Yekaterina Vasilievna Korotkova-Grossman

Vasily Grossman, with mother and daughter Katya
Picture source

From Robert Chandler's Facebook page earlier today:

A few minutes ago I received the sad news of the death of Yekaterina Vasilievna Korotkova-Grossman, the daughter of Vasily Grossman. She was someone unusually sensitive, perceptive and witty. We got on well from our very first meeting and I always greatly enjoyed our conversations. At one time in her life she worked as a translator from English. She read through our translation of The Armenian Sketchbook and made many helpful suggestions, not only correcting my misunderstandings of the Russian but also, here and there, coming up with stylistic improvements.
Yekaterina Vasilievna was ninety years old when she died.

In a separate post, Robert links to "a beautiful short memoir the late Ekaterina Korotkova-Grossman wrote about the years she lived in the city Russians call Lvov and which is now becoming known as Lviv." The story is Ukraine: On the Edge of an Empire.

In a 2010 interview, Yekaterina was asked what was the favorite work of her father:

Good Wishes - his account of the two months he spent in Armenia in late 1961. This is his kindest, most good-natured work. I also especially admire "In the Big Ring", one of his very last stories. This, I believe, will last for ever.

Robert Chandler adds: "In the Big Ring" is about a child from an elite family who is rushed to an ordinary village hospital. Acute illness throws the little girl into the company of women from other social classes, broadening and deepening her sense of life. We have not included it in The Road (the selection of Grossman's stories to be published this September by MacLehose Press) because we did not feel we could reproduce the wordplay that is so crucial in this story. But I, too, love Good Wishes - and my wife and I hope to translate it next year.

An excerpt from Good Wishes can be found here.

One last link: a 2010 conversation between Yekaterina and Robert Chandler can be found at the London Review Bookshop Podcast.

BBC Radio 4 Adaptation of Stalingrad by Vasily Grossman to air soon

From the BBC article:

Kenneth Branagh, Greta Scacchi, Mark Bonnar, Ann Mitchell, Doon Mackichan, Kenneth Cranham and more star in a dark and honest account of the epic battle of Stalingrad by celebrated war reporter and author, Vasily Grossman.

• Two part drama based on war reporter Vasily Grossman’s account also stars Greta Scacchi and Mark Bonnar
• Anton Lesser reads Grossman’s private journal - translated into English for the first time - in a Book Of The Week special

Translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, Stalingrad is a prequel to Grossman’s novel Life And Fate which was adapted by Radio 4 in 2011 and featuring many of the same acclaimed cast.

...

To accompany the adaption Radio 4 also gives over Book Of The Week to Stalingrad: Destiny Of A Novel; featuring readings from Grossman's private journal, translated here for the first time ever, chronicling his novel's tortuous progress through Soviet censorship from 1950-53. A period when Stalin's last campaign of terror was unfolding against his own Jewish population. Written and presented by author and historian Catherine Merridale, with readings by Anton Lesser, the five-part series tells the dramatic backstory behind the novel and the beginnings of Grossman’s own journey towards Soviet heresy. He was canny enough to keep a personal diary of the process of submitting his manuscript, translated into English for the first time it reveals the beginnings of a maddening journey that became an epic battle of wills. Detailing the pressure of Soviet forces attempting to censor Grossman, and the changing tides of approval and disapproval he faced from his comrades.

If it works like the Life and Fate adaptation, the broadcast will be available to listen to (and maybe download) for a brief time after the air dates at the BBC Radio 4 site.

The Life and Fate adaptation was well done and I really enjoyed it, so I'm excited to see the Stalingrad adaptation. My biggest concern, though, is that it will be only four hours long. That is a lot of material to compress into such a short period of time, so obviously there will be cuts to the story. Regardless, congratulations once again to Robert and Elizabeth Chandler for their translation and making this available in print so the adaptation could be done.

The readings from Grossman's journal should be fascinating as well, although it will probably go through some of the same material covered in Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century by Alexandra Popoff. I'll be listening anyway. I'll try and remember to post on it again as the episodes air. Spread the word!

Transmission details
Stalingrad
Saturday 30 November, 2.45-4.45pm
Sunday 1 December, 3-5pm

Stalingrad: Destiny Of A Novel
Monday 2 December, 9.45-10am (1/5)

Update:
"Robert Chandler talks about Vasily Grossman and how he (Robert) and his wife Elizabeth went about translating the novel Stalingrad."

Update 2:
I've linked this elsewhere, but I want to include this here, too. For more on Grossman, see Yury Bit-Yunan and Robert Chandler's article Vasily Grossman: Myths and Counter-Myths on sorting out facts of Grossman's life from “Soviet intelligentsia folklore."

Article: How the Soviet Literary Establishment Censored Vasily Grossman

Robert Chandler has a short article in The New Yorker on the censorship of Grossman's book For a Just Cause (the recent English translation uses the title Grossman wanted—Stalingrad.

The original publication process of the novel is a case study of Soviet editorial practices and censorship. Grossman worked on the manuscript from 1943 until 1949 and then spent three years battling with his editors. Anticipating difficulties from the beginning, he recorded all relevant official conversations, letters, and meetings in a document titled “Diary of the Journey of the Novel For a Just Cause through Publishing Houses.”

While many of the required changes were made to soften any criticism of the Soviet political structure, other changes were for petty things and it makes for a revealing look at Soviet taboos. The last censored item mentioned, a story about a general using a goat to lead them out of a bog, is so silly I figure it's something Grossman actually heard during his job as a war correspondent.

