Life And Fate (Orange Inheritance)

After graduating, Grossman moved to the industrial region known as the Donbass, working as a safety inspector in a mine and as a chemistry teacher in a medical institute. In 1932 he was able to return to Moscow, and in 1934 he published both ‘In the Town of Berdichev’ – a short story that won the admiration of such different writers as Maksim Gorky, Boris Pilnyak and Isaak Babel – and a novel, Glyukauf,2 about the life of the Donbass miners. In 1937 Grossman was admitted to the prestigious Union of Soviet Writers. His novel, Stepan Kol’chugin (published 1937–40) was nominated for a Stalin Prize.

Critics have often divided Grossman’s life into two parts. Tzvetan Todorov, for example, claims that ‘Grossman is the only example, or at least the most significant, of an established and leading Soviet writer changing his spots completely. The slave in him died, and a free man arose.’3 This sounds impressive, but it is wrong to draw so absolute a distinction between the ‘conformist’ writer of the 1930s and 1940s and the ‘dissident’ who went on to write Life and Fate and Everything Flows. Glyukauf may seem dull today, but it must once have had some power to shock; in 1932 Gorky criticized a draft for ‘naturalism’ – a Soviet code word for presenting too much unpalatable reality. At the end of his report Gorky suggested that the author should ask himself: ‘Why am I writing? Which truth am I confirming? Which truth do I wish to triumph?’4 Even then such a cynical attitude to truth would almost certainly have been anathema to Grossman. It is hard, however, not to be impressed by Gorky’s intuition; it is as if he sensed where Grossman’s love of truth might lead him. In ‘Four Days’, a story written a few years later, Grossman quoted the maxim ‘Absolute truth is the most beautiful thing of all’; and in 1961, after the manuscripts of Life and Fate had been confiscated, Grossman would write to Khrushchev, ‘I have written in my book what I believed, and continue to believe, to be the truth. I have written only what I have thought through, felt through and suffered through.’5

Something about Grossman – his love of truth, or perhaps his critical intelligence – seems to have alarmed not only Gorky, but also Stalin. Like Glyukauf, Stepan Kol’chugin may seem orthodox enough today, but Stalin deleted it from the list of Stalin Prize nominees, apparently saying that this novel about a young revolutionary was ‘Menshevik in sympathy’.6 Grossman was, in reality, neither a Menshevik nor a martyr; nevertheless, he showed considerable courage during the years of the Great Terror. In 1938, when his second wife, Olga Mikhailovna, was arrested, Grossman adopted her two sons by her previous husband, Boris Guber, who had himself been arrested the previous year; but for Grossman’s prompt action, the boys might have been sent to one of the camps for children of ‘enemies of the people’. Grossman then wrote to Yezhov, the head of the NKVD,7 pointing out that Olga Mikhailovna was now his wife, not Guber’s, and that she should not be held responsible for her former husband, with whom she had broken completely; later that year Olga Mikhailovna was released.8 Grossman’s friend, Semyon Lipkin, commented, ‘All this may seem normal enough, but (. . .) only a very brave man would have dared to write a letter like this to the State’s chief executioner.’9 It was around this time that Grossman began work on several stories about arrests and denunciations; these were first published only in the 1960s.

Grossman’s move towards dissidence was a gradual one; no single event should be seen as uniquely important. Like most people, he acted inconsistently. Throughout the war years he appeared to feel no fear of either the Germans or the NKVD; in 1952, however, as Stalin’s anti-Jewish campaign gathered momentum, Grossman agreed to sign an official letter calling for the harshest punishment of the Jewish doctors allegedly involved in a plot against Stalin’s life.10

