Among colleagues in the ranks of Soviet war correspondents, Vasily Grossman was known for narrow shaves and fortunate escapes. Once, a grenade landed between his feet and failed to explode; on another occasion, a shell punched a hole in a boat he was travelling on, and he used his greatcoat to plug the hole. Myopic and unathletic, he routinely stumbled past death, earning the nickname ‘Lucky Grossman’.
The epithet might have applied more generally. Born in the year of Bloody Sunday and the October Manifesto, dying in the year Khruschev was deposed, surviving the bloodiest decades in human history despite the high-risk identity of Jewish Soviet intellectual, Grossman did well to live long enough to die of cancer in Moscow fifty-five years ago.
The toll was instead borne by his work, including three postwar fictions informed by his wartime experiences: For a Just Cause (1952) was execrated, suppressed and censored; Life and Fate (1961) was deemed unpublishable by the KGB; his last-gasp novella Everything Flows (1964) was left incomplete.
Twenty years ago, however, Grossman was introduced to a new, Western readership by the publication of Antony Beevor’s bestselling account of the five-month battle for Stalingrad where Russian and German armies sustained two million deaths. Having scattered Stalingrad (1998) with selections from Grossman’s incomparably vivid frontline despatches for Red Star, Beevor edited a collection, A Writer at War (2005), including his reportage of Nazi atrocities at Berdichev and Treblinka.
A still more ambitious project was even then underway: a series of stunning translations by the American husband-and-wife team of Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, beginning with Life and Fate (2006) – a book that in George Steiner’s view eclipses ‘almost all that passes for serious fiction in the west today’. Everything Flows followed (2011); between times the Chandlers also translated and collected some of Grossman’s short stories in The Road (2010) and travel writing in Armenian Notebook (2012). With this publication of the first English language edition of For a Just Cause, under Grossman’s original title of Stalingrad, the scale of the Chandlers’ achievement can be seen.
So extensively was the novel manhandled for ideological compliance that there is no single version of Stalingrad; the Chandlers have had to reconstruct it, often by recourse to Grossman’s original notebooks and correspondence with publishers. The result is nothing short of a vindication of the power of literature even amid the worst of the twentieth century, during the clash of its most democidal ideologies. Might Grossman be the finest novelist of the twentieth century? The claim can finally be seriously examined.
Although it arrives now as a kind of prequel to Life and Fate, Stalingrad was originally the first volume of a dilogy featuring many of the same characters, chiefly the family Shaposhnikova, the ebullient physicist Viktor Shtrum and the austere commissar Nikolay Krymov. A useful appendix enumerates no fewer than 150 named participants.
What is Stalingrad’s relation to Life and Fate? The novels form part of the same continuum; they are also clearly distinguishable, partly because of the politics prevailing during their creation. After his reports of the Shoah during World War II, Grossman was recruited to the cause of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee: a group of writers dedicated to documenting Jewish suffering on the eastern front. When a recrudescence of Soviet anti-semitism at war’s end put paid to what had become The Black Book of Soviet Jewry, Grossman grew circumspect. To his later shame, he appended a self-preserving signature to a petition calling for draconian punishment of the innocent accused in the so-called Jewish Doctors’ Plot – Stalin’s final paranoid rage.
Written in the 1940s, then, Stalingrad falls in with the postwar climate of patriotic self-celebration: the imposed title was from a speech by Molotov. Characters were added to enhance its ideological purity, such as Shtrum’s academician boss Chepyzhin, because a Jew could not enjoy too conspicuous an authority, and the invincible Donbass coal miner Novikov, who provides wholesome affirmation of the ennobling properties of labour.
Yet Grossman worked with this grain to remarkable, subtly coded, effect. Chepyzhin, the Chandlers advise, seems to have been partly based on Lev Shtrum, a former university lecturer of Grossman’s liquidated in the Great Terror. There is also a heart-stopping scene where Viktor Shtrum receives an account written by his mother of her last days in the Jewish ghetto of Berdichev prior to the infamous September 1941 massacre – which in real life numbered Grossman’s mother among its 30,000 victims. It being impossible to write of the Shoah, Grossman made overt his not writing about it. Instead of relating the letter’s contents, he has Shtrum slip it into his jacket pocket, and later occasionally touch it. It will be unfolded at last in Life and Fate.
