With the U.S. publication of Life and Fate,1 his masterwork, the name of the Russian writer Vasily Grossman (1905-64) will, one hopes, become more familiar to the American reader than has hitherto been the case. Until World War II, even specialists were unaware of his work, though he had been publishing since the 30's. During the war years his reportage and sketches from the front made him famous in the Soviet Union, where he was ranked right below Ilya Ehrenburg as a journalist, but knowledge of him seems never to have reached the West. On two occasions in the last years of Stalin's reign he fell under the crushing wheels of the ideological machine, but at that time there were more famous victims and martyrs—Anna Akhmatova, for example—and again, so far as the West was concerned, Grossman remained in the shadows.
In 1970, six years after his death, Grossman's short novel Forever Flowing, which had not been published in the Soviet Union but which had been spirited out in manuscript, appeared with an émigré press. The story concerns a man who has lived through Stalin's camps and returns after thirty years to try to comprehend everything that has occurred, to understand the roots and nature of the Soviet system and the frailty and the strength of human beings. The book was noticed, and was translated into seven languages, including English (Harper & Row, 1972). In a review in the New York Times, Thomas Lask compared Grossman with Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn. Still, the book made neither political nor literary waves and was soon forgotten.2
In 1975, three different émigré journals printed excerpts from an unpublished novel by Vasily Grossman. As with Forever Flowing, this text had also left its fatherland in secret. This time, however, Russian publishers in the West were in no rush to bring out the complete version—possibly because of its size, around a thousand typed pages, but more likely because of ideological considerations. To some people Grossman seemed insufficiently anti-Soviet, to others, unforgivably anti-Russian; I will return to this later on. In any event, the novel, Life and Fate, was eventually published in Lausanne, in the original in 1980, and in 1983 in French translation.
If the Russian edition made little stir in the émigré press—little as compared with almost anything written by the big guns of the Russian emigration, Solzhenitsyn and Vladimir Maximov—the French edition became a literary sensation. With the exception of the Communist daily L'Humanité, every newspaper of any importance in France, Belgium, and French Switzerland spoke of the book and its author in tones that were not just complimentary but ecstatic: “. . . An encyclopedia of Soviet life”; “. . . a Soviet Tolstoy”; “. . . he will enter the pantheon of Russian literature”; “a historical fresco, a gigantic work, the great Russian novel of the 20th century”; “since the time of Chekhov and Tolstoy there has been nothing so stirring, so staggering.” There were dozens of reviews like these. And the novel was not only a critical success but also a genuine commercial one: it made the best-seller list and sold more than 150,000 copies, which for an 800-page translation priced at 150 francs is no small feat, at least in European terms. In 1984 the novel came out in Italian and German (among the many German reviews was an enormously long one by Heinrich Böll in Die Zeit), and now, at last, in England and the United States.
Why, ten years ago, was the West indifferent to Grossman's voice, and why is it now so enamored? It seems to me that the explanation lies, on the one hand, in an accidental chain of circumstances favorable to the novel and, on the other hand, in a profound and important lesson that cannot help being recognized, however dimly, by every reader. To the category of chance we must relegate the unusual fate of the novel in the Soviet Union, where it had been “arrested” by the KGB in 1961 and sentenced to eternal imprisonment in the archives of the political police, only to escape into freedom through a miracle that remains not fully understood. This story, of the death of a writer and the miraculous survival of his work, is the stuff of myth.
Another circumstance favorable to the novel, in my opinion, is the fact that today, even sophisticated readers have grown tired of the excessive and often pretentious complexity of literary experimentation, and have become newly receptive to old-fashioned narrative in the tradition of Leo Tolstoy. Life and Fate is such a narrative. In it, what is more, Grossman asks the central, final questions about human existence, questions many of us may have passed over but may be very glad to be reminded of.
As for the lesson, it is first of all connected to the metamorphosis that transformed Vasily Grossman from a more or less ordinary Soviet writer into one of the most significant Russian novelists of the 20th century, and from a slave of the state into an apostle of freedom. What interests me particularly about this shift is its Jewish aspect: what part did this Russian writer's Jewish fate play in his moral, philosophical, and artistic transformation?
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Vasily Grossman was born in 1905 in the Ukrainian town of Berdichev—“our kike capital,” to borrow an expression of Isaac Babel's. Anyone who grew up in the Soviet Union knows the special smell of the very word “Berdichev”—the smell of a Jewish joke, not innocently funny but somehow nasty and unclean. Few are left who remember the real Berdichev, which once bore the proud name “the Jerusalem of Volhynia,” but everyone knows the Berdichev of Russian anti-Semitism.
Grossman's place of birth did not, however, leave an imprint on the future writer; his family was an assimilated one, Russian rather than Jewish in cultural orientation. Grossman did not know Yiddish and received no Jewish education, neither in the usual sense of a religious upbringing nor in the broader sense of Jewish culture; the latter, along with Jewish history (or Jewish civilization, to use the still broader term of Mordecai Kaplan), passed him by.
There exist very few reminiscences of Grossman, which makes all the more valuable a memoir by Semyon Lipkin that not long ago came to the West in manuscript and is soon to be brought out (in Russian) by Ardis Press. Lipkin is a poet and translator who in recent years has embarked upon an open, fearless struggle against the state oppression of literature: he resigned publicly from the Union of Writers and he regularly publishes in the West.
