Life And Fate (Orange Inheritance)
Historical Background
In 1939 Stalin signed his non-aggression pact with Hitler. Hitler and Stalin divided up Poland, and the Second World War began. Throughout the first half of 1941 Stalin ignored all warnings about Hitler’s intentions. As a result, the Soviet armed forces were taken unawares by the German invasion of June 22, 1941; whole armies of up to a million men were encircled. By late October the Germans had taken three million prisoners, isolated Leningrad and breached the outer defences of Moscow. Meanwhile, more than 1500 factories, as well as whole universities and scientific institutes, had been evacuated to the Urals, Siberia, the Volga and Central Asia.
The first significant Soviet success was Zhukov’s defence of Moscow in December 1941. During most of 1942, however, the Germans held their ground in the north and centre, while advancing through the Ukraine towards the Volga and the oil fields of the Caucasus. By September 1942 they were laying siege to Stalingrad, the key industrial and communications centre on the Volga. It is at this point that Life and Fate begins.
For the main part, Life and Fate is historically accurate. As in War and Peace, a number of real historical figures appear – most of the senior Russian and German officers at Stalingrad, as well as Stalin and Hitler. Colonel Novikov is based on the tank commander, Babadzhanyan, who later became a Marshal of the Soviet Union. Some of the minor characters in Berdichev are based on people Grossman knew; others are derived from his researches for the Black Book. Viktor Shtrum is Grossman’s self-portrait: his growing consciousness of his Jewish roots, his feelings towards Stalin, his agonies over whether or not to capitulate to the authorities, his difficult marriage and his love affair with a friend’s wife – all these are based on Grossman’s own life. Grossman, however, has given some of his more positive experiences to Major Byerozkin, the one character in the novel who enjoys consistently good fortune. Like Byerozkin, Grossman once watched a grenade land between his feet and fail to explode. This was only one of several occasions when he was extraordinarily lucky to escape with his life; it was not for nothing that his wartime colleagues sometimes called him ‘Lucky Grossman’.
In more superficial respects Shtrum is based on Lev Landau, a physicist who was dismissed from his work during the anti-Jewish campaign of the early 1950s only to be reinstated by Pyotr Kapitsa, an ex-student of the British Nobel prize-winner, Ernest Rutherford. Kapitsa, at least in his refusal to work on developing the atom bomb, is a model for Grossman’s Chepyzhin.
One inaccuracy in the novel is a chronological one. Official Soviet anti-Semitism gathers strength more quickly in the world of the novel than it did in reality. The letter Shtrum signed in 1942 is a fictional equivalent of the one Grossman signed in 1952; and official vilification of Einstein dates not from 1942 but from the end of the 1940s. In this respect, Grossman seems to have considered symbolic truth (Stalin snatching the sword of anti-Semitism from Hitler’s hands at Stalingrad) more important than historical accuracy.fn1
There is also the vexed question of what motivated the defenders of Stalingrad. Grossman is relatively orthodox in his view that, as in 1812, there was a spontaneous upsurge of Russian patriotism. An alternative view is that the city was defended by crazed men whose only choice was between being shot by the NKVD if they deserted and being shot by the Germans if they did not desert. To say, as Grossman does, that ‘the soul of wartime Stalingrad was freedom’, may be a simplification.