Stalingrad by Vasily Grossman: Introduction

Stalingrad by Vasily Grossman
Translated by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler
NYRB Classics, 2019
Paperback, 1088 pages

Judging by how limited my time was yesterday and only making my way through Robert Chandler's introduction to Stalingrad, this may be a true "summer(-long) read" for me. And I'm fine with that.

A few quick notes on that introduction...
Chandler provides a good, concise introduction to Stalingrad and the trouble Grossman had with its publication. Because of the relationship between this book and Life and Fate, there is a lot on the second book, too. I liked this view of the two novels:

It [Life and Fate] is, amongst 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. … Stalingrad, in contrast, is less philosophical, but more immediate; it presents us with a richer, more varied human story. (viii)

From what I understand from Alexandra Popoff's book Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century, Chandler sums up one of Grossman's purposes perfectly when he says, “Stalingrad is, amongst much else, an act of homage. One of Grossman’s aims was to honour the dead—especially those who had been forgotten.” (xvii)

There are many historical figures in Stalingrad and Chandler looks at a couple of them. One of the central figures of the novel is Viktor Shtrum, based on Lev Yakovlevich Shtrum, “one of the founders of Soviet nuclear physics.” The historical Shtrum was executed in 1936 during one of many purges and the connection between the real-life person and the novel's character may have been lost to many people. Chandler points to an article by Tatian Dettmer establishing the relationship between the two. “The Physicist Lev Shtrum. Unknown Hero of a Famous Novel” is in Russian, but worth reading with a "Translate" option. The article covers the tragic life and fate of the physicist. I'll excerpt some of the article here. Note that the historical name shows up as "Strum" in translation.

More than half a century after the creation of the novel, a prototype of one of his main characters, the physicist Viktor Strum, was found. He was a Soviet nuclear physicist Lev Yakovlevich Strum (1890–1936), head of the department of theoretical physics at Kiev University.

The image of the physicist Victor Strum has a special place in the work of Grossman. The writer endowed Shtrum with his features and put his own thoughts on social and political themes into his mouth. Strum’s life story reproduces key points in the author’s biography: for example, the tragic story of a mother shot by the Germans in occupied Berdichev, or a slanderous letter that the Strum physicist signs at the time of spiritual confusion. A similar letter was once signed by Grossman himself, which he later bitterly regretted.

…

Another important feature of the hero of Grossman is the tendency to philosophical understanding of the surrounding reality, be it the peculiarities of the Soviet regime or the laws of physics, with the help of which Viktor Strum tries to explain the laws of social life. A versatile, enthusiastic, inquisitive person, Lev Strum was widely known in Kiev and beyond as a public lecturer and popularizer of science.

In an update to the article, Dettmer notes that Alexandra Popoff had found a couple of references to Lev Shtrum in Grossman’s letters to his father. Dettmer notes in the body of the article: “It is hoped that the answer to this question will be found: not all archival materials have been investigated both in Kiev and in Moscow.” There is more on the connection between the character and person at "Vasily Grossman and the Plight of Soviet Jewish Scientists: The Tragic Tale of the Physicist Lev Shtrum", a LitHub article credited to both Dettmer and Popoff.

Chandler is correct to note that Grossman took a risk by making the central character an “enemy of the people,” but Alexandra Popoff rounds out this observation by adding, “The fictional Shtrum is invested with Grossman’s personality: he is the author’s alter ego.” (page 202, Vassily Grossman and the Soviet Century). The importance of Viktor Shtrum to Grossman in the novel can be seen from Grossman's stubborn refusal to remove the character from Stalingrad despite repeated calls to delete the chapters in which he appeared.

Not only is the release of Stalingrad in English a cause for celebration, Chandler adds that there was a release in 2013 of the typescripts of Life and Fate that were confiscated by the KGB in 1961 and he hopes to revisit his translation in light of this new source material.

It's going to be a great summer...

Update:
Aargh, I hate it when I hit Publish before including everything I meant to. I also wanted to note that the book contains a timeline of the war (from the beginning of World War II to the surrender of German troops in Stalingrad), maps, an Afterword that goes into detail on the difficulty of piecing the text of the novel together, a helpful (and long) list of characters, and some books for further reading.

I don't know if this will be helpful for Stalingrad, but the BBC's "tree" of characters for Life and Fate might come in handy.

Also, HistoryofWar.org has a nice collection of Maps and Pictures for the Battle of Stalingrad.

More links can be found at the archived page of BBC4 Radio's page for Life and Fate. Clicking on the previously aired episodes comes up with "This episode will be available soon." Here's hoping that's correct.

Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century by Alexandra Popoff

Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century by Alexandra Popoff
Yale University Press, 2019
Hardcover, 424 pages

Stalingrad by Vasily Grossman is officially released today. While I'm waiting for my copy to arrive by mail, I wanted to share a little about this outstanding biography. Alexandra Popoff has written several literary biographies and is a former Moscow journalist. In Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century she follows Grossman's life and how it was intertwined with and influenced by a large part of Soviet history. While officially a reporter in World War II, Grossman's mature writings capture two of the totalitarian nightmares of the century.