In his memoir of Grossman, Lipkin asserts that Grossman's Jewish consciousness was primarily “gastronomic” in nature: that is, it expressed itself for the most part in a love of Jewish cooking. When, for instance, Grossman noticed that Lipkin owned a set of the Russian Jewish Encyclopedia (in a pre-revolutionary edition, it goes without saying) he asked, “Is there anything in there that's important for you?” It is true that Grossman's first literary steps were taken on Berdichev material—as in the 1928 sketch “Berdichev In All Seriousness” and the 1934 story “In the City of Berdichev”—but there he was simply, like many beginning writers, making use of a familiar background. “In the City of Berdichev” recounts an episode from the civil war from the point of view of a Russian writer; the Jewish characters in the story are nothing but stereotypes, and stereotypes, as we know, appear when a writer's main interest lies elsewhere.
Still, Vasily Grossman's Berdichev “debut” does allow us to make one significant observation, namely, that he did not feel hatred for his Jewish background. He was not ashamed of shtetl life and shtetl psychology, and did not try to distance himself from the heritage of his fathers. This is important, since a sizable group of writers who were Jewish by birth but Russian by orientation and self-definition did feel and express hostility toward their own past. (The two most famous examples are Osip Mandelstam and Edward Bagritsky.) Grossman's calm outlook and his lack of embarrassment suggest that he had an organic sense of belonging both to Soviet Russia and to Russian literature, and hence did not feel the need to prove himself.
Until the start of the war with Germany, neither Jewish interests nor Jewish themes existed for Grossman. He published a great deal; in accordance with old Russian tradition, his stories and novellas appeared first in journals, later as separate books. He also published part of a large novel that was never finished. Grossman's first steps in literature won the approval of Maxim Gorky, the patriarch of socialist realism. The critics were unfailingly attentive and well-disposed toward him: his (unfinished) novel alone garnered close to thirty laudatory reviews.
Was this success warranted, or were party critics making a mountain out of a molehill for reasons of ideology and propaganda? Rereading the pre-war Grossman today, I am persuaded that given the literary context of the 1930's, he deserved not only the praise of his critics but also the love of his readers. The early Grossman is a precise and alert observer; his voice rings true, his characters are convincing and at times even original. Not just a painter from life, he is also a thinker, and his thought can attain a striking precision. He is at his best in stories about the civil war, but he was also successful at what was then called “industrial” prose. Even the novel Stepan Kolchugin, a typical 30's story of a working-class lad who grows into a professional revolutionary (the Soviet variant of the Bildungsroman), stands out from most prewar and even postwar novels, containing some fine pages and some masterfully realized characters.
But at the same time it is obvious in these works that the young Grossman had voluntarily and wholeheartedly submitted to the ideological dictates of party consciousness, and that he was preaching Marxist writ in its Stalinist variation. And when ideology pressed in on natural talent—something that happened with a fair degree of frequency—the results were as pitiful as anything produced by such “classics” of socialist realism as Valentin Kataev's Time, Forward! (1932) and Ilya Ehrenburg's Day Two (1933).
In Grossman's 1937 “Story About Love,” for example, a chemical engineer is getting married. He is boundlessly happy, not only because his romance has worked out but most of all because everywhere around him he sees the most astonishing and joyful transformations. A special joy is provided by his trip to the Ukraine. The time of this trip is noted precisely—it is 1933 (a year in which the hungry cry of millions of dispossessed Ukrainian peasants had yet to subside). As for the heroine, who unquestionably enjoys the author's sympathy, here is a sample of her thought:
None of us think about this, but a very interesting thing has happened since the revolution: it used to be that girls would deceive themselves a lot, falling in love with actors and officers and all sorts of fools and empty talkers, things were all mixed up, and now—I don't know how to put it—now we all have a sense of the ideal man. Now a lot more often girls fall in love with better people, and everything has gotten a lot deeper, closer to the truth. . . .
Also belonging to the prewar years is a play, if You Believe the Pythagoreans (not published until 1946). In my opinion this play represents the worst of Vasily Grossman's literary sins. It is false through and through, replete with fake pathos and fake profundity. The contrived plot tells three parallel stories: the story of an old inventor, a chronic failure, who dies at the exact moment he achieves success; the story of a happy romance between an intellectual girl and a simple worker; and the story of an unhappy, near-suicidal romance that ends with passion vanquished through cheerful, earnest work. Matching the impossible plot is impossible dialogue. Tenderly cleaning the dirty boot of her beloved worker, the heroine teaches a lesson to an intellectual admirer whom she has spurned: “Neurotic! All your philosophical garbage is not worth this boot.”
If I have spent so much time on Grossman's failures, it is only to show that despite his talent and intelligence, he was an ordinary Soviet writer who did the same things everyone did, though he sometimes did them better. In other words, there is nothing in the prewar Grossman that prefigures the future author of Life and Fate.
