Travel, Fun and Business in Russia

It would diminish Vasily Grossman’s gifts if we were to present him – as the BBC has tried to do in the publicity for the new radio dramatization of Life and Fate – as a stereotypically lonely victim of a brutal regime, a dissident author ruthlessly persecuted by the guardians of a totalitarian ideology. In fact, Grossman spent most of his active life rubbing shoulders with prominent figures of the Soviet literary establishment. During the Second World War, as a newspaper correspondent with the rank of Red Army officer, he was a star of Soviet journalism, describing in vivid detail the silent heroism of people behind the front line, the ordeal of defending Stalingrad, the Nazi atrocities in the occupied territories, the horrors of Treblinka and the fall of Berlin. He was the author of many officially approved publications that earned him important state prizes and decorations. He must have known what he was doing when in 1961 he submitted the manuscript of Life and Fate – the book that directly equates Stalinism with Nazism – to Znamya, a Moscow literary magazine. Indeed, the manuscript was immediately handed over to the Soviet security services, Grossman’s apartment was raided and his manuscripts and even his typewriter ribbons were seized.

He must have known what he was doing when in 1961 he submitted the manuscript of Life and Fate – the book that directly equates Stalinism with Nazism – to Znamya, a Moscow literary magazine.

But such treatment of a dissident writer by the KGB was not exceptional, as Grossman well knew. The Moscow of the early 1960s was no longer a Stalinist prison; Khrushchev’s condemnation of Stalinism at the 1956 Party Congress changed the ideological climate in the country forever. And yet, when Doctor Zhivago was published in Italy in 1957, Boris Pasternak was vehemently denounced throughout the Soviet press as a traitor – a campaign that drove the poet to despair and an early death. On the other hand, the late 1950s witnessed unofficial gatherings of poets and uncensored public readings in Mayakovsky Square in the heart of Moscow. For the first time in Soviet history, ordinary people could buy a personal typewriter or tape recorder and make samizdat copies of prose, poetry and songs to circulate among their friends. Semi-official concerts and heated political discussions took place in cafés and university lecture halls. This literary activity was closely monitored by the authorities and sometimes severely punished. It was a turbulent and controversial period in Soviet history, which helps to explain why Grossman was so persistent in his attempts to have Life and Fate published. He, no doubt, believed that this book could be regarded as anti-Stalinist but not anti-Soviet. How can one otherwise explain the fact that he wrote a letter to Khrushchev, appealing to the Soviet leader to reconsider the decision by Party ideologues to suppress the book?

One can also detect a note of historical optimism in Grossman’s Soviet epic, similar to that in Solzhenitsyn’s works (and partly shared by Pasternak in his Doctor Zhivago): that is, the belief that the horrors of Stalinism were necessary for the purification of Russia’s national spirit. This belief was the major point of disagreement between Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov, who (like Primo Levi in the context of Nazism), had rejected outright any spiritual benefits of that suffering, any positive lessons to be drawn from having experienced Stalinist labour camps: for Shalamov, as for Levi, these camps were an irredeemable hell – the only duty of the writer is to depict this hell vividly enough to be recognized by future generations. Grossman eventually arrived at the same conclusion in his last, unpublished novel Vsyo techyot (Everything Flows in Robert Chandler’s translation of 2010, reviewed in the TLS March 5, 2011), but when Life and Fate emerged in samizdat in the 1970s (a copy of the manuscript had been saved and preserved by Grossman’s friends, to be eventually published abroad in 1980) the new Russian intellectual elite, already familiar with Orwell and Koestler, Hannah Arendt and Albert Camus, treated the Grossman of Life and Fate with scepticism, because in their eyes he was too close to the system he was trying to debunk.

Chandler underlines one aspect of the novel which, to my mind, is essential for understanding this historical masterpiece: its autobiographical nature
Reconstructing the history and fate of Grossman’s book in the preface to his translation of 1985, on which the BBC dramatization is based, Chandler underlines one aspect of the novel which, to my mind, is essential for understanding this historical masterpiece: its autobiographical nature. The conscience of the central character, the nuclear physicist Viktor Shtrum, is loaded with the same burden of guilt as Grossman’s was. Grossman’s mother (like Shtrum’s in the book) was left behind the front line in Ukraine and murdered by the Nazis because, initially, Grossman’s second wife had been against living with her under the same roof. It was Grossman, like his hero, who started a love affair with his best friend’s wife. It was Grossman who put his signature under the Partyinspired proclamation demanding harsh treatment for the Jewish doctors accused of heinous crimes against the Soviet state. It was Grossman who was knowingly silent about Soviet atrocities in the occupied territories, just as he was silent during the assaults of the Soviet propaganda machine on his fellow writers, such as Mikhail Zoshchenko and Anna Akhmatova.

Life and Fate is an encyclopedia of moral choices in the haunting circumstances that Grossman had witnessed, heard evidence of or might have experienced himself – in the battle for Stalingrad, in the Jewish queues to the gas chambers, in Lubyanka prison cells or German concentration camps. It is an exposé of the whole of Soviet society, including the liberal intelligentsia, in its complicity in the process of isolating and persecuting the individual, the outsider, the one who refuses to succumb to the collective urge to pursue honourable aspirations by means of disgraceful acts. Grossman, in his authorial commentaries between the episodes in the narrative, does not discuss totalitarian ideas as such, but rather their consequences when those ideas become a collective obsession. This is a dispatch from the front line of moral compromises, and the voice of the correspondent, with all his comments and clarifications, is of the utmost importance. It is, in fact, a conversation that Grossman conducts with himself, confessional in its character, an act of repentance, which he, in ventriloquist fashion, presents through a multitude of voices, embodied by his characters. Life and Fate is written, in a way, as if it were scripted for radio – a captivating narrator talking to his listeners. This narrator’s voice makes us trust the author when he shares with us his thoughts on what might have been happening in Hitler’s or Stalin’s head when they were committing crimes against humanity, or when Grossman lets us know the secret feelings of the victims of the Holocaust in their last moments.

Conventional radio theatre which simulates the exotic reality of Soviet Russia
With the impeccable traditional craftsmanship of BBC radio drama, combined with editorial boldness, two script writers, Jonathan Myerson and Mike Walker, and their producer, Alison Hindell, have cut through the complicated plot of Grossman’s family saga about the three sisters Shaposhnikov and their families and lovers during the Second World War. Struggling with the epic scale of the work, with its hundreds of characters and their innumerable links with each other (the BBC have even provided a simplified family tree on their website, and every episode can now be downloaded), they have concentrated on the career of Viktor Shtrum (played by Kenneth Branagh); on the death of his Jewish mother at the hands of the Nazis; on the controversial – from the Soviet point of view – fate of a few Red Army officers during the defence of Stalingrad; and on the moral dilemmas of the political commissar Krymov, initially a Stalinist who undergoes a spiritual transformation when he himself is denounced and arrested. But the authorial voice I was talking about has been removed from this radio adaptation. The voice is broken up and distributed between different characters. The result is an elaborate and convincing piece of conventional radio theatre which simulates the exotic reality of Soviet Russia. Only the soliloquies in this star-studded production (such as the last letter from Shtrum’s mother, read by Janet Suzman) convey the confessional horror lurking behind Grossman’s family story. Without this unifying narrative voice, Grossman’s epic fable of the mendacious triumph of collective fate over individual life can sometimes sound like an anti-Stalinist version of The Archers.

Zinovy Zinik’s autobiographical tale, History Thieves, appeared earlier this year.