As a Jew whose mother was killed by the Nazis in his native Berdichev, Ukraine, Grossman felt the twentieth-century calamities most acutely. His mother had perished in September 1941, during one of the first massacres of Jews in the occupied Soviet territories. Her destiny became the strongest motivation force in Grossman's life. It prompted him to become an early chronicler of the Holocaust and was behind his determination to tell the whole truth about the global evil unleashed by the twentieth-century's totalitarian regimes. (page 3)

In his last and most radical anti-totalitarian novel, Everything Flows, written after the arrest of Life and Fate, he declares that "there is no end in the world for the sake of which it is permissible to sacrifice human freedom." (5)

To help in understanding Grossman's early life, Popoff describes the treatment of the Jews in Russia: pogroms, distrust, deportation. Grossman was twelve at the time of the February 1917 revolution, with promises of freedom and equality ending when Lenin seized power. As Popoff covers Grossman's life, she notes how much of his life and the experiences of his friends were used in his writings. His scientific background and job took him to various places around the Soviet Union and he was able to see firsthand some of the horror from the deliberate Ukrainian famine of the early 1930s. Members of his family were exiled or murdered, and his father lived in constant fear of arrest. Many of his early writer friends were shot as traitors to the state.

While aware of the nature of Stalin's regime throughout his life, Grossman's early works were fairly conventional even if they didn't quite fit the socialist realism (propaganda) mold that journals and censors wanted. Popoff delves into these works to find seeds for later, more confrontational writing, especially in his determination to make truthful depictions.

An endorsement from Maxim Gorky took Grossman from relative obscurity to publications clambering for his work. As Popoff details, having Gorky as a friend or an acquaintance was no guarantee of safety since there were repeated purges of those not faithful or loyal enough to the Soviet state or just simply being an inconvenience to those in power. Grossman's fame brought him close to authors who would later be suspect and/or liquidated because of relationships or publications that weren't pure enough. Some of his writings were noted for their ideological unsoundness, but he (mostly) escaped harsh treatment. His wife in the late 1930s, though, was arrested. Her eventual release was a rarity for the time.

Germany's invasion in 1941 changed Grossman's life drastically. As noted above, his mother was trapped in the former Ukraine, although Grossman would not learn of her outcome for several years. Taking a job as a war correspondent, Grossman saw firsthand the incompetence of Stalin's micromanagement and the heroism of the lowly Soviet soldier. His job also afforded him with access and information that most Soviets would never see, such as experiencing the siege of Stalingrad or the liberation of concentration camps. His reports were prominently published (after censorship, of course) and what he saw and learned provided the basis for his greatest novels.

In a book that provides exciting and moving passages, the two chapters I found the most exciting and the most moving are "The Battle of Stalingrad" and "Arithmetic of Brutality" (Chapters 8 & 9). Stalingrad provided Grossman deep insight into the Soviet (and human) psyche. Men and women fight hopeless battles, but feel more alive because of their freedom in doing so, provides some of the most stirring passages in Life and Fate. In his later writings, Grossman often focused on the ordinary...men, events, etc....for deeper looks into what it is to be human, and the siege gave him plenty of examples to use. Some of the worst aspects of the battle was the fight for recognition after it was over, ignoring the countless casualties needed to secure the victory. "Arithmetic" also looked at countless casualties, in this case those of the Jews during the war. The chapter follows Grossman during the revelations of deportations and massacres of the Jews across Soviet territory and German territory. He helped work on The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry (often shortened to The Black Book), providing a record for a worldwide audience of the special targeting of Jews during the war. While the Kremlin was uninterested in allowing such a publication, several of Grossman's articles such as "The Murder of the Jews of Berdichev" (which included his mother's death) and "The Hell of Treblinka" combined "investigative journalism, a historical and philosophical essay, and "a requiem to the victims." (173) The strain of what he saw and his work on articles to capture the atrocities took its toll on him personally, causing Grossman to have a nervous collapse. Another result is that his writing would not be the same.

Grossman saw his duty in writing as becoming a Soviet Tolstoy, recording a War and Peace for the Soviet era. Fortunately for us, this yielded Stalingrad and Life and Fate, a deliberate comparison to Tolstoy's sweep and storytelling. Unfortunately for him, his work on such an epic would show his dedication to the truth, which was at odds with Soviet politics. Popoff mines Grossman's personal journal for the circumstances and difficulties of publishing his novel For the Right Cause (the published title for Stalingrad). He constantly had to rewrite large sections while fighting to keep central storylines in the novel. Since Stalin was still alive, many hurdles and restraints surrounded publication and it was a tortuous path before the bowdlerized version was released.

One of the low points of Grossman's life was adding his name to the letter by prominent Soviet Jews denouncing the Jewish physicians who were part of the so-called "Doctors Plot" against Stalin. His character Viktor Shtrum signs a similar document in Life and Fate and it's fair to infer that the guilt of character reflects Grossman's feelings of complicity. After Stalin's death and a slight thawing of restrictions, Grossman began work on Life and Fate in order to show the dehumanization of both the Communists and Fascists against man's needs for love, compassion, and freedom. It's still a wonder that the novel was arrested instead of the author. Despite this escape, Grossman didn't have long to live. He died from stomach cancer in September 1964 with several of his works unpublished, and those that had been released mangled by censors.

Alexandra Popoff does a superb job or recounting Grossman's remarkable life, fleshing out the political and social background of his life and times in order to fully appreciate his writings. She also details how parts of his life and his experiences make into his stories. For anyone wanting more of a background on Grossman and how he fit into the "Soviet Century," start here. Very highly recommended.