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It might seem banal to say that the war marked a turning point in the life of Vasily Grossman—after all, it broke and redirected the lives of hundreds of millions of people—but the point is nevertheless essential. The immense calamities that befell Russia in the 20's and 30's had left both man and writer untouched. Grossman was no saint (though this is what Lip-kin calls him at the end of his memoir), and until he himself was hit by intense suffering, he did not feel real empathy for the suffering of other people.
Grossman spent all four war years at the front, not as a soldier but as a correspondent for the military newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda (“Red Star”). He was always in the thick of battle, in the most decisive and dangerous defense positions or in the first line of attack. He marched and rode from Gomel to Stalingrad and—in the opposite direction—from Stalingrad to Berlin. And he saw everything: the shame, despair, and horror of defeat; death, ruins, incredible brutality; and, finally, the rapture of victory and the triumph of the victors, too often unsightly, not to say loathsome. He was, along with Ilya Ehrenburg, the most famous and best-loved journalist of the war years.
Even today, when one might expect Grossman's name to be under the strictest ban, it is impossible to erase him from history—and will seemingly remain impossible as long as the memory of the war is officially sacred. Thus, to mark the fortieth anniversary of the victory over Germany, the Moscow journal Voprosy Literaturny (“Problems of Literature”) conducted a survey of writers who had been at the front. The first question asked: of everything that you read from 1941 to 1945, what has remained in your memory above all? Of the twenty-six respondents, four named Grossman's sketches. If you keep in mind the way such surveys are conducted in the Soviet Union and how participants are selected and screened, the number is enormous.
Grossman wrote as a Russian about the sufferings and heroism of the Russian people. And a Russian is what he was, despite what may be said on the one side by anti-Semites or on the other side by collectors of Jewish “contributions” to this and that. But the war and the Holocaust also reminded Grossman of his background, and he accepted this with the seriousness and sense of duty that were his by nature.
The great 20th-century Polish poet Julian Tuwim (1894-1953), a Pole in the same way that Grossman was a Russian, wrote, as an émigré in New York in 1944, an article entitled “We, the Jews of Poland.” It became the manifesto of assimilated Jewry throughout Europe, and was also well known in the Soviet Union thanks to Ehrenburg, who quoted from it at every opportunity. Tuwim declared: “There are two kinds of blood—the kind that flows in the veins and the kind that flows out of them. . . . The latter is the innocent blood of the martyred. . . . Never before has the world seen such torrents of martyred blood, and in the widest, deepest torrents flows the blood of Jews. . . .” The only binding ties, Tuwim concludes, are those based on the second kind of blood—the blood of martyrs, spilled by villains. During the war the “Tuwim syndrome” appeared among many Russian writers who were born Jews, but most of them got over it quickly; in Grossman it remained and grew stronger.
The reasons for this can be found in Grossman's personal circumstances, in his nature, and in the general atmosphere. To begin with, he lost his mother in the Berdichev ghetto. As a war correspondent, Grossman was among the first Russian witnesses to the aftermath of the Holocaust, among the first who saw with their own eyes the empty ghettos, the anti-tank ditches filled with corpses, the death factories. He was, indeed, the first writer in the world to tell about a death camp (in the sketch “The Treblinka Hell,” August-October 1944). Even earlier, toward the end of 1943, he had begun to work with Ehrenburg on a “Black Book” about the destruction of Russian Jewry in German-occupied territory. Among the materials that Grossman prepared personally was the essay, “The Murder of the Jews in Berdichev”; he went there to look for traces or witnesses of the final hours of Ekaterina Grossman, but without success.
But no matter how terrible the war and its losses were for Grossman, the worst was yet to come. It is one thing to fight against an enemy, quite another to realize that this same enemy is living in your own camp, in your own soul. This was the fate of a small number of old Bolsheviks, whose eyes were opened when Stalin kicked them out of power and into labor camps. Grossman describes their anguish precisely and mercilessly in Life and Fate. But he himself knew it in its Jewish variation.
Even at the start of the war it was clear that the anti-Semitic propaganda of the Nazis, inciting the Russian people to rise up against “Jew-Bolshevism,” was not meeting resistance in the Soviet Union; to this element of enemy propaganda Stalin capitulated, possibly with satisfaction. And the atmosphere at the top found a sympathetic response down below. In February 1943, at a plenary session of the presidium of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Ehrenburg spoke of the rise in anti-Semitism in the country and the urgent need to counter it. By the eve of victory, anti-Semitism in the USSR had taken firm if unofficial root as a factor of social life and of state policy. At first, its only manifestation was a negative one, to be found in the silence that surrounded the subject of the Holocaust. The meaning of this silence was lost on no one. But Jewish matters in general, even the word “Jew,” were avoided as far as possible in any context.