Stalingrad also mimics the development of the eastern front in operating at ever decreasing distances. In the first half, the Germans sweep on relentlessly, the Russian front is in constant collapse. Shtrum is described preparing for a train journey to Moscow as though undertaking an expedition. Krymov is glimpsed changing his headquarters’ ordnance survey maps almost daily. War, Grossman reports, pursued the fleeing Red Army like a ‘dark shadow’.
Those who retreated brought the war with them, close on their heels. The vast spaces to the east were a dangerous lure. The limitlessness of the Russian steppes was treacherous; it seemed to offer the possibility of escape, but this was an illusion.
The retreating troops came to peaceful orchards and villages. The peace and quiet were a joy to them – but an hour or a day later the black dust, the flames and thunder of war would burst in after them. The troops were bound to the war by a heavy chain, and no retreat could snap this chain; the further they retreated, the heavier the chain grew and the more tightly it bound them.
Krymov is then seen, at a critical and allegorical moment, fighting his way to Stalingrad through a crossing teeming with retreating soldiers and desperate refugees: ‘Here, on this bridge, Krymov at once sensed his own power – the power of a man going slowly and calmly west when everyone else is going east.’ As the city of Stalingrad is at last besieged and bombarded, the action condenses to streets, corners, even rooms.
The bombs reached the ground and plunged into the city. Buildings began to die, just as people die. Tall, thin houses toppled to one side, killed on the spot; stockier, sturdier houses trembled and swayed, their chests and bellies gashed open and exposing what had always been hidden from view: portrait on walls, cupboards, double beds, bedside tables, jars of millet, a half-peeled potato on a table covered with an ink-stained oilcloth.
Death stalks this suddenly alien landscape, but also life, in the soldiers Grossman knew from his journalism – dogged, earthy, fatalistic, unillusioned. Vavilov, Filyashkn, Shevdkov, Kovalyov: we come to know them all. ‘What strength, what sadness,’ Grossman writes. ‘And what emptiness around these men.’
Grossman is concerned in Stalingrad chiefly to indict fascism, which he submits to ambitious study, even bringing us into the presence of Hitler, first lording it over Mussolini, later lecturing an obsequious Himmler. In a lengthy disquisition, Grossman summarises fascism as ‘a rebellion against millennia of human history’, in being ‘a challenge to mankind’s humanistic prejudices’. It was not open to Grossman, of course, to identify similar propensities in communism. Stalingrad is free of Gulags and devoid of secret police, while the desiccation of Soviet bureaucracy is only briefly embodied, in Lt Col Zvezdyukhin:
‘We need documents. Nothing can be determined without documents.’
He gave particular weight to word documents. Against the background of his habitual monotone the word sounded almost succulent.
The sole anti-regime voice is a drunken village peasant nostalgic for tsarism, who to the passing Krymov wants ‘to speak freely…about everything that had been forbidden’, and whose warning hangs heavily: ‘There are young men who think the same as me, and there are old men who think the same as me. You’re not going to be able to shoot all of us.’ Again, the state will bulk more darkly in Life and Fate: Krymov will become a victim of the party he has so selflessly served, and Shtrum be forced into strike a devil’s bargain like Grossman’s during the Jewish Doctor’s Plot.
Does this make Stalingrad a lesser achievement than Life and Fate? It is certainly narrower, less even, more inhibited. Grossman was clearly aching for the thaw on thought that the ascension of Khrushchev fleetingly promised. Grossman would snatch at it – in the instant, overeagerly. At the same time, Stalingrad has the breadth of humanity and depth of sympathy that the scale of Soviet sacrifice called for. Only after first attending to the Russian people could Grossman take up his quarrel with the ideology and institutions that had enslaved them. He was here less lucky than he had been on the battlefield. The luck instead is now ours. (2019)