Stalingrad by Vasily Grossman (Trans: Robert Chandler, Harvill Secker, £25) and Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century by Alexandra Popoff (Yale University Press, £25)
"It is impossible to make any parallels between the fate of this novel [Life and Fate] and that of the book, For a Just Cause. I read For a Just Cause and found nothing politically offensive in it."
So wrote Mikhail Suslov, a high party functionary, in response to Vasily Grossman, after Grossman, the Ukrainian Jewish writer of both For a Just Cause and its powerful, hard-hitting sequel of the 1950s, Life and Fate, had written in 1962 to Nikita Kruschev, imploring him to release the latter, his masterpiece, which had, bizarrely, been “arrested” a year earlier.
It was not to be published during the author’s lifetime. This, we learn from Alexandra Popoff’s highly readable, well-researched account of the writer and his times.
Suslov’s response tells us much about the difference between Stalingrad — the original title of For a Just Cause — and its sequel.
In the introduction to his 1985 translation of that sequel, Life and Fate, Robert Conquest, Grossman’s eloquent and sympathetic translator, disparaged Stalingrad as a book “deadened by its ideological conformity” and recommended approaching the two books as “separate novels that happen to portray some of the same characters.”
But, for readers of Life and Fate unfamiliar with the earlier book, there is a sense of being parachuted abruptly into the heart of a drama with whose cast we are expected to be already familiar.
Unless one has first read Stalingrad, where the same characters are gradually developed, with care and in detail, Life and Fate can, at first, overwhelm with its fast-moving, multiple plot-lines. And Grossman intended his two epic-length books to be read as a sequence.
Perhaps Conquest’s view of Stalingrad has altered over time, with the rediscovery of many suppressed passages that are included in Robert Chandler’s translation. It is, like its successor, a gloriously written book, though more lyrical, lacking the devastating punch which makes Life and Fate one of the 20th century’s greatest novels.
In Stalingrad, Grossman’s own beliefs can still be deciphered. Pro-Soviet and patriotic views abound, but they are voiced by the likes of commissars, such as Krymov, and sometimes opposed by characters whose views were no doubt closer to the author’s, as in the scene where Krymov encounters harsh criticism of the Soviet regime from an old Cossack who has suffered under collectivisation.
Elsewhere, Grossman sets up a debate about truth between the sisters Zhenya and Marusya, a scene inspired by a letter Grossman had received from Maxim Gorky concerning Grossman’s early novel, Glückauf.
“This is, of course, truth,” Gorky had written, “but it is a disgusting and tormenting truth. It is a truth we must struggle against and mercilessly extirpate.”
Gorky was to become a strong supporter of Grossman’s after he followed the older writer’s advice and rewrote his novel in the Soviet realist style that Gorky recommended. Like so many, Grossman had to play the game to survive.
Despite claiming, “it would have been better if they killed me,” after Life and Fate was arrested, Grossman’s darkest hour surely came when he felt compelled to sign the infamous letter calling for the execution of the “Killer Doctors”, an episode he fictionalised, using his alter ego, Viktor Shtrum, in Life and Fate.
Yet he was also capable of writing to the fearsome Nikolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD, demanding legal guardianship of his two stepchildren after their mother, Olga, had been arrested as “an enemy of the people”.
Olga believed that she and the boys would have perished, had it not been for Grossman’s potentially suicidal intervention.
Popoff remarks that Grossman is neglected in Putin’s Russia, where Stalinism and the myth of a glorious past are on the rise. All the more reason to read him.
Mark Glanville is freelance writer and singer