What happened next is well known: the campaigns against those “lacking in party values” or “bowing before Western bourgeois culture” (the campaigns bore indistinct but still sufficiently legible traces of Judeophobia); the murder of Solomon Mikhoels, chairman of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee; the dismantling of the committee and the shut-down of what was by then (November 1948) the only Jewish press in the country, accompanied by a real typographic pogrom;3 the mass arrests of Jewish writers and other cultural figures. All this, naturally, was carried out under the veil of secrecy: there was no word in the newspapers about reprisals against the Jews. But in the last days of January 1949 the pogrom reached a new stage, and there began a total and by now completely open war against the Jews which has entered Soviet history under the name of the “struggle against cosmopolitanism.” Unofficial state anti-Semitism became shamelessly demonstrative, leading to the Prague “Zionist” trial (November-December 1952), the “discovery” of a plot of Jewish doctor-murderers in Moscow (January 13, 1953), and the near-Nazi raging of the Soviet press on this occasion. There is evidence that all this was preparatory to a massive deportation of Jews to Siberia, which would have taken place had the Jewish God not removed the Soviet Hitler on March 5, 1953.
This, then, is the background for the private drama of a Russian writer, the son of a Jewish woman murdered in the Berdichev ghetto.
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In 1946, at the zenith of his honorably-won popularity, Grossman published the play he wrote before the war—and fell under the murderous fire of critics, who, following on the heels of Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin's commissar of culture, accused Grossman of propounding an idealist philosophy hostile to Marxism-Leninism. The accusation was utterly groundless, as absurd as accusing him of dealing in narcotics. For an orthodox Marxist-Leninist, as Grossman then was, this made it all the more insulting. But at least the attacks lacked overtones of anti-Semitism.
The second blow, however, left not the slightest doubt on that score. Right after the battle of Stalingrad, Grossman had begun work on a novel about the war and about Stalingrad. All the “black years” of Stalin's postwar reign were devoted to this work. The novel, For a Righteous Cause, was published in 1952, in four issues of Novy Mir (“New World”), the journal then edited by Aleksandr Tvardovsky. And both Tvardovsky (who in 1962 would publish Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) and Aleksandr Fadeev (the chief master of the Union of Writers, who would kill himself in 1956 after Khrushchev's speech acknowledging Stalin's crimes) considered Grossman's novel an outstanding example of socialist realism. The critics also exulted: “the birth of an epic,” “the historical truth,” “an expressive image of the great Stalin. . . .”
It is absurd to think that in the terrible year of 1952 someone would dare to praise a book that differed one iota from the ideological and aesthetic standard established by those in power. And indeed, For a Righteous Cause is a completely orthodox Soviet epic narrative. Although at the time its purely artistic qualities were obvious and even striking, particularly when placed against the background of the sterile or (better) moribund prose being produced in the postwar years, today, after more than three decades, its appeal is significantly diminished. Despite some fine passages, the novel as a whole gives an unpleasant and even labored impression, and is plagued by a wooden rhetoric indistinguishable from Soviet officialese.
But in fact none of this meant anything; something else determined the fate of the novel. According to Lipkin, Tvardovsky wanted to secure the support of Mikhail Sholokhov, the author of And Quiet Flows the Don, who also happened to be on the editorial board of Novy Mir; he sent him the manuscript of For a Righteous Cause. The “living classic” answered briefly, his primary objection being, Look whom you've allowed to write about Stalingrad. It was a precise and ominous warning: a Jew had no right to depict and glorify the victory of the Russian people.
Those at the top reasoned in exactly the same way. The novel and its excessively positive reviews provoked the wrath of Malenkov, Stalin's right hand, and soon Grossman was attacked from all sides. Everyone joined in: the major newspapers and journals, enemies as well as former friends and protectors, literary “comrades” and readers. Among the accusations of ideological errors and artistic weakness, one in particular gave a key to what was going on: the author, by concentrating on a character named Shtrum, “a mediocrity full of petty passions,” had left in the shadows the “powerful Russian Soviet man.” In the heated atmosphere of those days this was decoded instantaneously and unambiguously: a Jew had made the central character a Jew.
Grossman was being beaten to death and would have been killed—that is, arrested—but, as I already noted, the Jewish God intervened and Stalin died. Grossman was saved from literary and actual death, the novel was rehabilitated and published as a separate book, and on his fiftieth birthday (1955) the author was given a decoration. In Soviet terms, everything had worked out well. The party punished, the party forgave, and the person who got spat on was expected to wipe his face and pretend that nothing had happened. In Grossman's literary generation, everyone acted that way.
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Grossman acted differently. The party had forgiven, but he did not forget and he did not forgive, and the experience gained from his collision now with not one but two totalitarian powers he brought to the continuation of For a Righteous Cause, the novel Life and Fate.
He worked on the book for about ten years, finishing it at the beginning of 1960. By October of that year he had reread the enormous manuscript, made his corrections, and sent it on to the journal Znamya (“Banner”). The novel was read by the main editor and two associate editors. So great was their horror that, not even showing the manuscript to anyone else, they sent it right off to the cultural section of the Central Committee. There a decision was made: let the author go free but arrest the novel, and do it in such a way that not a trace remains.
In February 1961, two KGB functionaries dressed in civilian clothes appeared at Grossman's door. The search was short, a little over an hour. “They took,” writes Lipkin, “not only the typewritten copies but also the handwritten copy, the rough drafts of discarded chapters, and all preparatory materials, outlines, and sketches.” Then they asked if there were any other copies and if so, where. Grossman answered: at the typist's and at Novy Mir. They set off for the typist's together with Grossman; to Novy Mir they went themselves and ordered the safe opened.