Update:
For more on Grossman, see Yury Bit-Yunan and Robert Chandler's article Vasily Grossman: Myths and Counter-Myths on sorting out facts of Grossman's life from “Soviet intelligentsia folklore."

Robert Chandler on Vasily Grossman

Richard at Caravana de recuerdos has recently covered Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, a novel I give my highest recommendation to without any hesitation (see here for the summary of my posts on the novel). Both of us read the NYRB edition, translation by Robert Chandler.

While poking around recently some of Chandler's other translations (tied to my reading Andrei Platonov's Chevengur), I ran across the following series of videos with Robert Chandler about Grossman. Life and Fate dominates the early part of these videos but he touches on other stories and books by Grossman, his style, and his appeal. I enjoyed his talk so much that I'm embedding all five videos in this post. If you think you might be interested in reading anything by Grossman you will benefit by watching these videos. Warning: you may want to read more by Grossman after watching these videos. Many thanks to MacLehose Press for uploading these videos.
MacLehose Press' description of the videos:

Robert Chandler is perhaps best known as the translator of Vasily Grossman's novel Life and Fate. He has also translated a second Grossman novel, Everything Flows, and a volume of short stories, The Road, as well as works by Platonov, Pushkin and the Uzbek writer Hamid Ismailov and the poetry of Sappho and Guillaume . He has also edited or is in the process of editing anthologies of Russian short stories and poetry.

Part I


Part II


Part III


Part IV


Part V

Update: an earlier interview with Chandler by Sarah J. Young, conducted about the time of the release of the collection of Grossman stories The Road.

Links: Margaret Jull Costa, Leonid Tsypkin, Vasily Grossman

A few links I wanted to pass on...

An interview with Margaret Jull Costa at The White Review

What is one to make of ‘a solidão de esparguete da girafa’ on page one? Should I have translated that as ‘the spaghetti solitude of the giraffe’ rather than ‘the lofty, long-drawn-out solitude of the giraffe’, which was my final version? Does ‘spaghetti solitude’ mean anything in English? But then does ‘solidão de esparguete’ mean anything in Portuguese? Am I committing the translator’s cardinal sin of domesticating and explaining?

...

There are always new translations being made of these classic texts, but they are not necessarily improvements. Having said that, I have done ‘fresh’ translations myself, of Eça de Queiroz, and, inevitably and arrogantly, I feel that they are an improvement!

I've been looking forward to the release of The Bridge Over the Neroch: And Other Works by Leonid Tsypkin for a few months now. Michael Stein has a review of it in the current issue of Asymptote.

With the novella Norartakir, written in 1976, Tsypkin offers his most anguished and masterful treatment of the "insulted and the injured", though with explicit deference to a people for whom Dostoevsky would not have reserved the term. Then again, Dostoevsky didn't live to see the Holocaust, as a crucified Christ does in one memorable sequence here, being able to see inside the gas chambers of the future as the guards outside celebrate his birthday with Christmas carols and a decorated fir branch in place of a tree.

Mentioning Asymptote again, there are two articles on the upcoming release of Vasily Grossman's An Armenian Sketchbook. One is an essay by translator Robert Chandler, part introduction to Grossman (and Andrey Platonov) and part introduction to an excerpt from An Armenian Sketchbook.


Thanks to the Korretiv blog for understanding my love of "marketable horrible."

Life and Fate summary

I saw the unflinching force of the idea of public good, born in my country. I saw it first in the universal collectivization. I saw it in [the purges of] 1937. I saw how, in the name of an ideal as beautiful and humane as that of Christianity, people were annihilated. I have seen villages dying of starvation; I have seen peasant children dying in Siberian snow; I have seen trains carrying to Siberia hundreds and thousands of men and women from Moscow and Leningrad, from all the cities of Russia — men and women declared enemies of the great and bright idea of public good. This idea was beautiful and great, and it has mercilessly killed some, disfigured the lives of others; it has torn wives from husbands and children from fathers.

…

Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.

- Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman, translation by Robert Chandler (New York Review Books), pages 406-7, 410.

While the Soviet characters fight against Fascist enemies, Grossman juxtaposes both governments’ ability to restrict or take away an individual’s freedom. Grossman’s indictment wasn’t limited to direct restrictions imposed on man but included the perversion of man’s spirit. Ideologies or movements will always meet resistance, according to Grossman, when they attempt to crush “what is human in human beings” and he provides many moving examples of those struggles. He also shows people losing some of those struggles—after all, weakness is part of what makes us human, too.

Grossman celebrates the Soviet victory in Stalingrad unironically as a triumph of freedom over oppression. Yet he foreshadows later Soviet crackdowns on freedom in his appraisal of communism's similarities with fascism. The bottom line for Grossman lies in our humanity and our ability to flourish under freedom, without which we experience spiritual entropy.

Highest recommendation—as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, it is a difficult book and not just for its length or number of characters. The subject matter can be dark, but Grossman’s constant emphasis on hope buoys the book and the reader.


Posts:

Links for Grossman and Life and Fate

Life and…fate?

Chekov, kindness

More on fate and life

How was this possible?

“Good day, comrade Shtrum”

BBC4 Radio dramatization

Pictures of St. Petersburg: Now and Then

Life and Fate: “Good day, comrade Shtrum”

But an invisible force was crushing him. He could feel its weight, its hypnotic power; it was forcing him to think as it wanted, to write as it dictated. This force was inside him; it could dissolve his will and cause his heart to stop beating; it came between him and his family; it insinuated itself into his past, into his childhood memoires. He began to feel that he really was untalented and boring, someone who wore out the people around him with dull chatter. Even his work seemed to have grown dull, to be covered with a layer of dust; the thought of it no longer filled him with light and joy.

