The Soviet Tolstoy’s Forgotten Novel

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From The Paris Review:

Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate has been hailed as a twentieth-century War and Peace. It has been translated into most European languages, and also into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Turkish, and Vietnamese. There have been stage productions, TV series, and an eight-hour BBC radio dramatization. Most readers, however, have been unaware that Grossman did not originally conceive of Life and Fate as a self-contained novel. It is, rather, the second of two closely related novels about the Battle of Stalingrad—it is probably simplest to refer to it as a dilogy. The first of these two novels was initially published in 1952, in a heavily censored edition and under the title For a Just Cause. Grossman, however, had wanted to call it Stalingrad—and that is how we have titled it in the novel’s first English translation.

The characters in the two novels are largely the same, and so is the story line; Life and Fate picks up where Stalingrad ends, in late September 1942. Ikonnikov’s essay on senseless kindness—now a part of Life and Fate and often seen as central to it—was originally a part of Stalingrad. Another of the most memorable elements of Life and Fate—the letter written by Viktor Shtrum’s mother about her last days in the Berdichev ghetto—is of central importance to both novels. The actual words of the letter were probably always intended for Life and Fate, but it is in Stalingrad that Grossman tells us how the letter reached Viktor and what he felt when he read it.

Grossman completed Life and Fate almost fifteen years after he first started work on StalingradLife and Fate is, among other things, a considered statement of his moral and political philosophy—a meditation on the nature of totalitarianism, the danger presented by even the most seemingly benign of ideologies, and the moral responsibility of each individual for his own actions. It is this philosophical depth that has led many readers to speak of the novel as having changed their lives. Stalingrad, in contrast, is less philosophical but more immediate; it presents us with a richer, more varied human story.

Grossman worked as a frontline war correspondent throughout nearly all the four years of the Soviet–German war. He had a powerful memory and an unusual ability to get people from every walk of life to talk openly to him; he also had relatively free access, during the war years, to a wealth of military reports. His wartime notebooks include potted biographies of hundreds of individuals, scraps of dialogue, and sudden insights and unexpected observations of all kinds. Much of this material found its way into Stalingrad and it endows the novel with great vitality and a certain democratic quality; Grossman writes with equal delicacy and respect about the experiences of a senior Red Army general, a newly recruited militiaman, or a terrified housewife. He even devotes a surprising amount of space to the effects of the Battle of Stalingrad on the lives of dogs, cats, camels, rodents, birds, fish, and insects in the surrounding steppe.

. . . .

War and Peace has probably never been as widely read as in the Soviet Union during World War II. The authorities had every reason to promote the novel. Tolstoy was seen as a forerunner of socialist realism and the novel’s implications for the outcome of the war were obviously positive. War and Peace was broadcast at length on the radio. The two generals who played the most important roles in the defense of Stalingrad both spoke afterward about how important Tolstoy had been to them; General Rodimtsev said he read the novel three times and General Chuikov said in a 1943 interview that Tolstoy’s generals were the model by which he judged his own performance. The People’s Commissariat for Education printed brochures with instructions on how to summarize War and Peace and explain the novel to soldiers.

In late August and early September 1941, Grossman’s mother, Yekaterina Savelievna, used a French translation of War and Peace to teach French to the children of the doctor with whom she lived during her last weeks in the Berdichev ghetto, before being shot by the Nazis. As for Grossman himself, he wrote, “During the whole war, the only book that I read was War and Peace, which I read twice.” And Grossman’s daughter, Yekaterina Korotkova, concludes a brief summary of her volume of memoirs with the words: “I remember a letter of his from Stalingrad: ‘Bombers. Shelling. Hellish thunder. It’s impossible to read.’ And then, unexpectedly: ‘It’s impossible to read anything except War and Peace.’ ”

Link to the rest at The Paris Review



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