Grossman tried to fight. He went to the Union of Writers. He was seen by a triumvirate headed by Georgy Markov, who was the ruler of the Union then and remains so to this day. He was told that in the present complex time, publication of the novel would bring harm to the state; publication might be considered, if ever, in another 250 years. He wrote a letter to Khrushchev, which Lipkin includes in his memoir. The letter helps us to understand how a man in his right mind with a working memory could take such an insane step—that is, how he could hand over to literary bureaucrats a manuscript whose conception of history was diametrically opposed to all official Soviet ideology with its attendant dogmas and myths. For both Lipkin and Tvardovsky, on reading the novel, had responded in one voice that there would be no chance of publishing it.
Grossman wrote to Khrushchev after the 22nd party congress (October 17-31, 1961) during which the policy of de-Stalinization, begun by Khrushchev five years earlier in the famous “secret” address to the 20th congress, was decisively upheld. His letter appeals to both of Khrushchev's speeches. He had, he writes, begun work on the novel before Stalin's death, without the slightest expectation of seeing it published, but the address to the 20th congress had aroused hope in him, and “your address to the 22nd congress strengthened my belief that the book Life and Fate did not contradict the truth you revealed, and that truth was the property of the present day, not something to be put off for 250 years.”
From the letter it is clear that Grossman really believed in the good intentions of the post-Stalinist leadership, in the depth and irreversibility of the changes, and in the idea that the shepherds, yesterday's executioners, wanted the whole truth as much as did the flock. It would be wrong to write off this belief as the naiveté of a holy fool; there was some basis for it. Let us not forget that exactly one year later, in November 1962, Tvardovsky published One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, marking the first time the censored Soviet press told the truth about the Gulag. For Grossman, the issue of Novy Mir containing Solzhenitsyn's story may have been proof that he had not been crazy when he entrusted his book to the editors of the Moscow journal.
Nonetheless he was crazy, a “fool of God” in the most profound meaning of that Russian expression. “My book is not a political book. I . . . speak in it about people, about their sorrows, joys, delusions, deaths,” he wrote to Khrushchev. Of course he had written about people, but about people oppressed, enslaved, and destroyed by the state—the Soviet state. He had written about the delusions that resulted from their submission, voluntary or forced, to the dogmas of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. His book was a thousand times more dangerous than Ivan Denisovich, which could be interpreted as a condemnation merely of what was past and gone.
His other crazy idea was to have sent the novel to Znamya, considered rightly a centrist journal, weak, subservient, and dull. True, he had had a falling-out with Tvardovsky, the editor of Novy Mir, but this was secondary. As Lipkin informs us, “Grossman was possessed by the strange thought that our so-called progressive editors were in fact more cowardly than the orthodox reactionaries; that the latter had the strength and the daring of bandits, and would be more willing to take a risk.” So he turned to the boss of Znamya. He would have been better off delivering the book to the KGB with his own hands.
The response to his letter to Khrushchev took the form of an audience with the main party ideologue, Mikhail Suslov, who advised Grossman to forget about the novel and repeated the verdict of his “brother writers”: we will publish it in two hundred or three hundred years, not before. Suslov turned out to be a poor prophet, just as the KGB bloodhounds proved insufficiently alert. One copy of Life and Fate remained at large. Our primary authority in this matter, Semyon Lipkin, informs us in a somewhat enigmatic and offhand way that “it would have been better if the people who managed to preserve the novel had found the courage to worry about the fate of the manuscript sooner. . . .” Who these people were we still do not know, but we do know where they went for help; the manuscript was placed on microfilm and its journey to the West was organized by the writer Vladimir Voinovich, who now lives in West Germany.
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The plot of Life and Fate, as I have already mentioned, forms a continuous whole with For a Righteous Cause, constituting an episode from the life of an extended family and taking place in a time frame of no more than a year. Without the first novel it is sometimes hard to understand the plot lines of the second, yet in fact the author does not insist on a prior acquaintance with the earlier novel, for the characters of the later one are quite cut off from the earlier images of themselves. The essence of the change does not lie in those few characters whose past lives actually get rewritten (thus in the first novel the eldest son is a high-placed manager who dies in his office of a heart attack; in the second he is shot during the Terror for “spying and plotting”) but in an internal transformation. The masks characteristic of Stalin's day have been dropped; immobility and Bolshevik “steadfastness” have given way to historicity, development, and the Tolstoyan “dialectic of the soul.”
This change can be seen in any one character, from the most central to the most marginal, from those loved tenderly by the author to those he hates, but it is particularly striking in the depiction of two old Bolsheviks, Mostovskoy and Krymov.
Mostovskoy's past includes a stint in the revolutionary underground, Siberian exile, emigration, and repression, but he himself sees his tangled path as an unbroken line of glorious progress. No amount of misfortune can shake his doctrinaire, anti-historical optimism. What is more, everyone around him is infected by his blind faith and listens to him greedily, as though he were an oracle. Krymov is a former member of the Comintern, now also out of power, who seems a bit more complicated than Mostovskoy. He is “tormented by contradictions,” but even his contradictions are artificial, “bookish,” and in the end he is comforted by nothing less than quotations from Lenin.
