critic of totalitarianism...
...It is for this reason that he admires Chekhov above all other Russian writers...
...Grossman lay low for a number of years and worked on a huge novel about the battle of Stalingrad, For a Just Cause, which appeared in Novy Mir in 1952...
...Who it was who kept Grossman's manuscripts we do not know...
...One can only hope that American readers make the effort to read this extraordinary novel, despite its enormous size and the additional handicap of its being a sequel to an earlier, untranslated volume...
...For a Just Cause, whatever its genuine merits, had been marred by its ideological conformity and what one critic has called its "wooden rhetoric indistinguishable from Soviet officialese...
...Shortly afterward, two KGB agents came to Gross-man's house to confiscate all traces of the manuscript, including his used typewriter ribbons...
...The book does form a self-sufficient unit, but the lack of information about what has come before creates needless confusion for the reader...
...Freedom and democracy are necessary for him, of course, but what most concerns him is individual human decency...
...Fighting a foreign invader, they enjoyed a brief period of freedom when the machinery of repression was slowed down...
...As a panoramic view of life in Stalinist Russia, Life and Fate bears comparison with the work of Solzhenitsyn, although Grossman's writing lacks the slavophilia, Christian mysticism, and impatience with democracy that have disturbed some of Solzhenitsyn's Western admirers...
...But the character whose moral crisis comes closest to Grossman's own is the physicist Viktor Shtrum...
...Professor Markish's recent book-length study, Le Cas Grossman (Paris: Julliard/L'Age d'Homme, 1983), helped make Grossman's Life and Fate a best-seller in France, where it came out about the same time in the LAge d'Homme series...
...Like Life and Fate, it was eventually smuggled out of the country years after Grossman's death, to be published in the West under the title Forever Flowing (1972...
...Until long after his death in 1964, Grossman had been known merely as a popular Soviet writer, the author of politically orthodox novels and wartime reportage...
...rather, it was the author's Jewish origins that rendered him suspect...
...When Grossman undertook a sequel to the novel 'Simon Markish, "A Russian Writer's Jewish Fate," Commentary, April 1986...
...We see through the eyes of a six-year-old Jewish boy on the way to the gas chambers, the haggard soldiers of General Paulus's encircled army, zeks in the gulag at the mercy of their criminal companions, and ordinary citizens struggling to obtain a precious residence permit or to send food parcels to an imprisoned relative...
...Emulating Tolstoy, he attempts to depict nothing less than the spirit of an entire people during the Battle of Stalingrad, and is necessarily as much a witness to history as a creator of an autonomous fictional realm...
...What also comes through in Grossman's writing is a similar generosity of spirit in the compassionate understanding with which he treats his many characters...
...Grossman's characters, far from being stereotyped Soviet heroes, are human beings in all their idiosyncratic frailties...
...Hardly was the war over than the subject of anti-Semitism became officially taboo again...
...Within a year the writer was back in good standing with the regime, which decorated him on his fiftieth birthday and reissued a collection of his writings in 1958...
...Once and for all, his eyes had been opened to the nature of the system he had defended so stoutly in his writings...
...Several are devoted Party members who have their faith shaken when they are arrested and sent to camps...
...Unlike his two brothers-in-law, Krymov and Abarchuk, he is never actually arrested, but he comes within a hair's breadth of it...
...Abarchuk, a government official, falls victim during the purges and meets his old teacher who had introduced him to the Party...
...Using an enormous cast of characters—over 150, by my count—he takes us through all strata of Russian society, from the humblest workers to the tyrant of the Kremlin himself, and in widely ranging settings which include both German and Soviet concentration camps...
...Like Chekhov, whose spirit is evoked by one of the characters in the book, he aspires to enter imaginatively into the lives of all manner of individuals, and it is a tribute to his novelistic powers that he succeeds to the extent that he does...
...Since so many characters have already died, divorced, fallen in love, or been arrested by the time Life and Fate opens, it is puzzling that the translator did not provide a plot summary of For a Just Cause in his otherwise admirable introduction to the laterbook...
...Grossman was vilified in all the Party organs, and was clearly being set up for an even more unpleasant fate when Stalin's death intervened in March 1953...
...Grossman despaired of ever being able to re-create his lost novel...
...Unfortunately, the climate Anita Susan Grossman is a writer living in Berkeley, California...
...Writing from first-hand experience, Grossman is especially skillful at depicting the fluctuating emotional states of a Soviet dissident in all their delicate nuances...
...Initially the novel was quite favorably received, but within a few months critics were changing their tune on orders from above...
...Mostovskoy, an old Bolshevik, finds his faith in the Party- eroded in a Nazi prisoner of war camp, as he comes to see the parallels between the Soviet and Nazi systems...
...With what seems in retrospect incredible naivete, Grossman submitted the manuscript to the editors of Znamya in 1960...
...In fact, there was little that was controversial in this innocuous, even servile play...
...The book was never to be, published in the Soviet Union...
Vol. 20 • January 1987 • No. 1