Only people who have never felt such a force themselves can be surprised that others submit to it. Those who have felt it, on the other hand, feel astonished that a man can rebel against it even for a moment—with one sudden word of anger, one timid gesture of protest.

- Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman, translation by Robert Chandler (New York Review Books), page 672.

The person being figuratively crushed is Viktor Shtrum, a Soviet physicist exploring the workings of the atom. Crushing him is the power of the state, directly and indirectly. He has made a remarkable breakthrough in atomic studies and, instead of being hailed, the council at the scientific institute blackballs him. Grossman then provides a deus ex mechina—a call to Viktor from Joseph Stalin who praises his work and asks if Viktor has what he needs to continue his research.

Despite Life and Fate’s dark subject matter, Grossman provides plenty of humor. With that short phone call, Viktor is welcomed back in the fold of the laboratory as if nothing had happened. Viktor’s indignation toward the people he called Stalin’s bootlickers softens now that Stalin’s beneficence helps him. Even so, he realizes how he has compromised his beliefs:

He was still as appalled as ever at the cruelty of Stalin. He knew very well that life hadn’t changed for other people simply because he was now Fortune’s pet instead of her stepson. Nothing would ever bring back to life the victims of collectivization or the people who had been shot in 1937; it made no difference to them whether or not prizes and medals were awarded to a certain Shtrum, whether he was called to see Malenkov or was pointedly not invited to a gather at Shishakov’s.

And yet something had changed, both in his understanding and in his actual memory of things. (823)

Viktor’s “spiritual entropy” does not stop with the end of his ostracism, as he fully realizes when he is asked to sign a letter that denounces innocent doctors as well as reinforces the denouncement of many high-profile figures in 1937. Earlier, when Viktor had been an outcast and felt he had nothing left to lose, he had held fast to his beliefs. After the call from Stalin he compromises his conscience because he has something to lose. Grossman treats Viktor gently though, probably because he had been in the same situation and had signed a similar letter. Viktor realizes what he has done, vowing

Every hour, every day, year in, year out, he must struggle to be a man, struggle for his right to be pure and kind. He must do this with humility. And if it came to it, he mustn’t be afraid even of death; even then he must remain a man. (841)

Grossman provides a hopeful final chapter that mirrors much of the book in which you can “hear both a lament for the dead and the furious joy of life itself.” (871)

Life and Fate: the BBC4 Radio dramatization

I mentioned it in earlier posts so hopefully you downloaded the podcasts of Life and Fate from the BBC site before they were deleted last week. My reaction to their production is similar to the reaction I had with the book—a few minor quibbles but extremely impressed with what was accomplished. How do you turn an 850 page book into an 8-hour radio show? Easy answer—very carefully. Fortunately that’s just what they did.

The amount of characters has been pared down so it will be easier to keep up with who is talking and what is the relationship to other characters. Having just read the book I found it generally easy (but not always, especially where changes to the book were made) to keep up. For those that haven’t read the book, I can see where this might be a challenge. BBC4 Radio provided a
character map that should be helpful, both for the radio program and the book.

From an interview with Kenneth Branagh, who plays Viktor Shtrum:

“I think Grossman wanted both [Viktor as a flesh-and-blood character and a political metaphor]. He makes Viktor a kind of poet-scientist who is interested in the beauty of maths and the beauty of physics; for whom the truth, the scientific truth, is all.

“But at the same time he gives him an obsession: a sort of rather weakening and yet very recognisable obsession with the wife of a colleague. Grossman makes him very flawed and very human.”

I don’t have many weak points to highlight. There are some parts of the book I wish received more attention than others, but that’s more of a personal feeling since I don’t believe the overall message of the book was weakened. The same goes with decisions made on what to include—when you’re limiting yourself to 8 hours you have to be ruthless at times in your cuts while working to include as much as possible to convey the overall feeling and meaning. The annoying part of the broadcast for me was the choice of accents and slang—whenever a setting involves foreign characters there has to be a choice on how to have them speak and the language they use. I don’t really care on the final choice as long as it’s consistent. I know it’s a minor point but I found the hodgepodge of accents and inclusion of so much British slang in mouths of the Russian characters distracting.

For anyone who downloaded it but hasn’t listened to it yet, I would provide a caveat: if you are planning on reading the book before listening to the podcasts, I recommend finishing Part Two in the book before starting to listen. Grossman presents only a few chapters at a time on any character or setting while the radio program chooses anywhere from one to a few characters to follow and present all of their sections in a linear fashion. For example, the first episode focuses on the Shtrum family in Kazan and Moscow which takes you to the middle of Part Two of the book.

There are many areas I found extremely well done. The intensity from the book, disturbing and harsh at times, was maintained. It’s not an easy book to read, even when ignoring the size and structure, and this production includes many of the unsettling details Grossman provided. One of the strong points of the radio production’s structure was the “pairing” of character storylines in the early episodes: Viktor and Lyuda, Krymov and Zhenya, Vera and Lt. Viktorov. Since these are scattered throughout the book, pairing characters in one episode helped bring out the emotional component of Grossman’s novel. I’ll limit myself to one more strong point of the radio production: by Part Three in the book the reader has most of the storylines fairly well established but connections between characters can be easily forgotten. Listening to the radio episodes helped keep the connections clear for me—anything that helps reinforce the intricacies of Life and Fate should be recommended on that point alone.