This, at any rate, is how it is in For a Righteous Cause. In Life and Fate, Mostovskoy finds himself in a German concentration camp. Though even there he retains his strength of will, his unflinching spirit and authority, he is consumed by doubt: was it corruption or cowardice that made him idolize the party and cling to “the Leninist way” like a stupid child to its mother's skirts? And when he is called in for a talk by a higher-up in the SS, a Nazi intellectual who argues in the most convincing fashion that there is no real difference between Communism and National Socialism, the conversation becomes in equal degree a devil's temptation and an objectivization of an internal split, like the conversation between Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov and the devil. Mostovskoy only thinks that he withstood temptation: in fact his faith has been shaken. He is incapable of arguing with the SS man; he has nothing to say beyond “Get thee behind me, Satan.” And yet he has been incomparably lucky. He has landed in an enemy concentration camp and not in a Russian one, as did hundreds of thousands of other steadfast Leninists and Stalinists—like, for example, Krymov.
The maturation of Krymov, the suffering of this “stepson of the times” (as he calls himself), represents Grossman at the height of his psychological powers. If the term “Rubashov complex” (named for Koestler's hero in Darkness at Noon) has come to be used as a shorthand for the capitulation and confession of the revolutionary old guard during Stalin's show trials, then we surely have an equal need for the term “Krymov complex” to describe the steady and merciless alienation from all that is life—a process that would be unstoppable were it not halted, as in a fairy tale, by a tiny drop of “absurd kindness.”
Human kindness has, indeed, become one of the two foundations of Grossman's new world view; such kindness defies logic and stands in opposition to goodness with a capital G, to utopian universalist ideas and projects for general happiness. The second foundation is freedom, opposed in the contemporary world by totalitarianism with its false myths and false scale of values. Nothing, in Grossman's view, can kill either kindness or the urge for freedom in the human soul: “History has not been the struggle of good to overcome evil. The history of the human race has been the struggle of immense evil to crush the small grain of real humanity. If, even now, the humanity of human beings has not been killed, then evil will not be victorious.” So runs the verdict of a prisoner in a Nazi death camp.
Grossman's “absurd kindness” makes it possible to look even at an enemy with a measure of sympathy. The character Dementiy Getmanov, once a regional party secretary in the Ukraine and now the political commissar of a tank corps, is a literary achievement of the first magnitude. Getmanov is the “leadership role of the party” as it looks and operates in reality, the “vivid image of the Communist” that Soviet critics have tirelessly exhorted writers to create, now as well as then—except that these critics have in mind the party-state mythology and not what is really there. Yet for all that Grossman's portrait smacks of an exposé, it lacks the tone of mockery and the grotesque exaggeration that characterize the work of so many of the recently enlightened and converted. Getmanov is not a monster, an offspring of the devil à la Dostoevsky or Solzhenitsyn. He is palpably natural; he has a power and charm that are difficult to ignore, and in his own way he is completely human. Like the other characters, he has been drawn from inside. It is, indeed, hard to imagine how Grossman managed to immerse himself so deeply into something he found so hateful. Perhaps, like the great Christian moralists, he learned to hate the sin but not the sinner.
Grossman openly follows Tolstoy in his general approach, his mode of composition, and particularly in the innumerable digressions in which he unceremoniously breaks off the illusion of epic and sets out his own convictions on history, politics, and society. But equally he sees himself as a follower of Chekhov, who, for the new Grossman, the Grossman of Life and Fate, was Russia's greatest writer. In the Chekhovian spirit, he wants to “bring the vastness of Russia, with all its classes, estates, and ages, into our consciousness.” In this novel he enters into the mind of a theoretical physicist, a worker at an electric station, a seventeen-year-old adolescent, an old woman, a young girl in love, and a bereaved mother at her son's grave. There is something greater here than the simple talent of an observer; it is a kind of clairvoyance, an absolute empathy, the elevated and elevating knowledge of catharsis. It seems to me that in its purity of tone and its complete freedom from falsity and affectation, Life and Fate has no equals in contemporary Russian literature.
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But how is Jewish fate reflected in this Russian novel? What part did it play in the transformation of Vasily Grossman?
Among the digressions in Life and Fate are two chapters about anti-Semitism. One concerns the new unity of the Jewish people, a unity imposed by executioners on those condemned to death. This imposed unity gives rise in turn to a voluntary one, accepted consciously and tranquilly by those who had long forgotten their Jewishness. The mother of Viktor Shtrum (the novel's chief character and an obvious stand-in for Grossman) writes him a letter that through some miracle reaches him from the ghetto:
I never felt like a Jew. I grew up with Russian girlfriends, my favorite poets were Pushkin and Nekrasov, and the play I cried over along with the whole audience, a convention of Russian doctors, was Uncle Vanya, with Stanislavsky. And, Vitenka, a long time ago when I was fourteen years old, our family was about to emigrate to South America, I told Papa, “I'm never leaving Russia, I'd rather die.” And I didn't go. But now in these terrible days I have been overcome by a mother's tenderness for the Jewish people. I never knew this love before. It reminds me of my love for you, my dear son.
A mother's love and kindness, the most irrational, “absurd” love possible, is awakened in this old woman who has long forgotten that she is Jewish. Her child is the entire suffering nation, all that is good about it and all that is bad.