Grossman’s weakness at this moment may seem surprising. It is possible that it was a momentary aberration; just before being asked to sign, Grossman had quarrelled with the poet and editor, Aleksandr Tvardovsky and he was, no doubt, feeling confused.11 Life and Fate, however, is almost an encyclopaedia of the complexities of life under totalitarianism, and no one has articulated better than Grossman how hard it is for an individual to withstand its pressures: ‘But an invisible force was crushing him. He could feel its weight, its hypnotic power; it was forcing him to think as it wanted, to write as it dictated. This force was inside him; it could dissolve his will and cause his heart to stop beating (. . .) Only people who have never felt such a force themselves can be surprised that others submit to it. Those who have felt it, on the other hand, feel astonished that a man can rebel against it even for a moment – with one sudden word of anger, one timid gesture of protest.’12

Grossman was always fiercely self-critical. He condemned himself, above all, for his failure to get his mother evacuated from Berdichev after the German invasion in 1941. He also, however, blamed his wife, who did not get on with his mother; shortly before the war, Grossman had suggested they invite his mother to live with them in their Moscow flat and Olga Mikhailovna had said that there was not enough room.13 In September 1941, Yekaterina Savelievna was killed by the Germans, along with most of the other 12,000 Jews who lived in Berdichev. After Grossman’s death, an envelope was found among his papers; in it were two letters he had written to his dead mother in 1950 and 1961, on the ninth and twentieth anniversaries of her death, along with two photographs. In the first letter Grossman writes, ‘I have tried dozens, or maybe hundreds of times, to imagine how you died, how you walked to meet your death. I tried to imagine the person who killed you. He was the last person to see you. I know you were thinking about me (. . .) during all that time.’14 One photograph shows his mother with Vasily when he was still a child; the other, taken by Grossman from a dead SS officer, shows hundreds of naked dead women and girls in a large pit. His mother’s death, Grossman’s guilt and the ensuing recriminations between Grossman and his wife are all reflected in Life and Fate. I know no more powerful lament for East European Jewry than the letter that Anna Semyonovna, a fictional portrait of Grossman’s mother, writes to her son and manages to have smuggled out of the Jewish ghetto.15

Grossman may have looked on the war as a chance to redeem himself. He volunteered as an ordinary soldier, despite his bad eyesight and poor health. Assigned instead to Red Star (Krasnaya Zvezda), the Red Army newspaper, he quickly won acclaim as a war correspondent, impressing almost everyone with his tenacity and courage. He covered all the main battles, from the defence of Moscow to the fall of Berlin, and his articles were valued by soldiers and generals alike. Groups of frontline soldiers would gather round while one of them read aloud from a single copy of Red Star; the writer, Viktor Nekrasov, who fought at Stalingrad, remembers how ‘the papers with (Grossman’s) and Ehrenburg’s articles were read and reread by us until they were in tatters.’16

No other journalist wrote with the same regard for what Grossman called the ‘ruthless truth of war’. What he wrote in his notebooks, however, was still more uncompromising; many passages, had they been seen by the NKVD, could have cost Grossman his life; some reflect badly on important commanders, others deal with such taboo matters as desertion and collaboration with the Germans. The notebooks are full of unexpected detail, much of which reappears in Life and Fate. In an early note he refers to ‘the usual smell of the front line – a cross between that of a morgue and that of a blacksmith’. Soon after arriving in Stalingrad Grossman writes, ‘Sunset over a square. A terrifying and strange beauty: the light pink sky is looking through thousands and thousands of empty windows and roofs. A huge poster painted in vulgar colours: “The radiant way”.’17

Grossman never took notes during interviews, perhaps afraid of intimidating people and so preferring to rely on his remarkable memory. He had the ability to win the trust of men and women from all walks of life: snipers, generals, fighter pilots, soldiers in a Soviet penal battalion, peasants, German prisoners, or schoolteachers who had guiltily carried on working in German-occupied territory. Ortenberg, the chief editor of Red Star, wrote, ‘All the correspondents attached to the Stalingrad Front were amazed how Grossman had made the divisional commander (. . .), a silent and reserved Siberian, talk to him for six hours (. . .) telling him all that he wanted to know, at one of the hardest moments.’18 Elsewhere Ortenberg wrote, ‘We didn’t ask him to hurry up. We knew how he worked. Although he had taught himself to write in any conditions, however bad, in a bunker by a wicker lamp, in a field, lying in bed or in an izba (peasant hut) stuffed with people, he always wrote slowly, persistently giving all of his strength to this process.’19

In 1943, after the German surrender at Stalingrad, Grossman was with the first Red Army units to liberate the Ukraine. He learned about Babi Yar, where 100,000 people, most of them Jews, were massacred. Soon afterwards, in Berdichev, he learned the details of his mother’s death. ‘The Old Teacher’, a fictional account of events leading up to the massacre of several hundred Jews in an unnamed town resembling Berdichev, was published in the journal Znamya; ‘Ukraine without Jews’, a remarkable article that fuses factual detail, moving lament and perceptive analysis, was turned down by Red Star but published in Yiddish translation in the journal of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee20; these two pieces are among the first accounts of the Shoah in any language.21 And Grossman’s vivid yet sober ‘The Hell of Treblinka’ (late 1944), the first article in any language about a Nazi death camp, was republished and used as testimony in the Nuremberg trials.

Even today – after so many accounts have been published – it is hard to grasp the magnitude of the Shoah. In being one of the first to research both the massacres in the Ukraine that marked its beginning and the death camps of Poland that were its culmination, Grossman showed a degree of moral and imaginative courage that is almost beyond comprehension. The SS had tried to destroy all trace of Treblinka’s existence, but Grossman interviewed local peasants and the forty survivors and managed to reconstruct the physical and psychological mechanisms according to which the camp functioned. He writes perceptively about the role played by deceit, about how the ‘SS psychiatrists of death’ managed ‘to confuse people’s minds with hope: ‘The same voice barks out word after word: “Women and children are to remove their footwear on entering the barrack (. . .) Stockings are to be put into shoes (. . .) Be tidy (. . .) As you proceed to the bathhouse, take with you your valuables, documents, money, towel and soap. I repeat . . .”’22 Coleridge once defined Imagination as ‘the power to disimprison the soul of fact’; Grossman was evidently endowed with this power to the highest degree.

The official Soviet line, however, was that all nationalities had suffered equally under Hitler; the standard retort to those who emphasized the suffering of Jews was ‘Do not divide the dead!’ Admitting that Jews constituted the overwhelming majority of the dead would have entailed admitting that other Soviet nationalities had been accomplices in the genocide; in any case, Stalin was anti-Semitic. From 1943 to 1946, along with Ilya Ehrenburg, Grossman worked for the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee on The Black Book, a documentary account of the massacres of Jews on Soviet and Polish soil. The Black Book, however, was never published;23 no amount of compromises could make such material acceptable.

The novel, The People Immortal (1943), like Stepan Kol’chugin, was nominated for a Stalin prize but vetoed by Stalin – although the committee had voted for it unanimously. Grossman’s next novel, For a Just Cause (1952), received enthusiastic initial reviews but was then denounced; this was probably both because Grossman was a Jew and because, at that time of high Stalinism, it had become unacceptable to write of the war – and especially of its disastrous first year – with even a modicum of realism. Other leading members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee had already been arrested or murdered and a new wave of purges was about to begin; but for Stalin’s death, in March 1953, Grossman would almost certainly have been arrested himself.

During the next few years Grossman enjoyed public success. He was awarded a prestigious decoration, ‘The Red Banner of Labour’, and For a Just Cause was republished. Meanwhile he was writing two of his masterpieces, neither of which was to be published in Russia until the late 1980s: Life and Fate and Everything Flows. Intended as a sequel to the politically less heretical For a Just Cause, Life and Fate is better seen as a separate novel that includes many of the same characters. It is important not only as literature but also as history; we have no more complete picture of Stalinist Russia. The power of other dissident writers – Shalamov, Solzhenitsyn, Nadezhda Mandelstam – derives from their position as outsiders; Grossman’s power derives at least in part from his intimate knowledge of every level of Soviet society. In Life and Fate, Grossman achieves what many other Soviet writers struggled but failed to achieve: a portrait of an entire age. Every character, however vividly realized, represents a particular group or class and endures a fate which exemplifies the fate of that class: Shtrum, the Jewish intellectual; Getmanov, the cynical Stalinist functionary; Abarchuk and Krymov, two of the thousands of Old Bolsheviks arrested in the 1930s; Novikov, the honourable officer whose ability was recognized only when the disasters of 1941 compelled the authorities, at least for a few years, to value military competence more highly than possession of the correct party credentials. There is nothing eccentric about the novel, either stylistically or structurally. But for Grossman’s persistent moral questioning and his heretical equation of Communism with Nazism, Life and Fate would have come oddly close to meeting the authorities’ repeated demand for a truly Soviet epic. Even in the West, however, few people at this time understood that Communism and National Socialism were mirror images of each other; to a regime that prided itself above all on its defeat of the Nazis, no heresy could have been more shocking.

In October 1960, against the advice of his two closest friends and confidants, Semyon Lipkin and Yekaterina Zabolotskaya, Grossman delivered the manuscript to the editors of Znamya. It was the height of Khrushchev’s ‘Thaw’ and Grossman seems to have believed that the novel could be published. In February 1961, three KGB officers came to the flat to confiscate the manuscript and any other related material, even carbon paper and typing ribbons. This is one of only two occasions when the Soviet authorities ‘arrested’ a book rather than a person;24 no other book, apart from The Gulag Archipelago, was ever considered so dangerous.25 Grossman refused to sign an undertaking not to speak of this visit, but in other respects he appeared to co-operate, taking the KGB officers to his cousin and his two typists so they could confiscate remaining copies of the manuscript. What the KGB, somewhat surprisingly, failed to discover is that Grossman had made two other copies; he had left one with Semyon Lipkin and the other with Lyolya Klestova, a friend from student days who had no connection with the literary world.

Many people think that Grossman was naïve to imagine that Life and Fate could be published in the Soviet Union; this is the view put forward by Lipkin and Zabolotskaya, who make out that it was only under pressure from them that he even agreed to make an extra copy of the novel.26 The poet, Korney Chukovsky, however, wrote in a diary entry for December 27, 1960, ‘Kazakevich had a call from Khrushchev’s secretary saying the novel was magnificent, just what was needed now, and he would let Khrushchev know how he felt.’ Even if this was mere rumour, the fact that Chukovsky took it seriously is significant.27

I cannot myself see Grossman as naïve; he clearly had a deep knowledge both of human psychology and of the inner workings of the Soviet regime. And it is all too easy to make retrospective judgments about a political situation that had been changing rapidly ever since Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956. The art critic Igor Golomstock has spoken to me about the high hopes entertained at this time by many intelligent people who were deeply critical of the Soviet regime but who – like Grossman – had lived their whole lives within it. Lipkin makes it clear that Grossman knew he might be arrested; my own view is that he was simply tired of prevaricating, tired of trying to accommodate himself to the authorities’ capricious demands. He did not foresee that the authorities might take the unusual step of arresting not him but his novel. Nevertheless, he took the precaution of not even telling Lipkin about the copy he had left with Lyolya Klestova.28

Grossman continued to demand that his novel be published. In time he was summoned by Suslov, the chief ideologue of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years. Suslov repeated what Grossman had already been told, that the novel could not be published for another two or three hundred years. Still more striking than Suslov’s presumption – as the satirist Vladimir Voinovich once pointed out – is his apparently unquestioning recognition of the novel’s lasting importance.29

Grossman once wrote that the only book he could read during the street fighting in Stalingrad was War and Peace;33 his choice of a similar-sounding title almost challenges the reader to compare the two novels. Life and Fate stands up to this comparison. Grossman’s evocation of Stalingrad is at least as vivid as Tolstoy’s evocation of Austerlitz. Grossman is equally convincing whether he is writing about how it feels to be subjected to a long bombardment or about the ‘domestic’ detail of war, e.g. the importance of having a good bunker. The account of how the destruction of General Chuykov’s bunker leads to one officer after another each evicting his immediate subordinate from a bunker is only one of many passages that are also surprisingly funny.

Grossman describes the development of a spirit of camaraderie and egalitarianism among the defenders of Stalingrad; he then shows this spirit being stamped out by Party functionaries who see it as more dangerous even than the Germans. He writes equally movingly about the general sadness in Stalingrad after the Russian victory, when the ruined city has ceased to be the focus of the world’s attention, a ‘world capital’ whose ‘soul was freedom’, and has been reduced to being merely a ruined city like any other ruined city.34

Like Tolstoy, Grossman adopts many viewpoints: from the immediate perceptions of an ordinary soldier to the loftier perspective of a historian or philosopher. Grossman’s general reflections are more interesting and more varied than Tolstoy’s; some are memorably succinct. On the eve of his arrest Krymov realizes that it was not only fear that led him to hold his tongue when innocent comrades were arrested: it was ‘the revolutionary cause itself that freed people from morality in the name of morality’.35 After his arrest, Krymov’s thoughts take on the power of poetry: ‘The hide was being flayed off the still living body of the Revolution so that a new age could slip into it; as for the red, bloody meat, the steaming innards – they were being thrown onto the scrapheap. The new age needed only the hide of the Revolution – and this was being flayed off people who were still alive. Those who then slipped into it spoke the language of the Revolution and mimicked its gestures, but their brains, lungs, livers and eyes were utterly different.’36

Sometimes, Grossman’s reflections derive their power not from imagery but from slow, deliberate logic; the unusual idea that totalitarian states operate on the same principles as modern physics, both concerned more with probabilities than with cause and effect, more with vast aggregates than with individual people or particles, threads its way through the whole length of the novel. Sometimes logic and poetry combine; the image of Stalin snatching the sword of anti-Semitism from Hitler’s hands at Stalingrad provides a powerful coda to the argument that Nazism and Stalinism are essentially the same phenomenon.

Grossman expresses his beliefs most directly in a thesis about ‘senseless kindness’ supposedly written by Ikonnikov, a former Tolstoyan who has recently witnessed the massacre of 20,000 Jews.37 This thesis includes thoughts we would do well to remember every time we hear promises of a new world order: ‘whenever we see the dawn of an eternal good (. . .) whenever we see this dawn, the blood of children and old people is always shed. (. . .) Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness.’38 Only individuals, it seems, can keep this kernel alive, and it can be spoken of only in a language that has not been appropriated by state ideologies. Before effectively condemning himself to death by refusing to work on the construction of a gas chamber, Ikonnikov turns to an Italian priest and asks a profound question in a haunting jumble of Italian, French and German: ‘Que dois-je faire, mio padre, nous travaillons dans una Vernichtungslager.’38 Grossman’s style has sometimes been called ponderous, typically Soviet; it would be truer to say that Grossman is capable of many kinds of poetry, from the fumbling, broken language of Ikonnikov to the self-denunciatory eloquence of Krymov, but that, being suspicious of poetry for its own sake, he gives himself up to it only when more ordinary language ceases to be adequate.

Only in one respect, perhaps, is Grossman overshadowed by Tolstoy; he lacks Tolstoy’s ability to evoke the richness, the fullness of life. There is nothing in Life and Fate that matches Tolstoy’s portrayal of the young Natasha Rostova. Grossman, however, is writing about one of the darkest periods of European history, and the overall tone of his novel – despite the hymn in the last chapter to spring sunlight shining so intensely, on snow and ice, that Byerozkin and his wife ‘seemed almost to have to force their way through it’ – is correspondingly sombre; most of the subplots end with the death of at least one of their main characters. Nevertheless, Grossman is not without love, faith and hope; there is even a powerful, tempered optimism in his belief that it is never impossible for us to act morally and humanely, even in a Soviet or Nazi labour camp. And his subtle understanding of guilt, uncertainty and duplicity, of the pain and complexity of moral choice gives his work extraordinary value.

This subtlety of moral understanding is one of many qualities that link Grossman to a writer who worked on a very different scale: Anton Chekhov. Many individual chapters in Life and Fate are surprisingly like Chekhov short stories. Abarchuk courts death by telling the labour-camp authorities the name of the criminal who has murdered a friend with whom he himself had been arguing only hours before; having regained the sense of his own rectitude that is so desperately important to him, Abarchuk feels furious with his dead friend and wants to give him a piece of his mind. The reader is torn between admiration of Abarchuk’s courage and revulsion at his self-righteousness.

There is a similarly Chekhovian irony in the chapter about Klimov, a young soldier at Stalingrad who is forced by a German bombardment to hide in a crater for several hours. Thinking he is lying next to a Russian comrade and feeling an uncharacteristic need for human warmth, this gifted killer holds the hand of a German soldier who happens to have taken refuge in the same crater. Only when the bombardment lifts do the soldiers realize their shared mistake; they clamber out in silence, each afraid of being seen by a superior and accused of collaboration with the enemy[. . .] Grossman poses similar but subtler questions in the chapter about Semyonov, a Red Army driver who has been taken prisoner by the Germans. The Germans release Semyonov when he seems about to die, and Khristya Chunyak, an old Ukrainian peasant woman, takes him into her hut, feeds him and cares for him.39 A month or so later, after Semyonov has recovered his strength, a neighbour calls and the conversation turns to collectivisation. Semyonov finds it hard to believe that his saviour, the woman he thinks of as ‘the mistress of the good hut’,40 could once have been as close to death from starvation as he has just been himself. Khristya, for her part, feels the need to cross herself before going to bed that night; she might – we think – not have saved Semyonov’s life had she known that he approved of collectivisation and that he was from Moscow – like the Communists and Komsomol members responsible for killing her entire family only twelve years before. Her capacity for kindness seems to be independent of understanding; it may even depend on a lack of understanding.

Just as much of Life and Fate can be read as a series of miniatures, so Chekhov’s stories – in Grossman’s view – can be read as a single epic. And the tribute one of Grossman’s characters pays to Chekhov is a statement of Grossman’s own hopes and beliefs: ‘Chekhov brought Russia into our consciousness in all its vastness – with people of every estate, every class, every age. More than that! It was as a democrat that he presented all these people – as a Russian democrat . . . 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. Let’s begin with respect, compassion and love for the individual – or we’ll never get anywhere.’41

As he said in a letter to Ehrenburg about the Black Book, Grossman felt it his moral duty to speak on behalf of the dead, ‘on behalf of those who lie in the earth’.43 What is no less important, however, is that he felt sustained by the dead; he believed that their strength could help him to fulfil his duty towards the living. This is clear from the guardedly optimistic conclusion to the story of Viktor Shtrum. After uncharacteristically betraying men he knows to be innocent, after agreeing to sign a slanderous official letter merely because he can’t bear the thought of losing a few new privileges, Shtrum expresses the hope that his dead mother will help him to act better another time; his last words in the novel are ‘Well then, we’ll see (. . .) Maybe I do have enough strength. Your strength, Mother . . .’44

While the memorial was being constructed, Grossman died in obscurity. The memorial was begun in 1959 and completed in 1967; Life and Fate was ‘arrested’ in 1961 and Grossman died in 1964. It is as if the authorities chose to deal with Grossman by splitting him into two separate figures: a dissident Jew whose work must be silenced, and a ‘voice of the Soviet people’ whose words could be carved in huge letters provided his name went unmentioned. The absence of any acknowledgment to Grossman inside the mausoleum is, of course, shameful. Grossman himself, however, would probably just shrug his shoulders; what would upset him more is people’s reluctance to attend to what he has said ‘on behalf of those who lie in the earth’.