Along with Grossman’s book, highly recommended. If you haven't read the book the names and settings may be a little confusing, but I think it won't take long to understand each part and put it into its place in the overall story.

If you missed downloading the podcasts, I burned them to CDs—I’ll be happy to mail you my copy of the discs (my email address is in my profile). (The CDs have been spoken for)
I would love to see other bloggers posting on this book and program.

A few video clips about the program:

Kenneth Branagh and David Tennant on Life and Fate (Part One):



Kenneth Branagh and David Tennant on Life and Fate (Part Two):



The TV ad for the series that highlights the arrest of the novel:

Life and Fate: How was this possible?

How was this possible? The Germans knew about these troop movements. It would have been no more possible to hide them than to hide the wind from a man walking through the steppe.

Any German lieutenant, looking at a map with approximate positions for the main concentrations of Russian forces, could have guessed the most important of all Soviet military secrets, a secret known only to Stalin, Zhukov and Vasilevsky. How was it then that the Germans were taken by surprise, lieutenants and field marshals alike?

Stalingrad itself had continued to hold out. For all the vast forces involved, the German attacks had still not led to a decisive victory. Some of the Russian regiments now only numbered a few dozen soldiers; it was these few men, bearing all the weight of the terrible fighting, who confused the calculations of the Germans.

The Germans were simply unable to believe that all their attacks were being borne by a handful of men. They thought the Soviet reserves were being brought up in order to reinforce the defence. The true strategists of the Soviet offensive were the soldiers with their backs to the Volga who fought off Paulus’s divisions.

The remorseless cunning of History, however, lay still more deeply hidden. Freedom engendered the Russian victory. Freedom was the apparent aim of the war. But the sly fingers of History changed this: freedom became simply a way of waging the war, a means to an end.

- Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman, translation by Robert Chandler (New York Review Books), page 488.

Grossman uses the example of the Soviet soldiers in House 6/1 as an example of both the freedom and the fanaticism necessary for the successful defense of Stalingrad. The men (and woman), temporarily exempt from Party oversight, experience an unexpected freedom because of their situation. Commissar Krymov’s appearance threatens that freedom in ways the men could intuit but couldn't fully understand because of the second requirement—fanaticism. This isn't a fanaticism for state or ideology, but the flip side of freedom and part of man’s nature. The soldiers in House 6/1 were fighting as much for the love of fighting, of killing as many Germans as they could, as they were in conscious defense of their country.

I highly recommend this tribute to Grossman I included in my links post because the speakers address the defense of Stalingrad and the use of the word “freedom” in his novel. Grossman uses the word often and the speakers highlight the many meanings he layers into the word (similar to several levels of meaning for “fate” I’ve looked at in some posts).

Ikonnikov, the holy fool, wrote “Kindness is powerful only when it is powerless”, extolling kindness for its own sake. In his view, ideologies, no matter how well intentioned, would use and pervert kindness to advance their goals. Grossman, by extension, believes that man increases in power when what he has to lose decreases. The opening quote is sly in its juxtaposition: History did not change the aim of the war but only unveiled what was there all along. Just like the German’s unwillingness to see the Soviet troop build-up as a new offensive, people refused to recognize that the shackles they wore were little different from their enemy. Grossman focuses on the equivalence between Fascism and Communism, not in their methods but in their outcome. The stripping of freedom for others' aims strangles man’s capabilities, which Grossman highlights in his paean to the short-lived moment when ideology was muted:

Every epoch has its own capital city, a city that embodies its will and soul. For several months of the Second World War this city was Stalingrad. The thoughts and passions of humanity were centered on Stalingrad. Factories and printing presses functioned for the sake of Stalingrad. Parliamentary leaders rose to their feet to speak of Stalingrad. But when thousands of people poured in from the steppes to fill the empty streets, when the first car engines started up, this world capital ceased to exist.

Life and Fate: more on fate and life

I just realized I had not mentioned I was using the New York Review Books edition of this book with translation by Robert Chandler.

For good summaries and analyses on Vasily Grossman and Life and Fate, I highly recommend the links in this post—I’m slowly working my way through them and they capture a lot that is good and disturbing about this book. Since so much of what I intended to post on is covered so well in these links I decided to do a short series of posts on subjects I thought were absent or underrepresented in the articles.

In my initial post I looked at the title…why did Grossman pair life and fate? The obvious reason, and what Grossman emphasizes the most, highlights the contrast between passively yielding to fate and actively engaging life. In that same post I also looked at one of Grossman’s definitions of fate—the difference between stumbling through life, existence, and living with freedom and meaning. Grossman also shows characters making decisions which put them on a path where they feel they are at fate's mercy. This meaning of fate, where a character feels helpless because of their choice, occurs more frequently as we get deeper into the novel. As quoted in the previous post, “A man may be led by fate, but he can refuse to follow.” (537)

There are a lot of examples that could be chosen to highlight this meaning; in fact, it may sum up much of what we’re looking at in many of the Soviet characters. Do they play along with the absurdities foisted upon them by official party narrative, believing they have no choice? Or do they stand up for what they believe is right despite the potential consequences? As he shows characters' decisions, Grossman highlights the strengths and weaknesses of man.