The same thing, in essence, occurs with another completely assimilated Jewish woman. At the entrance to the gas chamber she is struck by an astonishing vision:
In the nakedness of young and old bodies . . . one could see the hidden body of the nation, no longer veiled by clothes. It seemed to Sofya Osipovna that the feeling “this is me” linked her not with any one person, but with the whole nation. It was the naked body of the nation, at the same time young and old, living, growing, strong and frail, curly-headed and grey-headed, beautiful and hideous, strong and emaciated.
“This is me”: Sofya Osipovna recognizes herself as a Jew, as part of something that “never changes” despite the Holocaust and all previous persecutions, despite assimilation and desertion. And when this woman who never knew love or motherhood dies holding someone else's child, her thought—“I have become a mother”—refers not only to the little boy David whom she “picked up” in the transport to Treblinka, but to her people.
I believe that all this refers to Grossman as well, and indeed to many, maybe even the majority, of assimilated Jews when faced with the fact of the Holocaust. Above and beyond the feelings of the prodigal son who has involuntarily returned come the feelings of a mother who has found her child, a child who is in mortal danger and whom the mother is ready to defend to the end, at any cost.
Grossman's own experience informs other aspects of the novel as well, perhaps most notably Viktor Shtrum's astonishment and anger at his first bouts with everyday and official anti-Semitism, and the new sense of his own Jewishness that arises therefrom. Grossman's past is likewise the source for a fictional event of major importance. At one point in the novel Shtrum commits an ignoble act—he signs an official letter denouncing the “scandalous fabrications” of the Western press concerning political repression in the Soviet Union. He understands what he has done: he has made a conscious and voluntary choice to join with those in power, and by doing so he has lost his inner freedom, his conscience, and his right to the respect of his friends. He thinks: how could he have condemned others for their meekness and servility, how could he have “paraded his purity and courage in front of them”? He is saved (for the second time!) by thoughts of his mother. Afraid at first to think about her, on account of the “base and pitiful thing he did,” he finally sees “that it was not too late, that he still had the strength to raise his head, to remain his mother's son.” And he says, to himself and to her: “Well, we'll see, maybe I do have the strength, Mama, your strength.”
Now, thanks to Lipkin, we know the source of this episode. Soon after January 13, 1953 (the date the doctors' plot was announced) Grossman received a telephone call from the historian Isaac Mintz, who asked him to come to the editorial offices of Pravda. Gathered there was a large group of famous writers, scholars, artists, and actors of Jewish origin. Mintz read a letter addressed to Stalin: the doctor-murderers must be punished without mercy, but the Jews as a people are not guilty, there are many honest Soviet patriots among them, and so on. Lipkin writes: “Deciding in a moment of blindness that the death of a few people could save a nation in distress, Grossman—along with the majority of those in the room—signed the letter. . . . To the end of his life he tormented himself for this act.”
Shtrum's silent appeal to his mother are his last words in the novel. With them, all the Jewish motifs of Life and Fate are brought together and tied in a knot. The living are indebted to the dead, and the nightmare of the Holocaust must be more than just a subject for historical inquiry; it necessitates action and choice. One cannot be at the same time the son of a Jewish woman murdered in Berdichev and a “Russian Soviet patriot” in the image of a Zhdanov or a Sholokhov—or of their equivalents today.
Moveover, one cannot, like Solzhenitsyn, simply cross out the word “Soviet.” In August 1914 Solzhenitsyn gives the Jews a choice. “Living in this country, you have to decide once and for all: do you belong to it with all your soul or not?” Let us put aside the question of whether such a choice is actually possible—the wholehearted Jewish as-similationists of the 1860's and 70's got their response during the pogroms of 1881-82, and it was a response of all Russia, from its darkest depths to its most enlightened heights. Let us instead note that even if it were possible, to say to Russia, “I am yours,” surrendering oneself fully would mean forgetting one's debt to the bones in the ditches and the ravines, to those who have turned into ashes, and renouncing the power given by a mother's love.
Had Grossman not felt the blows of his Jewish fate—blows that came from the West and the East, from Nazism and Communism—had he not accepted this fate as a matter of free, conscious, and responsible choice, and had he not thereby become a Russian writer of Jewish fate, he would never have achieved the creative strength—the artistic transformation of “your strength, Mama”—evident in his final work. Not only the “Jewish” pages but the entire novel shows the strength of the transformed Grossman. His own suffering, his own experience of injustice, opened his eyes to other people's pain and his soul to the victims of other injustices. The source of this new, universal vision is Jewish fate, but as a writer Grossman remains Russian, a part of Russian literature. The Jewish characters, episodes, and motifs of the novel are only details in a monumental picture, an all-Russian, Soviet epic. I would go so far as to say that Grossman in Life and Fate is the first free voice of the Soviet nation, the first sounds of freedom and kindness torn from a throat stopped by terror. The voice of a Jew, but not a Jewish voice.
