Life And Fate (Orange Inheritance)
Introduction by Linda Grant
In the summer of 2003 I read Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate. It took three weeks to read and three weeks to recover from the experience. Novels fade, your immersion in their world turns into a faint dream, and then is forgotten. Only great literature grows in the imagination. Grossman’s book did more than grow, it seemed to replace everything I had previously thought and felt, filling me with what Grossman calls ‘the furious joy of life itself’ which I have never lost.
Life and Fate is about the terrible years of the mid-twentieth century in the Soviet Union. Its vast canvas covers the Battle of Stalingrad, the Gulag, the coercion of a state which decides as diktat the nature of reality and of truth, however preposterously distant from actual reality and truth. Generals on the Front, common soldiers, mothers, wives, sons, daughters, sisters, ex-husbands, a boy about to advance on his first kiss, Nazi camp commandant, a prison interrogator, a holy fool, scientists in a Moscow laboratory – all of these characters swarm through the pages. Great ideas are discussed: the nature of totalitarianism, the betrayal of the Bolshevik revolution, the nature of anti-Semitism, military strategy, the question of freedom and how we can be free despite the external circumstances that chain us.
Life and Fate can be a daunting, monumental read. But its greatness is not the weight of those themes, for at the end of its 871 pages you are left with a message which, to the reader just starting the novel, might appear so banal that it could be inscribed on a greetings card. For Grossman, communism and fascism are ephemera. What matters, what endures, is the individual and the ordinary act of human kindness, indeed the often senseless act of kindness, as when an old Russian woman, about to hoist a brick in the face of a captured German soldier, instead finds to her own incomprehension that she has reached into her pocket and given him a piece of bread. And in the years to come, will still never be able to understand why she did it.
Grossman was not opposing ideology with Christian forgiveness, far from it. He was a Soviet Jew whose Jewishness became more and more meaningful to him as he was caught between the vast threats of anti-Semitism both from Nazi Germany and at home in the form of the increasingly deranged conspiracy theories of Stalin. The passion of Life and Fate is not for ideas or history, but for the ordinary; for human life in all its perplexing, muddled, contradictory and infuriating variety. Grossman takes us into the minds of a group of soldiers waiting in the forest: one is full of dire forebodings, one is singing, one is chewing bread and sausage and thinking about the sausage, one is trying to identify a bird, one worries about whether he’d offended his friend, one is composing a farewell poem to autumn, one is remembering a girl’s breasts, one is missing his dog. This passage leads to the substance of Grossman’s central thought, which at the time he was writing could lead to the arrest of a Soviet citizen: ‘The only true and lasting meaning of the struggle for life lies in the individual, in his modest peculiarities, and his right to these peculiarities.’
Such treasonous ideas can topple empires.
In the weeks after I first read Life and Fate I was desperate to talk about it, and found a tragic absence. No one I knew had read the novel. Almost no one had even heard of it. The early years of the last decade were the time when Life and Fate and its author were only just beginning to be discovered by English-language readers, following the Harvill Secker publication of Robert Chandler’s translation. These early awakenings of interest were largely due to the publication of two best-selling books, Stalingrad and Berlin: The Downfall by the military historian Antony Beevor, who drew heavily on Grossman’s journalism as source material. Grossman spent the war as a correspondent, he was there at the Battle of Stalingrad and is believed to have been the first reporter of any nationality to enter the extermination camp of Treblinka and make speakable the horrors he found there.
It was ironic that a former British army officer should lead me directly to one of the greatest European Jewish writers of the century, in a field dominated by Proust, Kafka, Isaac Babel, Bruno Schulz and Joseph Roth.
Life and Fate affected me like no other novel. It affected me personally. The danger in describing this impact is that it will sound to new readers as if Grossman is a writer with a message, and messages tend to kill art stone-dead. Grossman did, of course, have something to say, but its purpose was against the whole notion of the Big Idea. Whatever Grossman was up to, he was not trying to recruit anyone; instead, he was telling us to leave each other alone, to stop harming each other with our insistence on telling others what to think and how to live.
Yet Grossman changed me. The compassion of Kafka for his commercial traveller trapped in the body of an insect, the historic scope of Joseph Roth and Isaac Babel’s hard-headed understanding of war, were all elements of an impact that it is difficult to describe, even years later. I had written novels about idealists, all failed, but political idealism still seemed worth the effort. Idealism is a romantic pursuit, it speaks to the heart, it flatters our egos. Grossman, no reactionary, taught me that the right to our own modest peculiarities is the only right worth fighting for. In his novel there are no heroes, no saints and no supermen. This must have seemed an extraordinarily dangerous message in the Soviet Union of the early Sixties, despite the Khrushchev thaw.
Life and Fate, unlike the work of the Soviet Union’s other internationally-recognised dissident writers, Boris Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, was virtually unknown in the West until the mid-Eighties because the year after its completion in 1960 the book was, in the author’s words, ‘arrested’. KGB men came to Grossman’s flat, removed all copies, removed carbon paper and even the ribbon from his typewriter in case it had left a tell tale imprint. He was told that if his book were ever published, it would not be for another two hundred years. The Soviet Union was careful not to make a martyr of him and he continued to publish stories in important journals in the remaining few years of his life. But there were no Nobel Prizes or committees abroad campaigning for his safety, and part of the torment of his final years was the belief that his life’s work would become, in the word he used to describe the prisoners in Stalin’s camps, ‘dust’: a forgotten book about times everyone wanted to forget.
Grossman died in 1964, aged fifty-eight, in terrible pain from cancer. For another twenty years after his death, Life and Fate was in the black hole of Soviet censorship, until the 1980s, when an edition appeared in France. In 1984 one of the Soviet Union’s leading dissident writers, Vladimir Voinovich, admitted that it was he, together with the help of the Nobel Prize winning physicist Andrei Sakharov, who had smuggled a microfilm out to the West.
One of Grossman’s other regrets was that he had not been allowed to edit his novel. What you are about to read is a copy from an imperfect microfilm of an imperfect book. Its length is unwieldy, the cast of characters overwhelming, its structure anything but tight. Grossman often writes in the pedestrian, utilitarian prose known as socialist realism (there would have been no chance of publication on any subject had he tried a literary form not approved by the state). Still, there are many occasions of blunt beauty in the intensity of his observation, gained from his years as a reporter: ‘Blinking their scorched eyelashes [the soldiers] forced their way back to the bunkers through the thickets of red dog-rose.’
The impact of Life and Fate is not to be found in its style, but in the cumulative effect of the stories Grossman tells about his characters; the living are full of life, arguing, making love, crying and worrying. At its centre are the Shaposhnikova sisters, Lyudmila, married to Viktor Shtrum, a Jewish nuclear physicist working in a Moscow lab; Yevgenia, the divorced wife of Krymov, a commissar in the Red Army, fighting the Battle of Stalingrad; and Marusya, wife of the director of the Stalingrad power station.
Beyond this circle lie the radiating lives of all those they are connected to: Lyudmila’s son Tolya, fighting at the Front; the sisters’ brother Dmitry, a political prisoner, and his son Seryozha; another soldier; Viktor’s mother, trapped behind enemy lines, and Sofya, one of the sisters’ friends, who is on a train en route to the gas chamber. Life and Fate, like its nineteenth century counterpart War and Peace, to which it is frequently compared, encompasses the whole of Soviet life, from Stalin down to the luckless peasant in the line of fire. In hearing their stories, the reader is rubbed raw by life. Characters appear, we become immersed in their thoughts, their feelings, their conversations, their romantic dreams and jealousies, and in a sentence they are wiped out: by a bullet or the sinister knock at the door. How can life end in the middle of the story? Because life always does.
Writing the novel in the Fifties, a decade after the events he describes, Grossman was still consumed with grief for the death of his mother, murdered in the massacre at the Berdichev ghetto and the strains this had placed on his marriage. His own unhappiness is reflected in the story of Viktor and his mother. One of the best-known and most powerful chapters is the letter she sends him from the ghetto, describing the gradual deterioration of conditions for the Jews, and her knowledge that she will not survive. Yet, like the whole book, even this chapter ends with an exhortation to live, indeed the hope that her son lives for ever.
Grossman was born in Berdichev, a Ukrainian town which at the turn of the twentieth century was then home to one of Europe’s largest Jewish populations, at one time it had eighty synagogues. Both his parents were Jewish, assimilated, educated and well-off. The family were not dwellers in the shtetls of Isaac Bashevis Singer; if they had been they were more likely to have emigrated to America around the time of their son’s birth. They are believed to have met in Switzerland where his father was active in the revolutionary movement, and both were political activists who believed that the road to Jewish emancipation lay in the struggle for universal equality. A tragic error, as it turned out, and a bad choice for them personally. The couple separated early on, and Grossman’s mother would find work as a French teacher.
Grossman married twice. His second wife, like Viktor’s, was divorced from a previous husband who had been arrested and shot during the Great Terror of 1937, when the revolution devoured its own founders. She and her mother-in-law did not get on; had they done, his mother would probably have been living with them in Moscow, instead of in Nazi-occupied Ukraine where she met her death.
The horror of the Holocaust, which Grossman had witnessed at first-hand at Treblinka, the fate of his mother and the terrifying period of the Doctors’ Plot1 in the years just before Stalin’s death when, for the second time in the century, state-sponsored anti-Semitism was directed at the country’s Jews, combined to increase Grossman’s sense of his own Jewish identity – not religiously, but he seems to have become conscious that universal liberation, the Bolshevik ideal, would in practice continue to be suffused with persecution and prejudice.
He, like everyone else who survived the period of the 1937 show trials which liquidated the revolutionaries of 1917, came to understand that guilt and innocence are meaningless when the state decides the nature of reality. For those of us living comfortably in the democratic West, it is difficult to understand the mental contortions that a person must make in order to survive both physically and with any form of inner moral code intact. Grossman takes us into the interrogation rooms and shows how an innocent man will confess to crimes he has not committed. Like Grossman, in the years of the Doctors’ Plot when he was repeatedly and hysterically attacked as a Jew and a reactionary and had to write a ‘letter of repentance’, Viktor Shtrum finds himself out of favour. The nuclear physics in which he’s carrying out his research is deemed to be ‘Jewish’ (because of the connection with Einstein) and hence unpatriotic. Viktor is made persona non grata, and then, with a single phone call, rehabilitated. In the months afterwards he feels that his rehabilitation is the normal state, until a moral dilemma forces him to confront the terrible nature of life in a system based on denunciation in the name of a higher good, where the Party is more important than the individual, where ideas are granted higher status than human life.
Life and Fate contains some of the most tragic scenes ever written in world literature. A fifty-year-old unmarried doctor, who has never felt a hand on her own body since childhood, finds an unaccompanied boy in the cattle car leading to the gas chamber. When she has the chance to avoid her death, she chooses instead to hold the child’s hand as they are herded in to be murdered. Her final thought before the gas fills her lungs is that at last she is a mother. Individual acts of often senseless tender kindness light up the darkness of Grossman’s world. A soldier leaning forward to kiss a girl radio operator first tactfully brushes away a louse from the collar of her uniform.
Nothing human is off-limits to Grossman. We see Hitler go for a walk in the forest on his own and, despite the presence of thousands of armed guards at the perimeter, he still falls pray to the atavistic, fairytale fears of unseen presences in the woods. Leaving the cattle cars to enter the extermination camp, a ‘curly-headed man on all fours [drinks] from a puddle’ and a ‘hunch-backed woman [lifts] up her skirt to adjust the torn elastic of her knickers’. And in one of the most finely observed passages in literature, falling snow settles into the ears of dead German soldiers, lying on their sides waiting to be buried.
By the end of Life and Fate, the Battle of Stalingrad has been won, Nazi Germany is retreating. The defeated German army, the pride of the Reich, looks, to one of its officers, like a scene from the Stone Age, unshaven man reduced to hacking frozen horsemeat from the sides of a dead horse. In Stalingrad, a building that had started out as a tailor’s and dry-cleaner’s had been taken over as a German machine gun emplacement, and now the holes for their weapons are used to hand out the liberated town’s bread rations to queuing women.
The triumph over fascism for Grossman is partly that of armed men (he was no pacifist) but the novel’s insurrectionary observation was that the Soviet system, as totalitarian as fascism, had the same impulse to collectivise and dominate the individual. He sees all human groupings as bound by the same desire to win or defend the individual’s right ‘to be special, to think, feel and live in his or her own way’. But we fall prey to the belief that the race, the God or the party are the purpose of life, and not a means to an end. Those of us who grew up in the West in times of unparalleled peace and prosperity would do well to remember that Grossman’s lesson is as relevant now as in the black years of Stalinism and Nazism. The right to be oneself, however modestly ordinary that self is, is not granted to millions in the world today, whether it is because of repressive political systems or religious ideology. Grossman’s plea, to be left alone, continues to resonate, whether it is a man building a cathedral from matchsticks or a teenager choosing a mobile phone ringtone. Without these modest peculiarities, we are ciphers.
In the seven years since I first read Life and Fate I have urged all my friends to read it. In part this is from a sense of obligation to a great writer, to rescue his masterpiece from state-sponsored obscurity. But it is also because I want others to feel as I have done – that they are entering the heart of the twentieth century, touching its pulse. When Life and Fate was ‘arrested’, Grossman said that ‘they strangled me in a doorway’. The novel should be as famous as Doctor Zhivago or The Gulag Archipelago. It will become so when it finds a critical mass of readers who understand that all that matters is the individual and the furious joy of being alive, to live as human beings and to die as human beings, not the mouthpieces of unreality.
Linda Grant, 2011