Some of the people in the German concentration camps make choices that lead them to what they view as fate. The director of one complex, Kaltluft, sees himself as the plaything of stronger forces:

If, on the day of judgment, Kaltluft had been called upon to justify himself, he could have explained quite truthfully how fate had led him to become the executioner of 590,000 people. What else could he have done in the face of such powerful forces—the war, fervent nationalism, the adamancy of the Party, the will of the State? How could he have swum against the current? How could he have swum against the current? He was a man like any other; all he had wanted was to live peacefully in his father’s house. He hadn’t walked—he had been pushed. Fate had led him by the hand…And if they had been called upon, Kaltluft’s superiors and subordinates would have justified themselves in almost the same words. (536)

Grossman is having none of that argument, though. A few sentences later he makes the comment from earlier in this post about refusing to follow fate as well as this one: “But every step that a man takes under the threat of poverty, hunger, labour camps and death is at the same time an expression of his own will.” Or lack of one.

Grossman highlights these characters so we can look at how man reacts in extraordinary circumstances, how he justifies his behavior, and how his choices follow him. Man, according to Grossman, can be at his most powerful when he is completely powerless. Even at his lowest moment there are choices he can make. Some of the Jews in the concentration camp are offered a choice: help in the death camp or die. Sofya Levinton, a doctor who could have stepped out of the condemned line chose to stay and comfort a little boy (and fulfill her wish for motherhood, however brief). Others chose to live a little while longer and Grossman asks, I think honestly and not ironically, about their chosen fate:

How can one convey the feelings of a man pressing his wife’s hand for the last time? How can one describe that last, quick look at a beloved face? Yes, and how can a man live with the merciless memory of how, during the silence of parting, he blinked for a moment to hide the crude joy he felt at having managed to save his life? How can he ever bury the memory of his wife handing him a packet containing her wedding ring, a rusk and some sugar lumps? How can he continue to exist, seeing the glow in the sky flaring up with renewed strength? (540-1)

Life and Fate: Chekov, kindness

Continuing with some of the lesser points in Life and Fate…see my links post for Vasily Grossman and Life and Fate for reviews that cover both very well.

Many of the links in that post mention Grossman's love for Anton Chekov's work and some similarity in style. Several authors are mentioned in Life and Fate, but Grossman consistently has his characters praise Chekov:

"Chekov brought Russia into our consciousness in all its vastness—with people of every estate, every class, ever age…More than that! It was as a democrat that he presented all these people—as a Russian democrat. He said—and no one had said this before, not even Tolstoy—that first and foremost we are all of us human beings. Do you understand? Human beings! He said something no one in Russia had ever said. He said that first of all we are human beings—and only secondly are we bishops, Russians, shopkeepers, Tartars, workers. Do you understand? Instead of saying that people are good or bad because they are bishops or workers, Tartars or Ukrainians, instead of this he said that people are equal because they are human beings. At one time people blinded by Part dogma saw Chekhov as a witness to the fin de siècle. No, Chekhov is the bearer of the greatest banner that has been raised in the thousand years of Russian history—the banner of a true, humane, Russian democracy, of Russian freedom, of the dignity of the Russian man. …

Chekov said: Let’s put God—and all these grand progressive ideas—to one side. Let’s begin with man; let’s be kind and attentive to the individual man—whether he’s a bishop, a peasant, an industrial magnate, a convict in the Sakhalin Islands or a waiter in a restaurant. Let’s begin with respect, compassion and love for the individual—or we’ll never get anywhere. That’s democracy, the still unrealized democracy of the Russian people.” (283)

I don’t know that I would totally agree with Madyarov’s assessment of Chekhov but it clearly advances Grossman’s message that kindness not only makes us human but is the highest achievement of our soul. Ikonnikov, called a holy fool by other Soviet prisoners-of-war, pens a tract emphasizing the need for kindness, looking for

The private kindness of one individual towards another; a petty, thoughtless kindness; an unwitnessed kindness. Something we could call senseless kindness. A kindness outside any system of social or religious good. (408)

Does Ikonnikov’s tract represent Grossman’s viewpoint? I think to a large extent it does. Grossman highlights human weakness, especially when faced with the strength of the state, whether fascist or communist. But he also shows man’s strength to stand up to “the colossus of the state” through several of the characters, including Ikonnikov, who is executed because he refused to work on construction of an extermination camp. As the tract describes kindness, so it is with Ikonnikov—he is at his most powerful when completely powerless. Or, in describing a different character’s struggles, Grossman points out “A man may be led by fate, but he can refuse to follow.”

---

Grossman’s style has also been compared to Chekhov and while not delving into that assessment I will say that many of his chapters would make wonderful short stories. If you find yourself in a bookstore and see a copy of Life and Fate, read Part One Chapter 44 or Part Two Chapter 41. Each chapter is around two pages in length but each provides great insight and power in those few pages.

Life and Fate: Life and...fate?

Scanning through the links I posted on Vasily Grossman and his book Life and Fate I see the reviews do an extremely good job summarizing the book and covering his life. Instead of restating the same points I’ll post on a few topics in the book most of those reviews did not cover (probably for good reasons, but I won’t let that stop me).

I’ll start with the title since it puzzled me. Why is “Fate” paired with “Life” in the title? Grossman uses the word “fate” in the book with a variety of meanings. In the most common usage, characters use it in the expected manner—a predetermined course of action or results they are unable to influence or change. Grossman also uses it when looking at decision points and the cascade of events after it, some predictable while others are unforeseen (more on this another post).