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After the arrest of the novel, Grossman had only three and a half years left to live. He was alone, impoverished, depressed to the point of despair. He suffered unbearably before his death from cancer, which was almost certainly a result of the murder of Life and Fate. Once he told his friend, the writer Boris Yampol-sky, “I've been strangled and killed in a doorway.” Still he kept on working. In those years he finished the second, greatly expanded version of Forever Flowing, wrote several stories (some of which remain unpublished, locked up in state archives), and completed a travel sketch about Armenia called “Peace Be With You.” Everything that has come to light either in the West or in the Soviet Union, where Grossman was occasionally published both before and after his death, shows that he did not betray the vision or the moral triumph of Life and Fate.
To repeat, Forever Flowing is the story of a man's return from a camp after thirty years of imprisonment. It is a meditative work, almost without a plot, and it reads like an intensive commentary on Life and Fate—which, however, does not detract from its independent significance. Perhaps the appearance of Life and Fate in English will again call attention to this greatly undervalued work, which among other things contains Grossman's thoughts on Russian history and most specifically on Lenin.
In outline, Grossman's historical scheme looks like this. When Russia's thinkers and prophets, her finest minds and hearts, praised the Russian soul and predicted a great future for it, they failed to see that this “Russian soul was a thousand-year-old slave.” But that was why the choice of the Russian soul fell on Lenin, even though “dozens and maybe scores of revolutionary teachings, faiths, and leaders passed like so many suitors before the young Russia, newly released from the yoke of czardom.” Lenin, though he hated old Russia “with all the strength of his fanatic's soul,” merely facilitated its development on a colossal scale by bringing about the new victory of slavery over freedom. And Stalin, “who united in himself a European Marxist and an Asian,” was Lenin's true heir, brilliantly completing the work he had begun. There is, in truth, no such thing as “the enigmatic Russian soul.” If the French or the English had found themselves in the same situation, they would have suffered the same fate, for “souls like those are born everywhere in the world, wherever there is slavery.”
These thoughts belong solely to the second variant of Forever Flowing, and indeed in his letter to Khrushchev, Grossman appeals to Lenin as a defender of democratic freedoms. But they exist in nascent form in Life and Fate, and this should be emphasized, since in the novel that was naively meant for publication and in the novella written in secret (maybe for himself, maybe for future generations) Grossman is the same person. He has nothing of the “double-dealing” nature that so often marks Soviet dissidents of both liberal and conservative leanings.
Still more important, perhaps, is that Forever Flowing shows not the slightest trace of hatred for Russia, but only an infinite pity born of love. Despite this, Russian nationalists, particularly those now in emigration, gave the novella an indifferent reception on its publication in 1970, and have also been completely cold to Life and Fate. For them, Grossman is a Russophobe because he is not Russian. We know (again, thanks to Lip-kin) that Grossman was ecstatic about Solzhenitsyn (“. . . a mature, immense talent. Which one of us can equal him?”) but I more than doubt that Solzhenitsyn reciprocates his feelings. And quite recently, Vladimir Maximov, the novelist and editor of the Paris-based Russian journal Kontinent, has branded Grossman's bitter thoughts on Russian history an “openly racist declaration.”
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I do not know if the Armenian travel sketch, “Peace Be With You” (1962-63), is the last thing to be written by Grossman, but it has become his testament. Looking back at all he has seen and done, his gaze is as intense and serious as before, but now, for the first time in his life as a writer, there is a faint smile of self-irony about his lips. He writes here about the martyred Armenian people, scattered over the globe, and of course about his own martyred people, the Jews.
The few sentences about the Jews became the occasion for a final clash between Grossman and the state. The censor demanded that they be removed, the author refused categorically, and the sketch saw the light of day only after Grossman's death—in its crippled version. We do not know what the missing phrases were, but what remains is eloquent enough. Here is one paragraph, placed at the very end of the sketch where it might resonate with greater force and stay longer in the memory:
I bow low before the Armenian peasants, who at a wedding celebration in their mountain village spoke about the suffering of the Jews. . . . I bow to everyone who solemnly, sadly, listened in silence to these speeches. . . . I give thanks for the mournful words about those who perished in clay ravines, in gas chambers, and in ditches—I give thanks in the name of those living who have been burned by the inhuman words of scorn and hatred: “Too bad that Hitler didn't finish you off.”
This Russian writer of Jewish fate does not want much. He does not want the voice crying out in pain to be silenced, the past wiped out, the present shown bright and cloudless. But he also does not want the Jews to be alone, isolated in their special suffering; if they cannot be comforted, then at least they can be encouraged by the sympathy and kindness of other peoples. These small requests were and remain an open challenge, not only to those in power but to Russian nationalists of all stripes, from official to dissident.
Defiled by the censor's pencil, the testament of Vasily Grossman still embraces and reflects his entire life. He understood his life in the strictest sense of service and duty and accepted the tragedy of his fate. But he was unable to see its grandeur, which can be appreciated only by the readers of his novel.
1 Translated by Robert Chandler, Harper & Row, 880 pp., $22.50.
2 It has just been reissued in paperback by Harper & Row, translated by Thomas P. Whitney, 247 pp., $6.95.
3 This was when the plates for The Black Book, which had long been ready, were destroyed. The book was never printed in its homeland either in Russian or Yiddish; it came out in Russian in Israel in 1980, and in English in 1982 (Schocken).