Then there’s the meaning in Chapter 43 of Part One, the first chapter with Sofya Osipovna Levinton and the journey to the gas chamber. He starts out with a fairly standard description of fate while also laying groundwork for another meaning: “The most fundamental change in people at this time was a weakening of their sense of individual identity; their sense of fate grew correspondingly stronger.” (196) Grossman builds on this: “What saves people when their bovine melancholy, their mute fatalism yields to a piercing sense of horror—what saves people then is the opium of optimism.” (198) The reader knows the outcome for many of the characters as soon as we meet them. While reading Life and Fate and viewing characters’ optimism, it’s easy to understand why Hope was in Pandora’s jar with the evils of the world since it can provide a harmful element when there is no foundation for it. Hope remained in the jar, though, proving to be beneficial at times—the “opium” of hope allows humans to carry on after the foundations for life have been extinguished.

We're now at Grossman's additional meaning of fate: “Sofya now understood the difference between life and existence: her life had come to an end, but her existence could drag on indefinitely.” (199) Existence, or fate, can mean a person stumbling through their remaining days after freedom has been denied. Instead of bowing to her fate, Sofya finds a new meaning in life—to be a mother to little David for the short time they have left. The human spirit, what separates Life from existence or fate, proves to be a current running through the novel.

---

There are several themes providing unity to the book but one thing provides a physical unity—the Volga River. Many of the settings are either on the Volga or on one of the tributaries that is part of its watershed: Stalingrad (now Volgograd), Astrakhan, Moscow, Ufa, and Kazan. The Volga provides a symbol during the siege of Stalingrad—while the Soviet soldiers keep the Germans from reaching the river before the counterinsurgency begins, they retain hope. The river provides a common element for many of the characters—something providing safety or signifying danger.

The Volga River watershed
Picture source

---

The reason I’ve been stressing the need to visit the BBC site and download their dramatization of the novel is because there is a time limit on availability. I have listened to five out of the total eight hours and recommend it but I plan on a separate post to note some context and caveats.

Links: Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman

The Europe of Vasily Grossman, the founder of a second tradition of comparison, was one in which the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were at war. Grossman, a fiction writer who became a Soviet war correspondent, saw many of the important battles on the eastern front, and evidence of all of the major German (and Soviet) crimes. Like Arendt, he tried to understand the German mass murder of the Jews in the east in universal terms. For him this meant, at first, not a critique of modernity as such but a condemnation of fascism and Germany. Just as Arendt published her Origins of Totalitarianism, Grossman was liberated from this political framework by the personal experience of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. He then broke the taboos of a century, placing the crimes of the Nazi and Soviet regimes on the same pages, in the same scenes, in two novels whose reputations only grow with time. Grossman meant not to unify the two systems analytically within a single sociological scheme (such as Arendt’s totalitarianism) but rather to relieve them of their own ideological accounts of themselves, and thereby lift the veil on their common inhumanity. …

As one of Grossman’s characters exclaims, the key to both National Socialism and Stalinism was their ability to deprive groups of human beings of their right to be regarded as human. … From Arendt and Grossman together, then, come two simple ideas. First, a legitimate comparison of Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union must not only explain the crimes but also embrace the humanity of all concerned by them, including the victims, perpetrators, bystanders, and leaders. Second, a legitimate comparison must begin with life rather than death. Death is not a solution, but only a subject. It must be a source of sidquiest, never of satisfaction. It must not, above all, supply the rounding rhetorical flourish that brings a story to a defined end. Since life gives meaning to death, rather than the other way around, the important question is not: what political, intellectual, literary, or psychological closure can be drawn from the fact of mass killing? Closure is a false harmony, a siren song masquerading as a swan song.

The important question is: how could (how can) so many human lives be brought to a violent end?

- from Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder, (Basic Books, 2010), pages 386-7.

While I had heard of Vasily Grossman's books, I really wanted to delve into his work after reading Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands. The BBC's radio dramatization of Life and Fate determined which book I wanted to read first. Despite the book's size, I plan only a few post about Life and Fate, so I'll start with some links about Grossman and the book.

There are plenty of posts and links regarding Grossman and Life and Fate but I want to highlight a few that look interesting. I'll include links specific to the BBC adaptation in a post on their podcasts.

First up is Sarah J. Young's post dedicated to Grossman. Judging by what I see in the post, I'm sure some of our links will overlap.

Leon Aron's extended article in Foreign Policy looks at Grossman and Life and Fate. For an overview of Aron's essay, Soctt Horton has a summary article at Harper's Magazine.

Robert Chandler's introduction (“Speaking for Those Who Lie in the Earth”, The Life and Work of Vasily Grossman) in the New York Review of Books edition. A good introduction to Grossman and this book. (Note: in the table of contents there is a "List of Chief Characters" which is extremely helpful in understanding characters straight.)
For another article on Grossman by Chandler, see After Life and Fate: Vasily Grossman’s last stories.
Translator Robert Chandler reflects on translating Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate

Sam Sacks' essay at The Quarterly Conversation: "Life is Freedom: The Art of Vasily Grossman".

Books reviews:
John Lanchester at the London Review of Books
Martin Kettle at The Guardian

The transcript of Fate, Life, and Freedom in Vasily Grossman, a tribute to the author held at Columbia University last year. (Link isn't working for some reason--copy and paste http://www.crossroadsculturalcenter.org/storage/transcripts/2010-04-19-Life%20and%20Fate.pdf)

Update (10 October 2011):
Study Center for Vasily Grossman

The summary for A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941-1945, translated and edited by Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova.