Vasily Grossman: A Writer's Freedom 9780773555402

Citation preview

V as ily G ros sman

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VA SILY GROSSMAN A Writer’s Freedom

Edited by

A n n a B o n o la and G i ova n n i M a dda len a

McGill-­Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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©  McGill-Queen’s University Press 2018 ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN

978-0-7735-5447-4 (cloth) 978-0-7735-5448-1 (paper) 978-0-7735-5540-2 (eP DF ) 978-0-7735-5541-9 (eP UB)

Legal deposit third quarter 2018 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore and from the Vasily Grossman Study Center (Turin, Italy).

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Vasily Grossman: a writer’s freedom / edited by Anna Bonola and Giovanni Maddalena. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. isb n 978-0-7735-5447-4 (hardcover). – is bn 978-0-7735-5448-1 (softcover). – isb n 978-0-7735-5540-2 (ep df ). – is bn 978-0-7735-5541-9 (ep u b ) 1. Grossman, Vasilii˘ Semenovich – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Russian literature – 20th century – History and criticism. I. Bonola, Anna, editor II. Maddalena, Giovanni, 1971–, editor PG3476.G7Z92 2018

891.73'42

C 2018-901930-1 C 2018-901931-X

This book was typeset by Marquis Interscript in 10.5 / 13 Sabon.

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Contents

Note on Transliteration  vii Introduction 3 A n n a Bono l a a nd Gi ova nni M ad dal e n a   1 Free at Last: Vasily Grossman and the Battle for Stalingrad  16 John Ga r r a r d a nd C a ro l Ga rrard   2 Grossman and the Tradition of Classical Russian Literature  30 La z a r I . L a z a r e v   3 Ideological Words and Words from Life in Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman  41 A n n a Bono l a  4 Everything Flows but Ivan Grigorevich Stands Still: Grossman, Heraclitus, and the Prodigal Son  79 G iu sep p e Gh i ni   5 A Few Sad Short Stories: A Closer Look at Grossman’s Later Works 95 Mau r iz i a C a l usi o   6 “What Is Human in Man”: The Levels of Freedom in Vasily Grossman 107 G iova n ni Ma dda l e na   7 The Russian Idea, Lenin, and the Origins of the Totalitarian State in Vasily Grossman’s Forever Flowing 123 Fr a n k E l l i s

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vi Contents

  8 Vasily Grossman, Human Rights, and Political Institutions  141 Mic hele R osb o c h Contributors 165 Index 169

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Note on Transliteration

Different scholars and translators use different systems of transliteration. We generally use a modified version of the Library of Congress system of transliteration, except in quotations, references, and the bibliographies, where we keep the choices of others. The single and double apostophes that represent the Russian soft and hard signs have been deleted to ease reading, and the following Cyrillic letters are transliterated in this way: е (e, ye only initially and after a vowel), ё (yo), ж (zh), з (z), й (y), х (kh), ч (ch), ц (ts), ш (sh), щ (shch), ы (y), э (e), ю (yu), я (ya). For well-known names such as Dostoevsky, Vasily Grossman, Khrushchev, etc., we have used the more popular spellings.

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V as ily G ros sman

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Introduction A nn a Bo no l a and Gi ova n n i M a d da l e n a The fame of an author does not always fully correspond, quite rightly, to his actual importance and his real position in the world of literature. Time is an implacable judge of unmerited literary fame. However, time is not the enemy of genuine literary value; on the contrary, it is a good and ­reasonable friend, as well as a serene and loyal custodian. Grossman 1960

These are the words that Vasily Grossman (1905–1964) used when talking about his friend Andrey Platonov, the great writer who was only published with difficulty during the Soviet period.1 The passage of time operated in the way Grossman described: nowadays Platonov’s talent is acknowledged all over the world. The same can be said about Vasily Grossman: his last and most significant works, Everything Flows and Life and Fate, which were written in the 1950s, were published in the ussr only at the end of the 1980s. With the exception of some pioneering translations in the 1970s and 1980s,2 his books have for the most part only been studied and translated within the last twenty years. In this book, we present some of the most recent essays dedicated to the work of one of the greatest prose writers of the Russian twentieth century. The aim of this collection is to unfold some of the most crucial aspects of Grossman’s work to an English-speaking public. For a detailed portrait of Grossman’s life we refer to the seminal biography written by John and Carol Garrard, The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman (2012). However, a few words of introduction, and a brief sketch of his life, will illustrate the complexity of Grossman’s story. On the one hand, he was a Soviet writer, not only from a

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chronological point of view (he wrote from 1928 to 1964), but also in style and subject matter, at least until the 1950s; on the other hand, he eventually appeared in the West as “the leading authentic dissident of Russian literature” (Markish 1983, 9). Maurizia Calusio, author of one of the essays in this collection, explains the paradox this way: Both the “dissident” Grossman of Life and Fate and Everything Flows and the author of the striking, late short stories remained virtually ignored for years after his death. On the one hand there was the dull official Party literature of the time, and on the other the clandestine literature, accessible through the Samizdat and Tamizdat.3 Grossman – whose non–socialist realist work went for the most part unpublished – was not read by Samizdat followers … for the vast majority of Soviet readers, he remained an outdated socialist realist classic war novelist, enshrined as such, soon after his death, in the official Kratkaya literaturnaya entsiklopediya (Small Literary Encyclopaedia).4 Vasily Grossman was born in 1905 to a well-off Jewish family in the town of Berdichev, where he grew up and studied during the political and social upheaval that preceded the Russian Revolution (1917). During the years of civil war (1917–22), years of famine, he moved to Kiev with his mother in order to keep up with his studies. In 1923, he went to Moscow to study chemistry at the university, but at the same time, he cultivated his interest in literature. With the help of his mother’s cousin Nadya Almaz, he began his literary career in the Soviet capital. In 1929, he signed his first contract with the journal Ogonek to write a tale about his hometown, Berdichev. In 1929 he married his former schoolmate Anna Petrovna Matsuk. They divorced a short time later (1932), but in 1930 they had Grossman’s only child, Yekaterina, who grew up with Grossman’s mother in Ukraine. In 1933 the Soviet secret police (o g p u ) arrested Nadya Almaz and charged her with Trotskiyism. She was condemned first to exile and afterward to a prison camp, but his association with Nadya Almaz did not delay the development of Grossman’s career, and he started to become popular around 1934–35. Maksim Gorkiy, the master of Soviet literature, arranged the publication of Grossman’s novel Glyukauf. In 1934 Grossman published Schaste (Happiness) and in 1936 Chetyre Dnya (Four Days), two collections of short stories. Besides his literary successes, he started a new chapter in his personal

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Introduction 5

life. In 1935, he fell in love with Olga Mikhailovna Guber, the wife of one of his friends and a mother of two children, and they were married in 1936. In 1937, Olga Mikhailovna’s former husband was executed, and in 1938 Olga was arrested. Showing great courage, Grossman adopted her children to save them from the camps and voluntarily underwent interrogation by the police in order to defend his wife. He also wrote to Ezhov, the head of the n kvd (the political police apparatus), asking him to intercede for her. Eventually, Olga was set free. During the Second World War, Grossman enlisted in the Red Army as a war correspondent, writing a series of war reports for the Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda, which Soviet readers consumed eagerly. In 1942, he published a war novel, The People Immortal, inspired by his experience at the front, which was translated and published in English the next year.5 With the Red Army, he found himself on the front line in Stalingrad and witnessed the heroic Soviet offensive against the Wehrmacht’s Sixth Army, led by Paulus. Grossman then followed the Red Army in its victorious advance from Kursk to Berdichev, from Kiev to Warsaw, and then on to Berlin. During this time, he witnessed the horrors of the prison camps and wrote the first report about the death camps, The Hell of Treblinka. Znamya published this long article in 1944. It was translated into English in 1946, and, thanks to Grossman’s keenness in listening to witnesses, was used as testimony during the Nuremberg trials of the major Nazi war criminals (1945–46).6 In the first essay in this collection, John and Carol Garrard describe Grossman’s writing on the Battle of Stalingrad, where the Soviet comeback against the Nazis began. This battle was a turning point in Grossman’s life. Grossman describes it in its most concrete details, but despite the horrors, he wrote in a letter to his father: “I have no desire to leave here. Even though the situation has improved, I still want to stay in a place where I witnessed the worst times” (Garrard and Garrard 1996, 159). Stalingrad was for Grossman a liberating experience of making contact with common people. For one hundred days, he was allowed to move in the zone along the west bank of the Volga river, the most dangerous zone in the battle, from which the officers of the Party had fled. As a result, Grossman became more and more aware of the nature and forms of totalitarian coercion in the Soviet Union, and he could compare the two totalitarianisms that he was observing in their fatal clash.

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We can say that Grossman’s experience of war led him to a clarity of vision that, from the mid-1950s until his death in 1964, gradually alienated him from the Soviet regime, even though, as Chandler stresses, “[t]here is no single moment – or even year – that can be seen as having marked [Grossman’s] political conversion.”7 In 1945 Grossman became the co-editor of The Black Book8 with the well-known Jewish Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg. The book was a collection of eyewitness testimonies about the Shoah in the Soviet Union. Grossman had been touched personally by the horrors of the Nazi regime; in 1941, the SS death squads executed his mother with hundreds of other Jews in Berdichev. Grossman forever regretted not having been able to rescue her. The Black Book was never published in the Soviet Union, sharpening Grossman’s awareness of the disturbing similarities characterizing all totalitarian regimes.9 After the war, he published his war stories (Grossman 1945b)10 and began writing a monumental novel about the battle of Stalingrad, seen through the story of one family. The original title of this novel was Stalingrad, and it was blocked from publication during the socalled “anti-cosmopolitan” campaign, which consisted of the victimization of the Jewish intelligentsia in the late Stalin years. Eventually, after many reviews from the official censors, it was published in 1952 in the journal Novyy mir under a different title, For a Just Cause (Grossman 1952). Immediately, it became the object of a vehement campaign of denunciation and only Stalin’s death in 1953 protected Grossman from severe consequences. In the meanwhile, Grossman was working on the second part of his novel Life and Fate, which he finished in 1960. Even in the new political situation established after Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s crimes (1956) and under less harsh editorial politics, the book did not meet with the approval of the Soviet censors. On 5 January 1961, Grossman learned that Znamya, the journal to which he submitted the novel, had refused to publish it, and even worse, the editorial board had informed the authorities about the book. On 14 February 1961, the kgb searched his apartment, seizing the novel and all his notes.11 In the last years of his life, even while ill and isolated, Grossman continued to write. He completed his essay on his last trip to Armenia, which was published posthumously (Grossman 1965)12 because he refused to accept the edits proposed by the publisher; and he worked on the manuscript of the novel Everything

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Introduction 7

Flows,13 in which he wrote, unacceptably from the point of view of the Soviet regime, about the horrors of the Ukrainian famine.14 Grossman, whose works were rejected for publication not under Stalin’s regime, but by those who, under Khrushchev’s less repressive regime, had allowed Solzhenitsyn to publish One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was known in the u s s r for the works he wrote before 1953. His later works were not popular even in Samizdat, nor among opponents of the regime. This did not change even when Life and Fate – which had still not been published in the u s s r – was published for the first time in Switzerland in 1980 (Grossman 1980) in both French and Russian. If we think about the great impact of the publication abroad of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (1957), the minimal attention given to Life and Fate, even after its first translations outside the Iron Curtain, is astonishing. Even the earlier publication of Everything Flows, a shorter novel about the treachery of Soviet society and the Ukrainian famine, did not change the odd situation of a writer who was not appreciated by either the official regime or its opponents. Everything Flows was published in Russian for the first time in Frankfurt in 1970 and was immediately translated into Italian (Grossman 1971) and English (Grossman 1972), but in 1973 it was critically torn to shreds in an article in the Times Literary Supplement by a Soviet reviewer, Grigoriy Vodolazov. Frank Ellis writes about this in his essay in this collection: “Vodolazov’s article was to explain the nature of Grossman’s ideologically incorrect thoughts for the benefit of the Soviet reader and so blunt the full force of his analysis of Lenin and his role in the creation of the Soviet state.”15 Life and Fate and Everything Flows were finally published in the ussr at the beginning of the perestroika.16 In 1987 the literary journal Ogonek began publishing parts of Life and Fate, and by 1990 fourteen editions of the book had appeared in Russia, Ukraine, Moldavia, Estonia, and Byelorussia.17 Nevertheless, the reading public’s knowledge and appreciation of Grossman did not change radically; on the contrary, the polemical articles that accompanied the publication of these books confirmed the problematic reception of the author in his own land. The reasons for the lukewarm reception that Grossman’s later works received might be found in his interpretation of the events at Stalingrad as described in Life and Fate,18 as well as in Grossman’s vision of twentieth-century European totalitarian systems and the

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nature of the Russian people, particularly as depicted in Everything Flows, a vision that could not be accepted either in the u s s r or in the West. As Frank Ellis writes in his essay in this collection: Consolidating the attacks on Stalin and Stalinism which were made in Life and Fate, Grossman takes the logical but utterly heretical step of subjecting the Lenin cult to the same critical appraisal to which Stalin had earlier been subjected … In a series of chapters and digressions, Grossman shows Lenin as the destroyer of freedom … Grossman’s truly shocking and – for some – monstrous contribution is to attribute to Lenin unchallenged status as the founder of twentieth-century totalitarianism.19 Grossman’s “heretical” interpretation of Russian and Soviet history can be projected forward to our time and can serve as the touchstone for understanding the difficult relationship between Putin’s Russia and Grossman’s work. Ellis makes this point in commenting on Vodolazov’s review of Everything Flows: Had Grossman confined himself and his wide-ranging analysis in Forever Flowing to Russia’s twentieth-century woes, instead of describing a historical trajectory which explained the course of Russian history in terms of the evolution of slavery (nesvoboda) and which explicitly rejected the view of so many nineteenth-­ century Russian thinkers that Russia was destined to carry out a special mission (easily co-opted by Lenin), Grossman, today, in the opinion of this author [Vodolazov], would be more deeply embedded in the Russian national consciousness.20 If these are some of the cultural-political reasons explaining the poor reception of Grossman’s later works, the more strictly literary reasons, connected to the taste of readers and the publishing proclivities of scholars, still need to be studied. In the West, interest in Grossman and his mature works awakened at the beginning of the 1980s, “especially in France and Italy, thanks to certain writers, historians, philosophers and religious thinkers, from R. Conquest, M.  Geller, L. Giussani, E. Lévinas and H. Böll to Tz. Todorov, A. Glucksmann, A. Finkielkraut and D. Pennac,” as the editors of Grossman Studies (2016)21 point out in their introduction. But until

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Introduction 9

the end of the twentieth century, literary interest in Grossman’s work was limited to the sporadic (even if highly valuable) projects of a small number of scholars.22 Only in the last few years have Russian academics developed a significant interest in Grossman’s works. This interest, as shown in several PhD dissertations, has tended to focus on Grossman’s critical reception in Russia. Beginning in the 1990s, this interest spread to publishers, who began to propose and support translations of Grossman’s last and most important works into the major European languages.23 At the same time, scholarly attention to Grossman’s work has increased, culminating in two international conferences held in Turin in 2006 and 2009, organized by the Vasily Grossman Study Center. A third conference took place in Oxford, at St Peter’s College, in 2011. Finally, in 2014 scholars reunited in Moscow in a larger international event. Popular interest in Grossman’s late works has also grown throughout this period, with extremely successful productions of Life and Fate on television, radio, and the stage. These include the theatrical adaptation by Lev Dodin, the Russian television adaptation by Sergey Ursulyak, and the radio drama for b bc Radio 4. English-speaking readers have become acquainted with Grossman through the brilliant translations of Robert Chandler,24 whose introductions to the works offer insightful interpretations. English-speaking readers can also enjoy the writer’s war diaries, published by A. Beevor and L. Vinogradova (2005) in a form that interweaves fragments from different sources and summaries. In the last twenty years, there has been an awakening of interest in Grossman, but to date there is no exhaustive study of him in English. While some biographical and critical works about Grossman have been published in English – such as the biography by John and Carol Garrard; the books about the Battle of Stalingrad by Frank Ellis; and some journal articles, such as those by John Garrard (1991, 1994) and Vladimir Voynovich (1985) – we still await a comprehensive critical study. Many more essays in English are dedicated to Jewish themes25 – these are usually historical-biographical studies. The only collections of essays about Grossman in English are Vasily Grossman: Ruthless Truth in the Totalitarian Century, which was presented as a special issue of The Journal of European Studies in 2013, and which treats very specific themes largely from a historical point of view; and the 2016 proceedings of the international congress organized by the Vasily Grossman Study Center of Turin (containing

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essays in Russian and in English), which took place in Moscow in 2014 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the writer’s death.26 While we continue to await an exhaustive study in English of Grossman’s writings, which will hopefully take into consideration the many versions of the published works and related sources that are now available, we offer in this volume a selection of essays whose goal is to contribute to a reconstructed view of Grossman and his body of work in a multidisciplinary key. Owing to the variety of fields and wide range of themes considered, this collection will allow readers to develop a sense of the author, but also a picture from the point of view of certain specialized fields, both of which can provide a solid basis for further study. Each essay herein makes an original contribution: the chapter by John and Carol Garrard provides biographical background for Grossman’s work; Lazar I. Lazarev’s chapter explains the role Grossman plays in the history of Russian literature; and Anna Bonola, Giuseppe Ghini, and Maurizia Calusio provide keen linguistic analyses of the decisive relationship between language and power, language and treason, and language and the “Soviet thaw.”27 These latter authors discuss different works by Grossman in the order of their publication: respectively, Life and Fate, Forever Flowing, and the later short stories. Giovanni Maddalena presents an overview of the crucial philosophical concept of freedom in Grossman, and Frank Ellis and Michele Rosboch enlarge this picture to include the arenas of history, civil rights, and law. In sum, this book provides tools for comprehending the key historical, literary, linguistic, philosophical, and political aspects of Grossman’s work. This collection employs various approaches and addresses a number of themes but retains an essential unity, which is based not only on the obvious attention to the figure of Vasily Grossman, but on an element that invariably emerges in each chapter: the theme of freedom, which is the subject of some of Grossman’s most profound reflections. This theme may be seen in the paradoxical freedom of Stalingrad, and the unexpected freedom of communication that was present there within the darkness of a totalitarian society; in the notion of “philosophical” freedom; and in the freedom depicted in Everything Flows and in Grossman’s later short stories. Grossman wrote about this freedom in Life and Fate: “[I]n the glow of the gas ovens, people knew that life was more than happiness – it was also grief. And freedom was both painful and difficult; it was life itself” (2006, 540).

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n otes  1 Andrey Platonovich Platonov (Voronezh 1899–Moscow 1951), Russian writer. Robert Chandler, the translator of both Grossman and Platonov, says significantly: “Some of his works were published and immediately subjected to fierce criticism; others were accepted for publication yet ­published only thirty or forty years after his death. Platonov was never himself arrested but, in 1938, his fifteen-year-old son, Platon, was sent to the Gulag … During the Second World War Platonov worked as a correspondent for Red Star (the newspaper of the Red Army) and was able to publish several volumes of stories, but in 1946 he was again subjected to vicious criticism. After this, he could no longer publish work of his own” (Chandler 2016).   2 Grossman 1970, 1971, 1972, 1984, 1985.  3 Samizdat was the underground self-publishing of illegal texts in Soviet Union; Tamizdat refers to literature published abroad, often from smuggled manuscripts.   4 See ch. 5 in this volume.  5 This work was translated by Elizabeth Donnelly and first edited in Moscow (Grossman 1943); it was then edited in 1945 in the US.   6 Grossman 1945a; the English translation in 1946 appeared as a chapter in the volume The Black Book: The Nazi Crime against the Jewish People (Ehrenburg and Grossman 1946). This work is now available, translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and Olga Mukovnikova, in Grossman 2010.   7 See Chandler’s preface to Grossman 2010, 10.   8 Ehrenburg and Grossman 2002.   9 It would be published in Russian only in 1980, in Jerusalem (Ehrenburg and Grossman 1980). 10 These sketchbooks were also immediately translated into English in Moscow by the official Foreign Language Publishing House (Grossman 1946). 11 The notes were not given to the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (rg ali ) until 2014, and they are still waiting to be studied and published. 12 For the English translation, see Grossman 2013. 13 Everything Flows was published in Russian in West Germany (Grossman 1970) and then subsequently in English. There are two English translations of the text, one entitled Forever Flowing and the other Everything Flows. Thomas Whitney’s translation was published under the title Forever Flowing (Grossman 1972), while the second, Everything Flows,

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was translated by Robert Chandler for the New York Review of Books Classics (2009). Essays in this book use both titles. 14 The Great Famine (Holodomor) of 1932–33 in Ukraine was a manmade famine resulting from forced collectivization that killed seven to ten million people. 15 See Ellis, ch. 7 in this volume. 16 Perestroika was the name for the period of moderate freedom ushered in by Mikhail Gorbachev after his election as general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985. 17 See Tosco and Maddalena 2007, 273–4. 18 See Garrard, ch. 1 in this volume. 19 See Ellis, ch. 7 in this volume. 20 See ibid. 21 Calusio, Krasnikova, and Tosco 2016. 22 Etkind’s studies (essays from 1980 to 1991), Markish 1983, Lazarev 1989, Lipkin 1990, Berzer 1990, and Bocharov 1970 and 1990. 23 In 2000 For a Just Cause (Pour une juste cause, Lausanne) was published in French. In 2006, Oeuvres, edited by Tzvetan Todorov, was published, and in 2007 La paix soit avec vous: notes de voyage en Arménie. During these same years in Italy readers enthusiastically welcomed a new version of Life and Fate (Vita e destino, 2008), which was followed by translations of The Hell of Treblinka (L’inferno di Treblinka, 2010), and the short stories in An Armenian Sketchbook (Il bene sia con voi, 2011). In Spain, the first translation of Vida y destino (2007) was a literary event, and was followed by a Catalan version (Vida i destí, 2008), and then by translations of Everything Flows and For a Just Cause: Todo fluye (2008) and Por una causa justa (2011). The war sketchbooks appeared in French (Carnets de Guerre de Moscou a Berlin 1941–1945, 2008), Spanish (Un escritor en guerra: Vasili Grossman en el Ejército Rojo, 1941–1945, 2006), and Italian (Uno scrittore in guerra, 2015), the latter as a translation from the English version of Beevor and Vinogradova 2005. Other war materials and short stories also appeared in Spanish in Años de guerra, 2009. 24 Life and Fate (Grossman 1985), and then a second translation (Grossman 2006); Everything Flows (Grossman 2009); The Road: Short Fictions and Articles (Grossman 2010); An Armenian Sketchbook (Grossman 2013). 25 See Garrard 1995, Markish 1986, chapters 4 and 5 of Nakhimovskiy 1992, Genzeleva 1994, Lapidus 2003, and Khiterer and Gruber 2017. 26 Calusio, Krasnikova, and Tosco 2016.

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27 This expression refers to the period of Khrushchev’s leadership (from 1953 to the early 1960s) when censorship inside the Soviet Union was relaxed and many Russian writers who had been suppressed began to publish again.

R efer e nc e s Beevor, Antony, and Luba Vinogradova. 2005. A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941–1945. London: Harvill. Berzer, Anna. 1990. Proshchanie. Moscow: Kniga. Bocharov, Anatoliy. 1970. Vasilj Grossman: Kritiko-biograficheskiy ocherk. Moscow: Sovetskiy pisatel. – 1990. Vasily Grossman: Zhizn, tvorchestvo, sudba. Moscow: Sovetskiy pisatel. Calusio, Maurizia, Anna Krasnikova, and Pietro Tosco, eds. 2016. Grossmanovskiy sbornik: Nasledie sovremennogo klassika / Grossman Studies: The Legacy of a Contemporary Classic. Milan, Italy: EDUC att. http://system.educatt.com/libri/ebookRepository/9788893350952.pdf. Chandler, Robert. 2016. “Robert Chandler on Andrey Platonovich Platonov.” Asymptote. http://www.asymptotejournal.com/special-­ feature/robert-chandler-on-andrey-platonovich-platonov/ (accessed 4 February 2018). Ehrenburg, Ilya, and Vasiliy Grossman. 1946. The Black Book: The Nazi Crime against the Jewish People. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce. – 1980. Chyornaya kniga. Jerusalem: Tarbut. – eds. 2002. The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry. Translated by D. Patterson. New Brunswick, n j: Transaction. Etkind, Efim. 1980. “Dvadtsat let spustja.” In V. Grossman, Zhizn i sudba, v–xi. Lausanne, Switzerland: L’Age d’Homme. – 1991. “Drugaya zhizn i drugaja sudba knigi Vasiliya Grossmana,” Literaturnaya gazeta: Svobodnaya tribuna pisateley 17: 532–3. Finney, Patrick, ed. 2013. “Vasily Grossman: Ruthless Truth in the Totalitarian Century.” The Journal of European Studies 43, no. 4 (Special Issue). Frank, Ellis. 1994. Vasily Grossman: The Genesis and Evolution of a Russian Heretic. Oxford, u k: Berg. Garrard, John. 1991. “Stepsons in the Motherland: The Architectonics of Vasily Grossman’s Zhizn’ i sud’ba.” Slavic Review 50, no. 2: 336–46. – 1994. “The Original Manuscript of Forever Flowing: Grossman’s Autopsy of the New Soviet Man.” Slavic and East European Journal 38, no. 2: 271–89.

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– 1995. “Vasilij Grossman and the Holocaust on Soviet Soil.” In Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and the Soviet Union, edited by Yaacov Ro’i, 391– 405. London: Frank Cass. Garrard, John, and Carol Garrard. 1996. The Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman. New York: Simon & Schuster. – 2012. The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman. Barnsley, uk : Pen & Sword Military. (First publication: 1996. The Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman. New York: The Free Press.) Genzeleva, Rita. 1994. “Jewish Experience and Identity in Vasily Grossman’s Novel Za pravoe delo and Zhizn’ i sud’ba.” Jewish in Eastern Europe 1, no. 23: 46–63. Grossman, Vasily S. 1942. Narod bessmerten: povest. Moscow: Pravda. – 1943. The People Immortal. Translated by E. Donnelly. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. (Second publication: 1945. London, New York, and Melbourne, Australia: Hutchinson & Co. Ltd.) – 1944. No Beautiful Nights. New York: Julian Messner, Inc. – 1945a. L’enfer di Treblinka. Grenoble, France, and Paris: Arthaud. – 1945b. Gody voyny: ocherki i rasskazy. Moscow: Goslitizdat. – 1946. The Years of War (1941–1945). Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House. – 1952. “Za pravoe delo.” Novyy mir 7: 3–132; 8: 74–128; 9: 5–123; 10: 128–210. – 1960. “Dobryy talant.” Literaturnaya zhizn 6, no. 7: 3. – 1965. “Dobro vam!” Literaturnaya Armeniya 6: 32–54; 7: 27–52. – 1970. Vse techyot. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Possev-Verlag. – 1971. Tutto scorre. Translated by P. Zveteremich. Milan, Italy: Mondadori. – 1972. Forever Flowing. Translated by T. Whitney. New York: Harper & Row. – 1980. Zhizn i sudba. Lausanne, Switzerland: L’Age d’Homme. – 1984. Vita e destino. Translated by C. Buongiorno. Milan, Italy: Jaca Book. – 1985. Life and Fate. Translated by R. Chandler. London: Collins Harvill. – 2006. Life and Fate. Translated by R. Chandler. New York: New York Review of Books Classics. – 2009. Everything Flows. Translated by R. Chandler. New York: New York Review of Books. – 2010. The Road: Short Fiction and Articles. Translated by R. Chandler and E. Chandler with O. Mukovnikova. London: MacLehose Press.

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– 2013. An Armenian Sketchbook. Translated by R. Chandler and E. Chandler. London: MacLehose Press. Khiterer, Victoria, with A.S. Gruber, eds. 2017. Holocaust Resistance in Europe and America: New Aspects and Dilemmas. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Lapidus, Rina. 2003. Between Snow and Desert Heat: Russian Influences on Hebrew Literature. 1870–1970. Detroit, mi: Wayne State University Press. Lazarev, Lazar. 1989. “Chelovek sredi lyudey: O Vasilii Grossmane.” In V. Grossman, Neskolko pechalnykh dney, 3–12. Moscow: Sovremennik. Lipkin, Semyon. 1990. Le destin de Vassili Grossman. Lausanne, Switzerland: L’Age d’Homme. Maddalena, Giovanni, and Pietro Tosco, eds. 2007. Il romanzo della libertà: Vasilij Grossman tra i classici del XX secolo. Soveria Mannelli, Italy: Rubbettino. Markish, Simon. 1983. Le Cas Grossman. Paris: Julliard, l’Age d’Homme. – 1986. “A Russian Writer’s Jewish Fate.” Commentary 81: 39–47. Nakhimovskiy, Alice. 1992. Russian-Jewish Literature and Identity: Jabotinsky, Babel’, Grossman, Galich, Roziner, Markish. Baltimore, md : John Hopkins University Press. Tosco, Pietro, ed. 2011. L’umano nell’uomo: Vasilij Grossman fra ideologie e domande eterne. Soveria Mannelli, Italy: Rubbettino. Voynovich, Vladimir. 1985. “The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman and His Novel.” Survey: A Journal of East and West Studies 29, no. 1: 186–8.

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1 Free at Last: Vasily Grossman and the Battle for Stalingrad C aro l Garrard and J o h n G a r r a r d

Vasily Grossman, Red Army officer and correspondent for the military newspaper Red Star, wrote in his diary that the beginning of the German summer offensive of 1942 – almost exactly one year after the German invasion of the Soviet Union – would “decide all questions and all fates.” His prediction was fulfilled. The Wehrmacht’s offensive ended at the Battle of Stalingrad, the turning point of the war and of Grossman’s own destiny. General David Ortenberg, the wartime editor-in-chief of Red Star, told us in a personal interview that this period was Grossman’s “golden moment.” Grossman’s personal correspondence confirms this. After two months inside the most intense sustained close combat of the entire war, he wrote to his father: “I have no desire to leave here. Even though the situation has improved, I still want to stay in a place where I witnessed the worst times” (Garrard and Garrard 1996, 159). Years after the end of World War II, Grossman projected his emotions about the battle onto the end of his fictional account of it: Life and Fate. Krymov, a Red Army commissar to whom Grossman attributed many of his personal experiences as well as his army rank, has been arrested by the n k v d . He now lies in the Lubyanka prison, bloody from a beating at their hands. Krymov recalls that only a few weeks ago he had been “lying in a bomb-crater, happy and free, while friendly pieces of iron whistled over my head” (Grossman 1986, 781). “Happy and free” is hardly the way we would describe the condition of men fighting at Stalingrad. Grossman’s insights into the paradoxical nature of the freedom of Stalingrad convey his most profound analysis

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of the human condition and the uniqueness of each individual. They are also his bleakest indictment of the Soviet state, which, saved by these very soldiers, then proceeded to treat them so callously. “Freedom” at Stalingrad was, first of all, freedom from the n kvd . Normally the secret police were stationed safely in the rear, where they shot anyone who tried to retreat. But there was no “rear” inside the city, as the Red Army had to fight on all fronts, with their backs to the Volga River. The nk v d had prudently decamped to the safety of the east bank of the Volga. Here the river’s cliffs rose steeply, and the Red Army had dug caves for their artillery and Katyusha rockets. On the east bank, mail was delivered, soldiers were deloused, and the n k v d strutted and fretted. The safety of the east bank was so alluring that a great many Red Army commanders had quietly moved their regimental and divisional headquarters there from the west bank, where the street fighting raged. Once General Vasiliy Chuykov had taken over the 62nd Army, his first directive was to call all commanders back to the ruins of the city and to forbid retreat across the river upon pain of death. Chuykov was ordered to hold on at all costs while Marshal Georgiy Zhukov prepared a counteroffensive. How this was achieved, and at what price, neither Stalin nor the Soviet High Command (Stavka) cared. The Stalingrad garrison could conduct the street fighting as the battle situation required, ignoring “Party-mindedness” (partiynost). A comment in Grossman’s notebooks sums it up: “In the defense of Stalingrad divisional commanders based their calculations on blood rather than on barbed wire.”1 This is virtually identical to Chuykov’s own statement of the mission to his commanders: they were to buy time, and “time is blood.” And pay in blood the Red Army did. The street fighting had begun in earnest in September 1942 after a German terror raid by the Luftwaffe killed about 40,000 civilians. But once German forces began to infiltrate the city itself, they found themselves fighting house to house and street to street within the ruins of very strong concrete buildings. The battlefield terrain was reduced to craters and burning rubble. The diary of a lieutenant of the 24th Panzer Division is worth quoting at length because of its relevance to the conditions of the street fighting: We have fought during fifteen days for a single house, with mortars, grenades machine guns and bayonets … corpses are strewn in the cellars, on the landings, and in the stairways. The front is

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a corridor between burnt-out rooms; it is the thin ceiling between two floors. There is a ceaseless struggle from noon to night. From story to story, faces black with sweat, we bombard each other with grenades; in the middle of explosions, clouds of dust and smoke, heaps of mortar, floods of blood, fragments of furniture and human beings … Ask any soldier what half an hour of handto-hand struggle means in such a fight. And imagine Stalingrad, 80 days and 80 nights of hand-to-hand struggles. The street is no longer measured by metres, but by corpses … Animals flee this hell; the hardest stones cannot bear it for long; only men endure. (Clark 1985, 238) It was equally horrific for both sides, yet when Vasily Grossman wrote to his father in December, at almost exactly this point in time, he declared that this worst of times was also the best of times. The Germans eventually occupied ninety-nine percent of the city. The one percent they did not take included a number of ad-hoc Red Army units dotted in strategic locations, and a tiny continuous strip of ground still held by General Chuykov and his men along the Volga. This “front” eventually abraded into about 300 metres of cratered rock and mud. But it anchored the landing area for the Volga ferries, the supply line of the garrison. Every reinforcement, every shell, bandage, and ration needed by Chuykov and his men had to come across the river; every casualty had to be evacuated by the ferries back across it. If the Volga ferries were knocked out, the supply line would be cut; if the supply line were cut, the Stalingrad garrison would be effectively encircled. Once surrounded, and the last shell expended and the last ration eaten, there would be no choice for this small, courageous band of men except surrender, victims of yet another of the encirclements which had previously lopped off whole armies at such defeats as Gomel, Vyazma-Bryansk, Smolensk, and Kiev. Thus the tactical plan of the Germans was simple: each of their offensives aimed at capturing the Volga crossing. But Chuykov had evolved a plan that prevented the Germans from heaving him into the river. He organized his men into fighting units of ten to twenty, inserting each squad in a key building in the heart of the city – the one percent of the city still held by the Soviets. Each fortified structure commanded crucial street intersections. In Life and Fate, the commissar Krymov visits one of these miniature castles, called “Grekov’s House.” Such structures acted as “breakwaters,”

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funnelling Nazi panzers into approach channels, upon which Chuykov had targeted his limited artillery. When the panzers lumbered along these predictable routes, they faced fire from Chuykov’s heavy weapons. When the tanks bogged down, his small units fought hand to hand with the German infantry. Chuykov’s plan split the steel fist of the panzers, and the tank columns could then be made vulnerable to close combat. It was a brilliant plan that nullified the Germans’ superiority in armour and men. It even weakened the Germans’ air supremacy, for the Luftwaffe could hardly bomb their own men once they were mixed up with Red Army soldiers in hand-to-hand fighting. But it was a suicide mission for the men who had to carry out Chuykov’s strategy. German General Friedrich Paulus began the period of street fighting possessed of five panzer divisions, each with its full complement of tanks and weapons. On the Red Army side, it was quite different. General Chuykov says in his memoirs that when he took over command of the Stalingrad garrison he had forty operational tanks and a “reserve” of nineteen. Chuykov does not go on to say what this meant for the Red Army soldier fighting at Stalingrad, but Grossman fills in the gap. Krymov, Grossman’s alter ego as Red Army Commissar, says at the end of Life and Fate to his tormentors in the Lubyanka, “You should be sent to face a tank-attack with nothing but rifles” (Grossman 1986, 786). This fictional exchange refers to the terrible reality – Red Army men were indeed sent to face tank attacks with nothing but rifles. Further, the Germans had an enormous advantage in heavy artillery. Once their engineers located the site of one of the Soviet strongholds, they plotted its coordinates on their maps. German long-range guns and Stuka dive-bombers then would reduce it to concrete fragments floating in an enormous crater. Grossman understood what holding one of these mini-fortresses meant: every single Russian left inside “Grekov’s House” would die when the house was obliterated by German firepower. Military historians confirm the carnage: by the time of the German surrender on 3 February 1943, some Red Army divisions of 10,000 men were down to fewer than 100 survivors – meaning that only one man out of a given hundred in the Stalingrad garrison lived to tell the tale. This was the inferno Grossman itched to enter. He got his chance in early October of 1942, when General Ortenberg sent him an urgent message demanding information on the Guards Division of General Aleksander Rodimtsev. Grossman decided that he needed to be

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physically present in the city itself, and so he asked Ortenberg’s ­permission to cross from the east bank to the west. Once he landed on the west bank, he had no superiors from the Political Section to tell him what to do or where to go – they were back in the safety of the east bank. For the next hundred or so days, he was free to go anywhere he wanted, and he took full advantage of this dangerous freedom. He was exhilarated by the absence of the top brass and the nkvd, and he drove himself relentlessly. His utter fearlessness earned him the respect of the Red Army; the soldiers did not consider him a journalist, but one of their own. His pieces written from Stalingrad secured him nationwide fame. Probably the most relevant, “In the Line of the Main Drive” (Grossman 1946b), was a tribute to the extraordinary courage of the Siberian Division of Colonel Gurtev. This account made the front page of Red Star and was quickly reprinted in Pravda. His phrase “Heroism had become routine with them, the ‘style’ of this Division and a habit with its men” was shortened to a popular slogan, “Heroism had become routine.”2 Gurtev’s men were on the high bluff Mamaev Kurgan, which commands the city. Here was one of the hottest parts of the battle involving a direct line to the Volga. There were literally no survivors from certain sectors of the fight for Mamaev Kurgan. Grossman, as stated by General Ortenberg, “spent many a day with Gurtev’s Division on Mamaev Kurgan,” and yet he never received a scratch, though a grenade rolled between his legs (it failed to explode). While bullets only grazed his head, men standing next to him were shot down. Soldiers started calling him “lucky Grossman.” After “In the Line of the Main Drive” came out in Pravda, Ilya Ehrenburg told Grossman, “Now you can get anything you ask for.” But Grossman did not ask for anything. Why not? A few more perks would certainly have helped his wife, Olga Mikhailovna, or his father, who continually complained about his situation where he had been evacuated. Grossman’s selflessness was most likely a personal gesture to the courage displayed by the Siberian Division. For with a single exception, “Colonel Gurtev’s 30th was the only Russian division fighting in Stalingrad after the middle of September that was neither promoted to Guards status nor awarded a unit citation” (Kerr 1978, 202).3 What this omission meant is clear. Almost certainly these men were from the penal battalions, the infamous shtrafbaty from whose overall ranks (not just those posted to Stalingrad) only four out of a hundred would survive the war. And again, Grossman slips in a piece

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of the truth in Life and Fate – he has Krymov shout at his well-fed torturers in the Lubyanka (giving context to the quotation above): “You swine, you should be sent to a penal detachment … to face a tank attack with nothing but rifles” (Grossman 1989, 786). In this exchange, Grossman reveals what the horror of the street fighting at Stalingrad meant for many in the Red Army garrison. Grossman knew this truth, and though these facts would be unpalatable to Soviet censorship, he was determined to get them out. The men in this battalion were Siberians, famously taciturn as a group, yet each emerges in Grossman’s article as a unique human being.4 Colonel Gurtev, a man from whom everyone else found it difficult to extract more than da and net, opened up to Grossman for six hours. Grossman’s interviewing technique was more like counselling than journalism. He did not take notes. He did not have the men stand to attention while they spoke to him. He had them carve their famous wooden spoons, so they could focus on their hands, rather than look him in the eye. These men, so brave in combat, were terrified of being interviewed by a Red Army commissar and saying something to get a comrade into trouble. So Grossman got them to relax by talking first about hunting, or their families. Late at night, he would write out the entire conversation from his phenomenal memory and then shape it. Grossman’s technique allowed men under continuous strain to open up. Each Red Army “Ivan” in Grossman’s work is idiosyncratic. One soldier mentions that he is pleased with the “900 grams of bread and hot meals brought up in vacuum containers regularly twice a day” – the kind of telling detail that is important to soldiers at any front. The point of individualizing each man was simple: Grossman knew they had been stigmatized by their own army with the shtrafbaty label (in a larger context, of course, the Germans had insulted the Slavic peoples by labelling them Untermenschen, “subhumans”). Grossman’s entire reportage at Stalingrad illustrates the futility of labels. What mattered at Stalingrad was the kind of soldier you were. Grossman deliberately adopted a very quiet authorial stance. He is calling upon his countrymen to honour the brave. His own voice is never strident, and that lifts “In the Line of the Main Drive” above the level of military propaganda. The low-key tone of the narrative voice matches the men’s self-image: “The men themselves were not aware of the psychological changes that had taken place in them during the month they had spent in this inferno, in the forward

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positions of the great Stalingrad defense lines. It seemed to them that they were just what they had always been” (Grossman 1946b, 243). But if the men are unaware of, or unable to articulate, the change, Grossman is not. Grossman hints at another kind of “freedom” at Stalingrad – the freedom from suspicion and the Party’s badgering and interference. The men of the Siberian Division were knit together by trust, a quality singularly absent from Soviet life. In one of the last articles he filed with Red Star before being reassigned, he wrote that “faith in one another knit together the entire Stalingrad front from Commander-in-Chief to soldiers in the rank and file.” Out of that faith and trust came a freedom that “engendered the victory.” According to Grossman, it was precisely during the most terrible days of the fighting that the ruined city was the capital of the country of Freedom. The paradoxical freedom granted to the Red Army during the street fighting quite literally changed the course of history. By holding out against overwhelming odds, the Stalingrad garrison caused the Germans to make a catastrophic miscalculation – they overestimated General Chuykov’s strength.5 The Germans saw their reserves sucked into the fighting; their pride convinced them that the Russians had to be feeding their own reserves into the battle as well. Because they believed that the Russians were being worn down at the same or a faster rate, they ruled out a Russian counteroffensive for lack of reserves. Every day during the street fighting, Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry announced that Stalingrad was the “greatest battle of attrition” ever fought. That was true. But Goebbels made the mistake of arrogance. It was the Germans, not the Red Army, who were running all their divisions into the ground with fatigue and casualties. Meanwhile, Marshal Zhukov, across the Volga, was building up an enormous force of men and armour along an attack frontage of forty miles. With cold calculation, he made only minimal reinforcements of Chuykov’s 62nd Army. In the two critical months from 1 September to 1 November, only “five divisions were sent across the Volga – barely sufficient to cover ‘wastage.’”6 Goebbels’s propaganda organs could not believe that Germany’s Sixth Army, the flower of the Wehrmacht, was being fought to a standstill by outnumbered and outgunned Red Army soldiers. Paulus continued battering away using the same wasteful methods. His last attack started on 11 November 1942, and it degenerated into a series of violent small-scale battles, sometimes fought in the sewers, sometimes in the craters where a “Grekov’s

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House” had once stood. The fighting was ferocious; neither side took prisoners. Though by now vastly outnumbered (by more than ten to one) and possessing neither the tanks nor the air power of the Germans, the Stalingrad garrison still held on. The lull on the battlefield on 18 November signalled that both sides were short of ammunition. Chuykov was also almost out of rations, though his men still had their vodka. But the Sixth Army was spent; its last reserves were gone. While what Grossman described as “calculations based on blood” confused the Germans, Marshal Zhukov was not wasting the time purchased at such a price. He had moved into place half a million infantry, 230 regiments of field artillery, and 115 regiments of Katyushka rocket forces. He positioned 900 new T-34 tanks alongside them. And now the moment for his counterstroke was at hand. On the morning of 19 November 1942 – just hours after the last German offensive had died out – Zhukov unleashed his artillery barrage, and his armies and their armour poured across the Volga. This was the greatest density of men and firepower so far achieved by the Red Army since the invasion. They flattened the Romanian armies who held the German flanks, and each arm of the pincer rolled on. On 23 November they linked up at the bridge at Kalach, the Germans’ supply line over the Don River, and the conduit for every shell, bandage, and ration that supplied the Sixth Army. This cutting of the Germans’ supply line also effectively blocked their escape route. Now the tables were turned – instead of the Red Army being surrounded on three sides with their backs to the Volga, it was the Wehrmacht who were surrounded. They were now the victims of the dreaded “double envelopment” which has been the dream of every military commander since Hannibal’s classic victory over the Romans at Cannae. Inside the cauldron, or Kessel, as the Germans called it, over 250,000 men were ground down piecemeal. In his narrative masterpiece Barbarossa, Alan Clark eloquently summed up what the encirclement of the Sixth Army meant: “This brilliant stroke marked, in its every aspect – its timing, its concentration, and the manner in which it exploited the enemy’s own disposition – a complete and final shift in the strategic balance between the two contestants. From this time on the Red Army held the initiative, and although the Germans were to try on many occasions (and to succeed on some) to reverse this balance, their efforts turned out to be no more than tactically significant. From November 1942 on, the posture

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of the Wehrmacht in the east was fundamentally a defensive one” (Clark 1985, 249). Vasily Grossman had been there, and he expressed in Life and Fate the nature of the German mistake as clearly as, but of course much earlier than, the professional historian: “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’ divisions” (Grossman 1989, 488). Once hope of relief for the encircled Germans was extinguished, their surrender was inevitable – a chess problem simply waiting to be played out. The last troops in the northern pocket of Stalingrad were captured by the Soviets on 1–3 February 1943, though the bulk of the forces, including Paulus (whom Hitler had just named Field Marshal) and thirty of his generals, had been captured two days earlier. Yet what was the fate of the men whose “freedom” purchased this magnificent and decisive victory? From the moment it became clear that the Sixth Army could neither escape nor be reinforced, the Red Army’s freedom from n k v d interference also began to evaporate. The secret police trickled back into the city. After the surrender, the Red Star would laud Stalin, who had never left the Kremlin, as the architect of the Cannae on the Volga. Sadly, freedom from the nkvd, which the Party had granted for a hundred days, was to be only a means to an end. General Ortenberg ordered Grossman to leave Stalingrad on 3 January 1943 – almost exactly a month before the final surrender, but six weeks after the 23 November encirclement which ensured the Germans’ eventual defeat. Konstantin Simonov, the fair-haired boy of the Party, replaced him. At the time Grossman left, the city that had been the capital of the land of Freedom was changing back into the burned-out ruins of just another shattered city, under Party and nk v d control once again. In Life and Fate Grossman wrote the true story of how freedom from Party control had “engendered the victory.” It was an insight

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that simply could never be published inside the Soviet Union, but Grossman was slow to realize this. As his close friend Yekaterina Zabolotskaya told us in a personal interview, “He was a child in such matters.” Apparently Grossman thought the “band of brothers” mentality of the Stalingrad garrison would endure into the 1960s – even after the k gb raided his apartment and seized everything they could find of Life and Fate, down to the typewriter ribbons, Grossman tried to release his book from prison. He wrote a letter to the First Secretary of the c p s u, Nikita Khrushchev, who had also been at Stalingrad during the street fighting, asking for help in getting the manuscript back. He was summoned to the Kremlin on 23 July 1962 to meet with Mikhail Suslov, the Party boss for ideology. Grossman wrote down the ensuing conversation from memory when he returned to his apartment that night. Suslov said he had not personally read the novel, but he had in front of him the notes of “reviewers,” that is, k gb watchdogs. His comment was intriguing: “Why should we add your book to the atomic bombs that our enemies are preparing to launch against us? Its publication would only help our enemies. Publishing your book would only increase the number of victims.”7 Suslov then made a statement that shows the k g b minders had paid particular attention to the passages about how the victory was achieved at Stalingrad: “How could we have triumphed in the war with the kinds of people you describe? … If we accept what you say, then it is impossible to understand how we won the war. According to you, we should never have won. It is impossible to understand why we won” (Garrard and Garrard 1996, 358). By “we” of course, Suslov means the Communist Party, not the Red Army. In 1962, the Party line that Stalin’s leadership had won the war had changed; now the hosannahs were shouted for the Party, which had supposedly accomplished the miracle on the Volga. Suslov never placed himself in harm’s way during the war. From his perspective, as he said, “It is impossible to understand why we won.” Grossman had been there, and he showed that ordinary soldiers won at Stalingrad because they were, for those critical hundred days, free from Party control. The Party might have to acknowledge the role of the Red Army, but they would reflect the soldiers’ achievements in a distorting mirror. After the meeting with Suslov, Grossman knew his manuscript would never appear in his lifetime. His remaining two years were

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extremely difficult and painful, but his Stalingrad fame had won him some protection. He did not die in the Lubyanka, but in the hospital (on 14 September 1964) from stomach cancer. Technically, then, he died from “natural causes,” though it is likely that the omnipresent surveillance of the k g b , the informers, the spies, the seizure of his manuscripts, the removal of his books from libraries, and his consignment to “non-person” status hastened his end. In a sense he was lucky to die when he did. In September 1964, virtually every important military office post was occupied by soldiers who served with or under Khrushchev during the three critical months at Stalingrad.8 This meant that they had been Grossman’s comrades as well. Khrushchev himself fell from power only one month after Grossman’s death. The new Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, had not been at Stalingrad and shared no sense of camaraderie with those who had. Brezhnev had been a Party commissar in the Caucasus; a ghostwriter puffed up his very modest contribution to the war effort into a grandiose memoir, which earned the ghostwriter lavish literary prizes from the sychophants at the Soviet Writers’ Union. Brezhnev set out on an eighteen-year campaign to co-opt the victory for the cpsu. Suslov, Grossman’s nemesis since the day in the Kremlin where he had compared Life and Fate to a bomb, drove the propaganda blitz. Lazar Lazarev, himself a decorated veteran of the Red Army, has eloquently described the theme song that accompanied this campaign: “Ring Out, Victorious Thunder!”9 The Party merged the genuine popular memories of the war with Soviet ideology, and had no intention whatsoever of acknowledging the role of Vasily Grossman. Nowhere is the Party’s cynical denigration of Grossman’s contribution to the victory at Stalingrad seen in starker relief than at the scene of his greatest fame, the gigantic memorial complex at Volgograd (Khrushchev renamed the city during his anti-Stalin campaign). During his tenure as General Secretary of the cpsu, Brezhnev ordered twenty huge memorials erected to the Great Patriotic War, and the one at Volgograd was the biggest. It was inaugurated in 1967 at Mamaev Kurgan to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution and thus link the Party with the victory over the Sixth Army. The hill of Mamaev Kurgan still dominates the town. Grossman had gone to the hill in the midst of murderous firefights to conduct interviews. He had spent hours and days under German bombardment. And yet here, on the very ground where he had shared the soldiers’ danger, the Party refused to speak his name. To add insult

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to injury, a quotation from Grossman’s “In the Line of the Main Drive” was engraved in letters almost six feet high along the wall leading to the mausoleum: “An iron wind lashed their faces, but still they marched forward. And once more a feeling of superstitious terror gripped their foe: ‘They are attacking us again; can they be mortal?’” but neither the author nor the source of these words is mentioned anywhere. The same silence holds true inside the great mausoleum at the memorial complex. Within the dome, a giant hand holds aloft a torch. Engraved on the dome’s sides are the names of the countless citizens and soldiers who died at Stalingrad. Again we see Grossman’s words, the answer that Red Army soldiers gave to the Germans’ question, this time tooled in gold around the base of the giant dome, but again without identifying their source: “Yes, we were mortal indeed, and few of us survived, but we all carried out our patriotic duty before holy Mother Russia.” Mother Russia herself is personified on Mamaev Kurgan by a huge statue raising her sword and calling all her sons to defend Stalingrad against the invaders. Vasily Grossman was one of those sons who answered the call, yet the Party has obliterated his name. Here is the classic Soviet war memorial: a masterpiece of disinformation captured in stone. Ostensibly, the huge complex at Volgograd honours the Red Army soldiers who won the battle and the war correspondent who penned a deathless tribute to their sacrifice. Yet it conceals the identity of both the soldiers – almost certainly a penal battalion – and the author of the words. Even today, as attested by Mark Burman, a bbc correspondent who visited the memorial at Mamaev Kurgan recently, the official guides still claim it is not known who wrote these words, even though the Communist Party of the Soviet Union no longer controls the country. That silence gives tacit approval to the Party’s lies about the true heroes of Stalingrad. Grossman was and is the great teller of truth about the war, about its most epic battle, and its darkest secrets. The Soviet Union and its ideology of Marxism-Leninism have disappeared, but Russians (and non-Russian citizens of the Federation) still struggle to make sense of a war which was largely fought on their own territory, and whose victory was bought at such a price that the nation’s demographics are still distorted. That struggle will continue in this century, perhaps longer. As the individual memories of the survivors fade, a collective memory is being forged. All people of honour are called to active duty in the war against forgetting. Still alive in his books, Grossman calls

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upon us, everywhere, to take up the burden of history and remember the true victors at Stalingrad, the soldiers of Chuykov’s 62nd Army, who swung the “hinge of fate” back against the Wehrmacht, and saved the planet from fascism.10

n otes  1 Zapisnye knizhki (Grossman 1989, 363). Translation by John Garrard.  2 See The Years of War (1941–1945) (Grossman 1946b). This is the English translation of Gody voiny (Grossman 1946a).   3 The only other division to be so slighted, according to Kerr, was the 112th, Sologub’s division.   4 The same is true of all of Grossman’s reportage from Stalingrad. In his equally famous piece, “As Chekhov Saw It,” he gives a specific portrait of a young man, a sniper with the disconcerting name of Chekhov. He had hunted in Siberia and knew how to lie motionless in the snow for hours. His difficult childhood and drunken father had taught him cunning. Now he was determined not to allow the Germans to walk proudly in this city with their heads held high – they would hunch over, fearful of being picked off. Chekhov made the “master race” bow down, lean over, dart from place to place, and finally collapse on rubble with a bullet in the skull. The coolness of a trained killer is combined, in Grossman’s article, with specific, indeed endearing, details of what it was like to be a young Red Army soldier.   5 Alan Clark, working primarily from German sources, has described this mistake thus: “[The] Sixth Army, from an understandable desire to justify its own further reinforcement, and to emphasize the weight it was carrying, tended to report whole divisions where only regiments or even battalions existed, by assuming the presence of the ‘parent’ division once one of the subordinate formations had been identified. Owing to the number of ad hoc miscellaneous units Chuykov had cooped up in isolated parts of the city, this habit resulted in an estimate of the Russian strength five or six times greater than the true figure” (Clark 1985, 240).   6 Clark 1985, 232. The term “wastage” used by Clark was commonly employed also by many Red Army veterans as reflecting the standard operating policy of Stalin and Stavka. The obscene profligacy with which men were expended would have catastrophic demographic consequences for the post-war Soviet Union.   7 The full text of Grossman’s meeting with Suslov is printed as an appendix to our book The Bones of Berdichev (Garrard and Garrard 1996,

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357–60). The translation is by John Garrard. The provenance of Grossman’s account of his meeting with Suslov is itself instructive. At the time of his death, he had left the five-page handwritten document in his apartment, which meant that it came into the possession of his widow, Olga Mikhailovna. In 1964, she agreed to a request from the bureaucrats at the Writers’ Union to hand over these notes, to be deposited in the special collections of the state’s literature archives, closed to all but Party ideologues. She then happily told the stunned and horrified Semyon Lipkin, Grossman’s friend, that she had been praised by the Secretary of the Moscow branch of the Writers’ Union, General Ilyin, who happened to be a serving kg b officer. We recount the whole tale in The Bones of Berdichev, 308–9. John Garrard’s translation of this formerly inaccessible document provides a window into how c psu apparatchiks at the highest levels dealt with troublesome writers such as Grossman.   8 For a complete list of these men and their positions (taking up half a page), see Clark 1985, 464. Grossman made a political mistake at Stalingrad – he did not interview Khrushchev himself. Apparently this ­rankled the future Soviet leader, who took the omission personally.   9 See Lazarev’s discussion of this, and other important truths about the war, in his article “Russian Literature on the War and Historical Truth,” in Garrard and Garrard 1993, 42. 10 Winston Churchill used this memorable phrase, “the hinge of fate,” as the title of one of his books chronicling the war, in which he describes the Battle of Stalingrad.

R efer e nc e s Clark, Alan. 1985. Barbarossa: The Russian-German Conflict 1941–45, 2nd ed. New York: Quill. Garrard, John, and Carol Garrard. 1993. World War 2 and the Soviet People. New York: St Martin’s Press. – 1996. The Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman. New York: Simon & Schuster. Grossman, Vasily S. 1942. Napravlenie glavnogo udara. Moscow: Voyennoye izdatelstvo Narodnogo Kommisariata Oborony. – 1946a. Gody voiny. Moscow: Ogiz. – 1946b. The Years of War (1941–1945). Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. – 1986. Life and Fate. New York: Harper & Row. – 1989. Gody voiny. Moscow: Ogiz. Kerr, Walter. 1978. The Secret of Stalingrad. New York: Doubleday.

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2 Grossman and the Tradition of Classical Russian Literature L azar I . L az a r e v In 1960 Vasily Grossman wrote an article that he dedicated to Andrey Platonov (Grossman 1960). They had a long and deep friendship, and Grossman greatly admired Platonov’s books and extraordinary artistic talent. During the war, Grossman had brought Platonov to the army’s leading newspaper, Red Star, having convinced the editor to hire his friend as a correspondent from the front, despite the fact that Platonov’s official reputation left something to be desired because Stalin had previously expressed decidedly negative views of him. To this, after the war, were added the attacks of the official critics on one of Platonov’s best stories, The Return (Platonov 1989, 263–85). The death of Platonov was for these reasons a major blow to Grossman. Grossman was extremely embittered because so much of Platonov’s splendid work had not been published, because his books had not been reprinted, because ten years after his death only one collection of his writings had been published that no one had bothered to write or speak about, and because Platonov had been relegated to the margins of Soviet literature. Grossman, having finished his novel Life and Fate, felt an obligation to write about the life and fate of Platonov: “I would like, at least briefly, to talk about Platonov, to remind readers of the existence of this wonderful writer, a master with a complex destiny, whose books, in my view, deserve a lifetime of study and whose unpublished manuscripts await publication.” But the authorities at the time reacted furiously to the very mention of the unpublished manuscripts of writers they regarded as suspect. In his article, Grossman talked about

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the high mission of literature, that “transforms spiritual wealth, the heart of the individual, into a treasure for all, and, at the same time, enriches mankind with the inheritance of other men, with the warmth of the hearts of previous generations.” Grossman’s article begins: “The fame of an author does not always fully correspond, quite rightly, to his actual importance and his real position in the world of literature. Time is an implacable judge of unmerited literary fame. However, time is not the enemy of genuine literary value, on the contrary, it is a good and reasonable friend, as well as a serene and loyal custodian” (Grossman 1960, 3). When I first read these lines, it occurred to me that Grossman was not just commemorating Platonov and reflecting on the fate of his work; he was also thinking about the possible future of his own work, about what might happen to it, about what he could hope for it. And I think I was right. When publication of Life and Fate was forbidden, the directors of the Writers’ Union, supported not just by the “voice” of Suslov, the Party’s main ideological leader and then-arbiter of our cultural destiny, but also, as has been said, by his “work,” stated that such a book could only be published “in around 250 years.” Clearly, they thought their power would dominate for eternity. But, after less than half a century, it was instead Grossman’s prediction that came about: time had done its job and, like an “implacable judge,” had repudiated the work of those who had enjoyed “unmerited literary fame.” Among these was the editor of the magazine Znamya, who had warned Grossman to take copies of the manuscript of his novel out of circulation and ensure that it did not fall into “enemy hands,” and who had communicated to the Central Committee that Grossman had written a dangerous and subversive novel, inviting the Party leaders to take measures so that the book would not see the light of day. As we know, such measures were taken and brutally enforced – there is no other way to describe the manner in which the author was required to hand over the manuscript. The book was condemned to death, but it survived by a miracle. Time has dealt with the work of the Znamya editor who headed the Writers’ Union and all his colleagues, those who ignored the work of Platonov and cast Grossman’s novel into oblivion. But who now remembers their names, those holders of high-sounding honours, or the titles of their books, previously reprinted in dizzying numbers, except pedantic scholars of the period’s literature?

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But time, like the “good and reasonable friend of genuine literary value,” like the “serene and loyal custodian” of the same, has placed the work of both Andrey Platonov and Vasily Grossman at the front rank of twentieth-century Russian prose. They have become renowned throughout the world. Celebrated literary critics immediately recognized the merits of Life and Fate, critics such as Simon Markish (Markish 1983) (leading to a Hebrew translation of the work) and Efim Etkind (Etkind 1980, v–xi). Grossman’s novel also attracted the attention of great essayists, including Heinrich Böll (Böll 1986) and Tzvetan Todorov (Todorov 2000), as well as inspiring a substantial monograph by John and Carol Garrard (Garrard and Garrard 1996). Grossman and Platonov are both now firmly established in the literary pantheon of “the classics.” Aleksandr Tvardovskiy made an acute observation that sheds light on the crucial role of literary works in preserving the past. He pointed out that, in order to remain in the popular memory, events in reality, even heroic reality, “need to be sustained and fixed by art, without which it is as if it never was and therefore cannot fully influence our consciousness.” As an example, Tvardovskiy cites Tolstoy’s War and Peace: “Would the war and the victory of the Russian army in 1812 have had such significance for the patriotic consciousness of the Russian people without the felicitous creation of War and Peace, a work that not only reflected that historic moment in the life of the country, but showed, in unforgettable images, the heroic greatness of the Russian people in those years?” (Tvardovskiy 1976–83, 310). As a second, unparalleled example, Tvardovskiy cites the Soviet literature of the Great Patriotic War (the Second World War) unreservedly (and this is something I would like to underline), putting it at the same level as the literature created in the era of Tolstoy: “The same can be said of the literature that stimulated the incomparable heroism of the Soviet people during the [Great] Patriotic War of 1941–1945. Heroism that is confirmed and fixed in our consciousness, also in the consciousness of those who were directly involved, in the true language of artistic creativity” (Tvardovskiy 1976–83, 310). Of course, it is not coincidental that Tvardovskiy brings these two things together – Tolstoy’s War and Peace and the literature produced during the war against Hitler’s Germany. Tolstoy’s novel has been the principal traditional reference point for all Russian literature about war, and it exercised a profound ethical and aesthetic influence on writers during the Great Patriotic War.

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The importance of War and Peace was discussed in an article by another celebrated writer marking the centenary of its publication. The author of the article was Konstantin Simonov, in whose work the 1941–45 war plays a dominant role: The war of 1812, which is at the very heart of War and Peace, came to be known as the Patriotic War and when, 130 years later, circumstances in Russia led to the return of the idea of a patriotic struggle, Tolstoy’s novel enjoyed a second life in the consciousness of Russians. Despite its significance, it had in fact not really entered the consciousness of Russian readers in the same way as during our second Patriotic War [World War II], with all of its tragic and heroic associations. This is why, for my generation who saw the Germans at the gates of Moscow and the walls of Stalingrad, reading War and Peace during that period of our lives was not only an aesthetic, but also an ethical, shock that would remain with us forever. It was a book that answered all the most immediate questions of the age: what is real courage and real cowardice? Who are the real catalysts of war and who, on the other hand, were only apparently responsible? And, finally, the most important question, will we be able to destroy those who came all the way to Moscow and then the Volga? Yes or no? And, notwithstanding the intrinsic complexity of the situation and the lack of ready-made recipes for behavior, during the war it was precisely the words and language of War and Peace that consolidated the spirit of resistance that gripped the country as it faced the foreign invasion, in this case the Nazi invaders. I would also add that War and Peace also became a tangible element of this spirit or, at any rate, it was certainly so for many of us. (Simonov 1969, 162) If we put all this in the narrower context of literary tradition, it is not hard to understand that all of our war literature has been profoundly influenced by Tolstoy; indeed, how could it be otherwise? Grossman certainly understood this, and it has been noted by all those who have studied his work, in particular Life and Fate. In his 1990 monograph, by far the best thing ever written about Grossman’s work and based on numerous facts that he had observed first-hand, the late Anatoliy Bocharov wrote extensively about Tolstoy’s influence. After the publication of this monograph, the question of Tolstoy’s influence

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on Grossman’s novel was discussed by many critics and became a trite commonplace reduced to a series of considerations regarding whether the book was a compositional and figurative re-creation of Tolstoy’s artistic world. Meanwhile, Grossman’s adversaries, who in general belong to the so-called “patriotic” party, have used Tolstoy to discredit both Grossman and his novel: “The writer [Grossman] seeks to present himself to us in the role of a thinker, slavishly copying the historiosophic digressions of Leo Tolstoy” (S. Kunyayev). “For Grossman the individual and the people (narod) are poles apart. When he talks of the ‘people’ he is thinking of the ‘State.’ Tolstoy does not oppose the individual to the people. Indeed, his dearest idea is that the individual discovers himself by uniting with his people. But, of course, this is not only an idea of Tolstoy’s – it can be found in all of the Russian classics. Perhaps in War and Peace it is simply more fully expressed in the artistic sense. And if critics really want to establish a link between Grossman’s work and Tolstoy’s epic, it needs to be acknowledged that Grossman consciously takes issue with the author of War and Peace” (A. Kazintsev). None of this party could stomach Grossman. (Mikhail Sholokhov, who was the supreme authority of and a contagious example for this group, provided powerful support for them, and following the publication of For a Just Cause was clearly affronted: “Just look at who they have commissioned to write a novel about Stalingrad!” Evidently he thought that his own novel, They Fought for Their Homeland, should have been seen as the most important book about Stalingrad.) For them Grossman was not a Russian writer, but rather, as it was diplomatically expressed, a “Russian language” writer (which in fact meant that he was a writer who had ably insinuated himself into a literature to which he was extraneous, and perhaps even hostile, in its spirit and traditions). It is hardly surprising then that he was also accused of Zionism and “Russo-phobia.” But one question remains to be asked: who were the Russian heroes they wanted to see in writing, given that they did not like those depicted by Grossman? Before concluding this reflection on Tolstoy’s influence on Grossman, it is necessary to state two reservations. First, there is no direct link between War and Peace and Grossman’s Life and Fate. Consequently, I would not use the word “influence” with respect to the relationship between these works – the concept of Tolstoy’s “influence” may be better applied to an earlier work by Grossman, written in 1942 and therefore before Stalingrad: the short novel The People Immortal, a

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work to which, unfortunately, Grossman scholars have paid scant attention. The connection between Grossman’s later novel and War and Peace is of a different, more complex, less direct nature. It is, if I can put it like this, a link that is “capillary” and artistically “molecular.” And it is precisely this “capillary” and “molecular” link that we need to bear in mind before anything else. The second reservation comes from a re-reading of Grossman’s notes on Stalingrad. From these notes we can see, from the beginning, a link with Tolstoy’s notes about Sebastopol. For sure, Tolstoy’s work was deeply embedded in Grossman’s memory, and helped him comprehend the nature of the courage required of Stalingrad’s defenders. Then again, it is worth mentioning that Sebastopol Sketches was an extremely significant point of reference for the books written by those who fought in the Second World War, who, as Aleksandr Tvardovskiy rightly observed, experienced the blood and sweat of war on their own uniforms. At the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, their realistic depiction of the war became an important trend in military fiction and earned deserved public success. The truth about the war that this trend represented came to be called “the truth of the trenches,” and the books, such as they were, the “literature of lieutenants.” But, in fact, this trend was met with two diametrically opposed reactions: positive on the part of the reading public, but negative among official critics, who claimed that “whatever truth the lieutenants of the trenches may have seen, such truth was only accessible to the marshals and generals.” At this point, it is necessary to note that the author of Sebastopol Sketches, exactly there, in that very location, had been a second lieutenant of a platoon of mountain artillery soldiers, and that the “literature of lieutenants” was written by men who experienced the war from ranks similar to Tolstoy’s: the engineer Viktor Nekrasov and the gunners Vasily Bykov and Grigoriy Baklanov. Vasily Grossman had boundless admiration for Tolstoy, and certainly, in his novel about Stalingrad, made use of Tolstoy’s experience. This is perhaps best reflected in the extent of the epic’s panorama and in the weight of thought through which Grossman is not only able to make the complex, hidden, and contradictory course of history his own, but also able to develop an acute, profound analysis of human actions in crucial moments and when facing death. However, Grossman was much more familiar with Chekhov, something that will have been noticed by anyone who has read Life and Fate carefully. Commenting on Grossman, the great German writer

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Heinrich Böll observed Grossman’s great passion for Chekhov (Böll 1986). But for Grossman, Chekhov was not only a literary school, but also a life model, an example of the perfect solution to the problems of human life, of authentically moral behaviour. Grossman’s dearest friend, Semyon Lipkin, said that Grossman had an authentic veneration for Chekhov, to the extent that when he learned from Lipkin that Anna Akhmatova didn’t like Chekhov, he changed his attitude toward her, becoming deeply disappointed. In the years before the war, Grossman made friends with the literary and theatre critic Aleksander Roskin. It is probable that his good relationship with Roskin was helped by the fact that Roskin was conducting research into the world of Chekhov. And in the course of dedicating a commemorative essay to Roskin, who died fighting among the militias in Moscow in 1941, Grossman not coincidentally made a digression to share with readers his reflections on Chekhov and his characters: Chekhov’s characters were evoked out of the muddy chaos of pre-revolutionary Russian life, and he fixed their existence crystalline in our consciousness. And it was in or through these people that Chekhov placed his faith in the triumph of morality, goodness, science, reason, and creative work over the dark world of arrogant ignorance, of cruelty and prejudice. Chekhov realized himself through beautiful, kind, clever, clumsy, elegant, and good characters, who preserved their spiritual stability and their purity and nobility even in the darkness of pre-revolutionary Russian life. Chekhov found in them his own spiritual essence, and made it visible, convincing, and powerful. (Grossman 1993, 269–70) But even earlier, even before the war, in A Love Story (Grossman 1938), written in 1937 when Grossman was still young, the following episode occurs: the protagonist is travelling by train in the same compartment as a director, a cameraman, and a scriptwriter who are on their way to shoot a film about Donbass and are discussing how the film should be made. One of them recalls Chekhov’s The Steppe and says: “That is how we should work.” “Yes, that is real art,” they all agree. Naturally, they were expressing the same opinion as the author, Grossman. It is the spiritual essence of Chekhov’s work that is most important for Grossman. Indeed, for Grossman, Chekhov is the highest school

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of narrative art, an art that Grossman pursued in his late writings, published only after his death, in the so-called perestroika period. These late works can be considered Chekhovian because of both their content and their structural style. Certainly, from the outside, they are quite dry – Grossman’s writing is not usually associated with colourful, detailed descriptions, recalling Chekhov’s laconic style and so-called objectivity. But they also recall Chekhov’s hidden text: behind unspectacular details and seemingly casual remarks in everyday, banal situations, what emerges is a profound layer of reality that can be revealed by the well-known Chekhovian formula: “Those people are having lunch, all they are doing is having lunch, but in that same moment their happiness is fading and their life is falling to pieces” (Chekhov 1954, 51). And yet, for Grossman, Chekhov sets forth, first and foremost, a moral, human position, a position that becomes increasingly consistent and universal, and comes to include the most pressing questions about the radical problems of human life. And, for Grossman, just as in Chekhov, it is a position that generates an extremely high level of lyrical tension. The serious dialogue about Chekhov among the characters of Life and Fate, which all careful readers of the novel will have noticed, has within it the same kind of mature author, made an expert by a hard life, and contains also the essence of Chekhov. This is a dialogue that needs to be squeezed drop by drop from the “slave within us”: Chekhov took Russian democracy on his shoulders, the still unrealised Russian democracy. Chekhov’s path is the path of Russia’s freedom. We took a different path … 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! … At one time people blinded by party 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. (Grossman 1998, 206–7; Grossman 2006, 282–3) And it was precisely in this light that Grossman saw the underlying spiritual element that the defenders of Stalingrad had leaned on to avoid being overwhelmed by the enemy invasion. I would not dare describe in my own words the essence of the Russian classical

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tradition on which Grossman based his novel. Perhaps it is better to refer to the greats that Grossman had in his mind: Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (yes, him too – unfortunately, those who have written about Grossman have not noticed the points of contact between the disputes and clashes of Dostoevsky’s characters and the confrontation in Grossman’s novel between the old Bolshevik Mostovskoy and Sturmbannführer Liss, a very important episode that demonstrates these points of contact), and, finally, Chekhov himself. In his Sebastopol Sketches Tolstoy wrote: “The protagonist of my story, who I love with all my soul and who I forced myself to describe in all its beauty, and which has always been and will always be beautiful, is the truth” (Tolstoy 1986, 109). Not much more than twenty years later Dostoevsky in his diary expressed a similar thought: “Truth is higher than Nekrasov, higher than Pushkin, higher than the people, higher than Russia, higher than anything, and therefore you must desire only the truth and seek it, heedless of all the benefits that we may lose on account of it. And regardless of all the persecutions that we suffer because of it” (Dostoevsky 1984, 198–9). It was not many years later that Chekhov, too, took up essentially the same topic: “Artistic literature is so called because it depicts the reality of life. Its aim is unconditional, honest truth” (Chekhov 1975, 11). Vasily Grossman not only adhered to this exalted tradition and pursued it faithfully, but he also enhanced it with the cruel and tragic experience of the twentieth century, the “wolf century,” the century of the Holocaust, of concentration camps and the gulag, of famine in collectivized agricultural villages, and of trials against the “enemies of the people,” the resistance until death of Stalingrad, and the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Grossman was not an imitator, a copyist; he was a great and original artist who would become a new link in the precious, classical tradition that he continued with his own work. When Vitaliy Syomin (one of the most talented writers contributing to the literary magazine Novyy mir) was asked who, in his opinion, best personified the tradition of the Russian classics, the name he gave was that of Vasily Grossman. And he justified his opinion by pointing out that, starting from the wartime material, Grossman had continued to develop the fundamental principles of the Russian classics, principles that had been presented in the programmatic declarations of his great predecessors. And so, beginning from this new material, Grossman had in his work discovered the highest and most absolute truth of his age:

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Everything that happened in the war was more horrendous, more atrocious, more prosaic, more heroic than anything that you could have read about before that war. Among the appalling upheavals of the war there were also more subtle disruptions: the criteria of the attraction to and verisimilitude of literature shifted. Imagination was compromised. Imagination was no longer able to keep up with life. So fantastic, tragic, and incredible were the fates of one in three of our countrymen. The criterion of literature had, more than ever, become life itself, and it demanded writers able to understand and represent it. And Grossman was one of those. (Syomin 1967, 216) However, Grossman was not only a tragic writer, but also a luminous one. I would like to conclude my observations with words from his essay on the Sistine Madonna: What can we say when faced with the judgment of the past and the future? … We have no justifications. We may say that there has never been a period as tough as ours, but that we did not let the human in mankind die. Accompanied by the expression of the Sistine Madonna, we continue to believe that life and liberty are one and the same thing and that there is nothing more sublime than the human in mankind. (Grossman 2010, 185) This faith in the fact that life and liberty are indivisible, in the triumph of the human in mankind, illuminates all of Grossman’s work, which has become a new link in the continuing and splendid tradition of Russian literature.

R efer e nc e s Bocharov, Anatoliy. 1990. Vasily Grossman: Zhizn, tvorchestvo, sudba. Moscow: Sovetskiy pisatel. Böll, Heinrich. 1986. Die Fähigkeit zu trauern: Schriften und Reden 1983– 1985. Bornheim-Merten, Germany: Lamuv Verlag. Chekhov, Anton P. 1954. O literature i iskusstve. Minsk, Belarus: Izdatelstvo Akademii Nauk Belorusskoy ssr . – 1975. Polnoe sobranie sochineniy i pisem: V 30-i tt., 30, vol. 2. Pisma 1887- sentjabr 1888. Moscow: Nauka. Dostoevsky, Fedor M. 1984. Polnoe sobranie sochineniy, vol. 26. Leningrad, Russia: Nauka.

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Etkind, Efim. 1980. “Dvadtsat let spustya.” In V. Grossman, Zhizn i sudba. Lausanne, Switzerland: L’Age d’Homme. Garrard, John, and Carol Garrard. 1996. The Bones of Berdichev. The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman. New York: The Free Press. Grossman, Vasily. 1938. Povest o lyubvi. Moscow: Goslitizdat. – 1960. “Dobryy talant.” Literaturnaya zhizn 6, no. 7: 3. – 1993. “Pamyati A.I. Roskina.” Voprosy literatury 1: 260–70. – 1998. Zhizn i sudba. In V. Grossman, Sobranie Sochineniy: v 4-kh tt., vol 2. Moscow: Vagrius-Agraf. – 2006. Life and Fate. Translated by R. Chandler. New York: New York Review of Books. – 2010. The Sistine Madonna. In V. Grossman, The Road: Short Fiction and Articles, 185. Translated by R. Chandler and E. Chandler with O. Mukovnikova. London: MacLehose Press. Markish, Simon. 1983. Le Cas Grossman. Paris: Julliard, l’Age d’Homme. Platonov, Andrey. 1989. Vozvrashchenie. In A. Platonov, Povesti i rasskazy, 263–85. Moscow: Sovetskaya Rossiya. Simonov, Konstantin. 1969. “Chitaya Tolstogo… (K stoletiyu so dnya ­vykhoda ‘Voyny i mira.’” Novyy mir 12: 162. Syomin, Vitaliy. 1967. “Otvetstvennost’ pamyati.” Novyy mir 11: 216. Todorov, Tzvetan. 2000. Mémoire du mal, tentation du bien: enquête sur le siècle. Paris: Laffont. Tolstoy, Lev. 1986. Sebastopol Sketches. London: Penguin. Tvardovskyy, Aleksandr T. 1976–83. Sobranie sochineniy, vol. 5. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura.

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3 Ideological Words and Words from Life in Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman Anna Bo n o l a Totalitarian systems presume to determine the course of both personal and community life. They achieve this not just through physical violence; in the communist and Nazi totalitarian societies described in Life and Fate, they employ well-ordered ideological power,1 using what many historians have called “totalitarian communication”2 managed by a single party, controlled by security services, and more or less accepted by society. In Life and Fate this kind of communication and this manipulative use of language are described by Grossman with a precision that comes from his personal experience as a Soviet citizen. However, his own experience also led him to outline in the novel another mode of communication, an anti-totalitarian form, the expression of life and freedom (Grossman 1998, 414–15; Grossman 2006, 555),3 which we can see not only from the way in which some of the novel’s characters talk to each other, but also from the author’s style of writing. This chapter will attempt to describe both of these forms of communication in Life and Fate.

1. Co m m u n ic at io n in T otali tari an Regi mes 1.1 Words and Power: The Perlocutionary Effect Paradigmatic for understanding how Grossman represents Soviet communication in Life and Fate is the conversation that takes place at the home of Getmanov, the General Secretary of the Party, who,

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despite being trusted by Stalin, is sent as a Commissar to a Germanoccupied region. On the eve of his departure for the front, Getmanov and his wife Galina Terentyevna, his wife’s younger brother, Sagaydak, and a friend, Mashchuk, engage in a conversation. It is, in short, an evening at home in the company of friends and family, all loyal to the Party. Getmanov’s appointment as Commissar of the tank corps might, from the perspective of the Party hierarchy, be deemed less than flattering. There is a clear sense of latent disappointment, and the friends force themselves to dispel any doubts they may have. During the conversation, Getmanov tries to reassure himself with regard to his position in the Party, and a keyword recurs time and again. The word is partiya (“Party”), which, together with another, partiynost (“spirit of the Party”), indicates the essence of Getmanov’s mentality. The “spirit of the Party” was the fundamental coin of the realm for evaluating one’s value in Soviet society, and was in direct opposition to all things personal: Every decision he [Getmanov] made had to be infused with the spirit of the Party and be conducive to its interests … The attitude of a Party leader to any matter, to any film, to any book, had to be infused with the spirit of the Party; however difficult it might be, he had to immediately renounce a favourite book or a customary way of behaviour if the interests of the Party should conflict with his personal sympathies. But Getmanov knew that there was a still higher form of Party spirit: a true Party leader simply didn’t have personal likings or inclinations; he loved something only because, and only in so far as, it expressed the spirit of the Party. The sacrifices made by Getmanov in the name of Party loyalty were sometimes cruel … But true Party spirit showed itself when a sacrifice was not even necessary, when no personal feeling could survive for even a moment if it happened to clash with the spirit of the Party. (Grossman 1998b, 68; Grossman 2006, 102–3) The concept of partiynost, with its associated keywords and slogans, insinuated its way continuously into conversations and even into one’s personal thoughts, employing evaluative criteria established by the Party and exercising constant pressure on individuals.4

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Having briefly examined his conscience with regard to the partiynost of his behaviour, the newly appointed Commissar, as ultimate proof of his loyalty to the Party line, reassures himself by contemplating the power he possesses, and, more specifically, remembers that his word has its own strength; it is a decisive “guiding word” (rukovodyashcheye, reshayushcheye slovo: Grossman 1998b, 68; Grossman 2006, 102), an unequivocal sign of the Party’s confidence in him. The word of Getmanov “could decide the fate” of important people (Grossman, 1998b, 68; Grossman 2006, 102); it is a word with executive power, the power that he has been given, because Getmanov, quite apart from (even excluding!) his personal qualities, speaks on behalf of the Party: “The power of a Party leader does not require the talent of a scientist or the gift of a writer. It is something higher than any talent or gift. Getmanov’s guiding word was anxiously awaited by hundreds of singers, writers and scientific researchers – though Getmanov himself was not only unable to sing, play the piano or direct a theatrical production, but incapable even of truly understanding a work of science, poetry, music or painting … The power of his word lay in the fact that the Party had entrusted him with its own interests in the area of art and culture” (Grossman 1998b, 68–9; Grossman 2006, 103). And this brings us to one of the most important characteristics of the phrase “totalitarian communication”: it is not initially concerned with communicating information, but with acting; a word’s perlocutionary force prevails.5 When we speak, we act, we take a position, and, in totalitarian communication, this becomes dominant: the word of the Party makes things happen; it is the exercise of a largely destructive power. The power of the “guiding word” is granted by those in authority, and, in the Soviet Union described by Grossman, the ultimate holder of this power was Stalin, he who embodied partiynost: “One word of his could annihilate thousands, ten of thousands, of people. A Marshal, a People’s Commissar … could be reduced to nothing by one angry word. They would become labour-camp dust” (Grossman 1998b, 573; Grossman 2006, 765). In Stalin the word achieves the culmination of both effective rhetoric and perlocutionary force. The impact of this communicative force is fully revealed in the scene of Stalin’s telephone call to the physicist Shtrum, the second husband of Lyudmila Shaposhnikova, one of the two sisters around whom the main storyline of the novel

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revolves. Grossman here refers to Stalin’s repeated habit of rehabilitating intellectuals and artists with sudden and unexpected telephone calls and saving them from the isolation that he himself had imposed. Like his historical counterparts (e.g., Boris Pasternak and Michail Bulgakov), Shtrum, too, having been fired from his Institute of Physics on a charge of adhering to the obscurantist theories of foreign scientist-idealists, receives a telephone call from Stalin and is amazed and flattered by the dictator’s “guiding” words: “People repeated these conversations to one another in detail; every word of Stalin’s seemed astonishing. And the more banal his words, the more astonishing they seemed. It was as if Stalin was incapable of saying anything ordinary” (Grossman 1998b, 572; Grossman 2006, 765).6 The link between the word and power was tragically confirmed in cases where an individual was deprived of the Party’s confidence and consequently lost the right to exist in society. Incarceration in prison or camp in Soviet society meant a shift from being to not being, a shift that was clearly reflected at the level of discourse. For example, at the moment of his arrest, there is an interesting exchange between the People’s Commissar Krymov – a loyal and idealistic Bolshevik (insofar as this was possible in a regime that had made lies and informing its foundation) – and the captain who had asked him to come to his office: Krymov expected the captain to say something like this: “Excuse me, comrade Battalion Commissar, but would you mind taking this report to comrade Toshcheyev on the left bank?” Instead he said: “Hand over your weapon and your personal documents.” Krymov’s reply was confused and meaningless: “But what right …? Show me your own documents first …!” [Krymov’s words make no sense because they have lost their perlocutionary force; the order has no effect on his interlocutor.] There could be no doubt about what had happened – absurd and senseless though it might be. Krymov came out with the words that had been muttered before by many thousands of people in similar ­circumstances: “It’s crazy. I don’t understand. It must be a misunderstanding.” These words were no longer those of a free man [they had lost their communicative power]. (Grossman 1998b, 459; Grossman 2006, 616)7

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1.2. Logocracy and Label-Words The link between power and language concerns not only the perlocutionary force of the word, but also includes its referential value, its capacity to indicate things, so that power, through propaganda, can cancel the relationship between language and experience, assigning words new references in line with an ideological view of the world. For example, before the revolution, the word tovarishch meant “companion” (also in the sense of a party companion), but, by the end of the thirties the Ushakov dictionary lists, alongside the traditional meanings, a new, more restricted meaning as defined by Soviet propaganda: “A member of the Soviet social collective, a person belonging to Soviet society, all those who, together with others, participate in the common Soviet effort (neol.)” (Ushakov 1935–40, s.v. “tovarishch”). Soviet Russia, therefore, seemed to have realized George Orwell’s prophecy of “Newspeak,” the language of the totalitarian logocracy8 depicted in 1984: The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible … Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever … Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by ­cutting the choice of words down to a minimum. (Orwell 1949, 210)9 In Soviet society, just as in Nazi Germany, ideology reformulated the meaning of words, especially through the use of so-called “labelwords.” It was sufficient to be referred to by terms such as “kulak,” “idealist,” or “emigrant” for immediate denunciation to follow,

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because a kulak was not merely a peasant, an idealist was not just a follower of Hegel, and an emigrant was not just a fellow countryman residing abroad – they were all, at one and the same time, “enemies of the people,”10 each term having acquired a negative and ideologically reprehensible connotation. In Life and Fate, such label-words continuously pollute everyday life with ideological poison, which has a dual effect: it impedes the very possibility of thought, replacing it with stereotyped formulas with no connection to experience, and it creates a permanent diffidence in relation to others that paralyzes social interaction.11 Were it not so tragic, it was often quite ridiculous, as Grossman shows us in the character of Nyeudobnov: He was a strange man; Novikov sometimes found him quite frightening. Whenever anything had gone wrong on the journey – a delay because of a train coming in the opposite direction, a faulty axle on one of the carriages, a controller being slow to ­signal them on – Nyeudobnov had said with sudden excitement: “Take down his name. That’s deliberate sabotage. The swine should be arrested immediately.” Deep down, Novikov felt indifferent towards the kulaks and saboteurs, the men who were called enemies of the people … He himself had always attributed this good-humoured indifference to a lack of political consciousness. Nyeudobnov, on the other hand, seemed to be constantly vigilant. It was as if, whenever he met someone, he wondered suspiciously: “And how am I to know, dear comrade, that you’re not an enemy of the people yourself?” (Grossman 1998b, 330; Grossman 2006, 334) In this passage, the Soviet phobia of the enemy or the foreigner, an ideological position that is fundamental to justifying a totalitarian regime, is made concrete by the use of label-words such as “sabotage” (sabotazhnik, diversant), “enemy of the people,” kulak, “realities” which have their antidote in bditelnost, “political vigilance.”12 1.3. Confiding a Secret: Geheimsträger or Confidentiality Dependence on the ultimate holder of the last word, with the power to attribute sense and confer legitimacy, places the whole of society

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in check, including the official hierarchy and the nomenklatura (the people the Communist Party appointed to positions of authority), by means of the continuous threat of losing the power conceded from above and the continuous threat that the word (that is, what is said), having lost its perlocutionary force, has been transformed into mere sound. This fear determines the principal mechanism of the communication between the “managers” and within the totalitarian state in general: to speak is to continuously take a position with respect to power, a demonstration of how close you are to it, both through overt declarations of loyalty (as in the case of the frequent toasts to the health of Stalin), and through allusive suggestions of intimacy and familiarity (for Stalin, names such as otec, batko, tovarishch – father, papa, comrade). The position of the speaker with respect to power also delineates the relationship between his interlocutors: the closer one is to power, the greater his superiority toward his interlocutors. Where the State claims to be both omnipotent and omniscient, such closeness means to be in on the secret of the powerful, which keeps interlocutors in check.13 The “soft” and “insinuating” voice of Mashchuk typifies the insidious threat of a power that is ever-present even in casual conversations between friends in the home of Getmanov: “Mashchuk gave an almost imperceptible smile that was nevertheless noticed by everyone at the table. Although he was related twice over to the Getmanovs … the Getmanovs always felt a certain tension as they listened to Mashchuk’s soft, insinuating voice and watched his calm eyes and long, pale face. Getmanov himself did not find this in the least surprising. He was well aware of the power behind Mashchuk; he understood how much more Mashchuk often knew about things than he did himself” (Grossman 1998b, 70; Grossman 2006, 105). For the Party manager, communicating therefore means to demonstrate or imply the favour he enjoys from the powers that be, even to the extent of confiding the secret. But, given that no-one, apart from those who embody supreme power in the totalitarian state, can claim to be omniscient, the fragmentation of the secret, confided first to one person and then to another, corresponds to the distribution of power within society, in that confiding the secret means conceding trust (doveriye). Consequently, communication is always selective and partial and never addresses the true subject. In other words, it is never really communication, but rather has a purely social value and, more precisely, is a measure of the position of the speaker inside the Party.

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An emblematic, and not un-ironic, example is the passage in which Getmanov confides information to the Colonel of his corps, Novikov: Then he [Getmanov] told Novikov the news he had received from an old comrade, the secretary of an obkom, who had recently returned from Moscow; he had been received by someone who had a place on the mausoleum on public occasions in Red Square, though not, of course, at Stalin’s side by the microphone. This man didn’t know everything and, needless to say, hadn’t told all of what he did know to the secretary of the obkom [he is not omniscient and therefore not omnipotent] … The secretary of the obkom, weighting Getmanov up on some invisible chemical balance, had told him only a small part of what he had heard [diffidence determines the mood of totalitarian communication]. And then Getmanov had passed on to Novikov only a small part of what he himself had been told. (Grossman 1998b, 248; Grossman 2006, 338) He [Novikov] still found himself submitting to a force whose presence he was constantly aware of but unable to understand … Just now he had been purring with pleasure because Getmanov had told him a few stories about the world where this force was based. (Grossman 1998b, 250; Grossman 2006, 341) 1.4. Censorship, Denunciation, and Self-denunciation In totalitarian regimes, power is exercised not only by defining how what is said should be understood, but also by establishing limits on what can and cannot be said. This is most clearly seen in the phenomenon of censorship, which does nothing other than establish, on the basis of conditions dictated by the Party, the corpus of the approved texts of Soviet discourse (Sériot 1985, 50–4). This takes us to the heart of totalitarian communication: what can be said is decided by power and must conform to the reality that power establishes, while what cannot be said, what is not permissible, forms the basis of denunciation. There is an example of what cannot be said in the conversation at the home of Getmanov we have been examining. Getmanov’s young brother-in-law mentions that Stalin’s son, Yakov, was captured by the fascists, but quickly realizes his mistake:

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He stopped short, sensing that he’d touched on a matter his senior comrades preferred not to talk about. To break the awkward silence, he announced in a carefree tone: “By the way, I’ve heard the Germans have been dropping ridiculous propaganda leaflets. They’re making out that Yakov Stalin has given them information of his own free will.” The void surrounding Nikolay Terentyevich grew still more unpleasant. He had spoken about something that should never be mentioned, even in jest. To express indignation at lying rumours about Iosif Vissarionovich’s relationship with his wife would be as serious a blunder as to spread the same rumours – any word at all about such matters was inadmissible. (Grossman 1998b, 72; Grossman 2006, 108) A number of Soviet propaganda posters have remained famous as emblems of the regime. These include one that shows a woman with a stern expression on her face, holding a finger to her lips. Beneath the image are the words “Don’t babble!” (i.e., “no loose talk,” in Russian boltat). Which is exactly what Getmanov reminds his brotherin-law of – “not to speak without thinking” (Grossman 1998b, 73; Grossman 2006, 108; in Russian Ne boltat lishnego! or “Don’t babble so much”) – showing that he is perfectly in line with the concept of Soviet discourse and also aware of the fact that silence can have great communicative impact. But the mechanism of denunciation against Getmanov’s brother-in-law was triggered, and the possibility raised, if followed through on, of this denunciation determining the course of events. As the one who spoke so rashly well knows: Galina’s brother understood that this stupid, trivial incident would be forgotten; he also understood that it would not be forgotten entirely. One day, during a meeting to discuss a nomination for some particularly responsible post, Getmanov, Sagaydak and Mashchuk would all nod their heads at mention of Nikolay Terentyevich; at the same time, however, they would give the merest hint of a smile [the smile of one in the know, like the smile that had previously been seen on the lips of Mashchuk]. In reply to a question posed by an observant comrade, they would say, “Perhaps just a trifle indiscreet,” measuring this trifle on the tip of their little finger. (Grossman 1998b, 73; Grossman 2006, 108)14

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Figure 3.1  N.N. Vatolina N.V. Denisov, Don’t Blab! Soviet ­propaganda poster, 1941.

Denunciation is thus the child of the Party’s judgment as to what can and cannot be said, as well as being the main instrument for controlling information and limiting individual freedom. Indeed, the mere threat of denunciation leads to the most rigid form of self-control in communicative exchanges, creating a continuous tension apparent in all conversations, which wears down not only the characters in the novel, but also, at times, even the reader. In Life and Fate, the master of Soviet-talk is without doubt Getmanov, but also, albeit more subtly, Mashchuk, who is a natural master of both proper content and rhetoric:

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He spoke straightforwardly and openly, seemingly as straightforwardly as the manager of a knitwear factory or a teacher at a technical institute might talk about their work. But they all understood that this openness and freedom were only apparent – he knew better than any of them what could, and what could not, be talked about. Getmanov, who also loved to shock people by his boldness and candour, was well aware of the depths concealed beneath the surface of this animated and spontaneous conversation. (Grossman 1998b, 71; Grossman 2006, 106–7) In such a system, the weak are those who, because of the interference of their feelings (anger, fear) or their natural human inclinations (the desire for friendship, security, etc.), are unable to control what they say. This includes people such as Colonel Novikov, the antiintellectual soldier who in a moment of anger when speaking to Getmanov uses the word “marble” (Grossman 1998b, 243; Grossman 2006, 331) – the word Trotskiy had used to describe an article written by Krymov, the former husband of his lover Zhenya Shaposhnikova. Zhenya herself had told Novikov about Trotskiy’s use of the word, thereby potentially endangering her ex-husband. She did this to ­demonstrate to Novikov her reliability (once again – communication consists in confiding a secret related to the Party), but quickly that “mramorno” was transformed from a simple word to a demonstration of Krymov’s guilt – guilty, in the eyes of Stalin, of having been the subject of Trotskiy’s attention, a crime which might have landed him in Lubyanka prison. In fact, in totalitarian communication, words can become evidence, or even proof, of guilt, given that the crime is purely ideological. Also, for the Nazi lieutenant Peter Bach, words could become accusations. Weak after being wounded, Bach incautiously informs the nurse that the German soldiers on the front at Stalingrad are lost. But he immediately regrets it, and Grossman, with characteristic psychological delicacy, describes the captured man’s reaction: Bach remembered that hospital personnel had instructions to report on the morale of the wounded. And he himself had just expressed a lack of confidence in the might of the armed forces. He said very distinctly: “Yes, just how it will turn out is anyone’s guess.” What had made him repeat these dangerous words? No one can understand unless he himself lives in a totalitarian empire.

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He had repeated these words because he was annoyed with himself for feeling frightened after saying them the first time. And also out of self-defence – to deceive a possible informer by a show of nonchalance. (Grossman 1998b, 273; Grossman 2006, 368–9) There is no place for weakness in either Nazi or Soviet communication, not even to express feelings or human needs. There is no place for an extra word uttered “in the heat of the moment” (Grossman 1998b, 269; Grossman 2006, 363). The alienating impact of systematic diffidence is revealed in selfdenunciation, whereby an individual identifies the enemy within himself and voluntarily presents himself for punishment. The tragically paradoxical expression “Comrades, I’m not one of you. I’m an alien element” (“Tovarishchi, ya ne nash chelovek”: Grossman 1998b, 288; Grossman 2006, 389) is the concise and disturbing formulation of such ideological alienation. 1.5. Soviet Propaganda Styles: Lenin vs. Stalin As well as determining the prevailing meaning and function of words and the proper content of and conditions for what could be said, the totalitarian state has its own style, a way of speaking with which it is identified. This is the so-called langue du bois, otherwise known as novoyaz,15 Russian for Orwell’s “Newspeak.” It is the language of ideology, appearing in cold, bureaucratic, and formal terms, penetrating even everyday dialogue like a disease (in fact, Chukovskiy called it “cancellieritis” – kantselyarit).16 The syntactic and lexical characteristics of novoyaz have been described in numerous studies17 underlining its terrible poverty and artificial origins. Rich in ideological words, novoyaz is a stereotyped language, overloaded with lexical crossbreeds or mash-ups – “kompartya” (kommunisticheskaya partya), “profsoyuz” (professionalnyy soyuz), “orgkomitet” (organizatsionnyy komitet), etc. – and preferring generic over specific content. But Soviet discourse was not stylistically homogeneous – in the thirties, the language of agitation of the revolutionary Bolsheviks gave way to the Stalinist kazennyy yazyk (bureaucratic language).18 And it is precisely through his description of these two types of discourse that Grossman linguistically represents the clash between the different

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souls of Soviet communism (Bolshevik and Stalinist), highlighting in the novel the affirmation of the “new Party line” that demands a “rejection of the values of the past.” This conflict is clearly identified in the speech made by Pryakhin, First Regional Party Secretary, to the workers of Stalingrad on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the revolution, and in the way in which his words affect Krymov, his old comrade in arms. Krymov is unable to recognize himself in the Stalinist coldness of Pryakhin’s speech, and he compares it unfavourably to the enthusiastic tone of the early revolutionary slogans: And this [Pryakhin] was the same man who had once stood beside Krymov during a revolutionary meeting at the front, who had torn off his cap and shouted: “Comrades, soldiers, brothers, to hell with this war and its blood! Long live freedom!” Now he gazed calmly around the hall … … It was the very coldness of his speech that confirmed just how absolute was the State’s triumph. (Grossman 1998b, 386–7; Grossman 2006, 517–18) Reflecting on the language, Krymov continued to measure his distance from the Party led by Stalin: “Pryakhin’s words were spoken in the cold language of officialdom [govoril kazyonnymi, kholodnymi, chinovnymi slovami]. He had talked, in the name of the State, about grain procurements, worker’s obligations and percentages of the plan. Krymov had always disliked the soulless speeches delivered by soulless bureaucrats – but these soulless bureaucrats were his oldest comrades, the men he had marched in step with” (Grossman 1998b, 393; Grossman 2006, 526). But the gap between the old comrades, marked by Pryakhin’s linguistic style, is somewhat illusory, which Krymov will discover in the Lubyanka prison after being beaten by a communist like himself: Never had he felt such hatred towards the Tsarist police, the Mensheviks or even toward the SS officer he had once interrogated. No, the man now trampling over him was not someone alien. Krymov could see himself in this officer, could recognize in him the same Krymov who as a boy had wept with happiness over those astonishing words of the Communist Manifesto: “Workers of the World Unite!” And this feeling of recognition was appalling. (Grossman 1998b, 460; Grossman 2006, 618)

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And so the formerly enthusiastic Bolshevik succumbs when faced with the scandal of his arrest, provoked by the truth that their common practice of totalitarianism nullifies the apparent differences, even the most obvious, between Nazism and communism. The Bolshevik Mostovskoy is scandalized by this truth also, as stated in the insinuations of the SS officer Liss, who tries to convince him that there are no substantial differences between Soviet communism and Nazism (which is, in fact, Grossman’s thesis) (Grossman 1998b, part 2, chapter 15; Grossman 2006, part 2, chapter 14).

2 . A n t i- to ta l ita r ian Di scourse a n d t h e L a n g uage of Li fe Against the manipulative and coercive communication of power, what developed inside Soviet totalitarianism was a discourse that has been defined as “anti-totalitarian” and that attracted the attention of linguists, even though it has mostly been studied after the advent of perestroika.19 Such linguistic dissent can be found, for example, in the intimate and sincere words of Mariya Ivanovna, Sokolov’s wife, who goes to visit her friend Shtrum on the day the Institute of Physics has condemned him for his “idealistic” and “anti-Soviet” theories (two other adjective-labels of the Soviet novoyaz). She talks about children and shopping, ignoring the dramatic event that has occurred. And Shtrum, who understands the implicit rebellion of this way of communication, comments: “It was as though she [Mariya Ivanovna] were affirming that no power in the world could stop people from being people; that even the most powerful State was unable to intrude on a circle of parents, sisters and children; and that her admiration for the people she was sitting with gave her the right to talk not about what had been imposed on them from outside, but about their own inner concerns” (Grossman 1998b, 526; Grossman 2006, 703–4). Intimate and free dialogue represented the small sampling of daily freedom that Soviet citizens learned to carve out for themselves. Beyond that, Grossman also shows us another form of linguistic dissent, which has also been highlighted by studies of anti-totalitarian language: an active fight against ideological terminology and the euphemisms it uses to cloak reality.20 This time the example comes from the exchange between two Nazis, Rozenberg, the Brenner who is overseeing the cremation of the inmates killed in the concentration camp, and the Scharführer Elf:

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Scharführer Elf insisted that the bodies should be referred to as items – 100 items, 200 items – but Rozenberg called them people: a man who had been killed, a child who had been put to death, an old man who had been put to death. He used these words only to himself – otherwise the Scharführer would have emptied nine grams of metal into him – but he continued obstinately muttering: “So now you’re coming out of the grave old chap … There’s no need to clutch your mother like that, my child, you won’t be separated from her now …” “What are you muttering about over there? Me? Nothing. You must have imagined it.” And he carried on muttering; that was his little struggle. (Grossman 1998b, 141–2; Grossman 2006, 200–1)21 Such exercises of linguistic freedom evidence Grossman’s response to the dramatic question that he poses in one of the novel’s long reflective digressions: “Does human nature undergo a true change in the cauldron of totalitarian violence? Does man lose his innate yearning for freedom? The fate of both man and the totalitarian State depends on the answer to this question. If human nature does change, then the eternal and world-wide triumph of the dictatorial State is assured; if his yearning for freedom remains constant, then the totalitarian State is doomed” (Grossman 1998b, 153; Grossman 2006, 216). Grossman replies to this question with a complete conviction of the indestructability of human nature: “Man’s innate yearning for freedom can be suppressed but never destroyed … Man does not renounce freedom voluntarily. This conclusion holds hope for our time, hope for the future” (Grossman 1998b, 153; Grossman 2006, 216). Such certainty follows from Grossman’s understanding that every human being is unique and unrepeatable, and therefore free: What constitutes the freedom, the soul of an individual life, is its uniqueness. The reflection of the universe in someone’s consciousness is the foundation of his or her power, but life only becomes happiness, is only endowed with freedom and meaning when someone exists as a whole world that has never been repeated in all eternity. Only then can they experience the joy of freedom and kindness, finding in others what they have already found in themselves. (Grossman 1998b, 415; Grossman 2006, 555)

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In opposition to the totalitarian ideology, the seeming fate of twentieth-century man, Grossman proffers a unique, free life; but what sort of linguistic trace does this fact leave on the novel? And alongside the communicative restrictions of totalitarianism, is there also a language of this free, unique, and unrepeatable life? We encounter life in its roughest and most primitive mode in the first chapters of the novel, which describe the prisoners in the Nazi concentration camp. They come from a range of different countries – there are Russians, Poles, Italians, and other nationalities. The camp itself reproduces a system of totalitarian communication in which real communication seems impossible, and this is true not only as between the victims and their oppressors, but also between the victims themselves. Grossman expresses the profound nature of this ideologically rooted communicative block: “And in this silence of the dumb and these speeches of the blind, in this medley of people bound together by the same grief, terror and hope, in this hatred and lack of understanding between men who spoke the same tongue, you could see much of the tragedy of the twentieth century” (Grossman 1998b, 16; Grossman 2006, 33). And yet, even here the possibility of communication exists: Nevertheless, in a language composed of smiles, glances, slaps on the back and ten or fifteen words of atrociously mangled Russian, French, German and English, the Russians were able to discuss comradeship, solidarity, fellow-feeling, love of one’s home, love of one’s wife and children, with people from dozens of different countries. Kamerad, gut, brot, suppe, kinder, zigarette, arbeit and another dozen words that had originated in the camps themselves … were enough to express everything of real importance in the simple yet bewildering life of the prisoners. (Grossman 1998b, 16; Grossman 2006, 32) Here we find the most elementary aspects of life, which are able to spark communication beyond words, as occurs between two soldiers, a Russian and a German, lying in the dark in a bomb crater, who ignore the fact that they are enemies: “They lay there beside one another; the same soft light, the same prayer for life filled both their heads. It was the same light, the same touching hope that glows in all heads and all hearts – in those of birds and animals as well as in those of human beings” (Grossman 1998, 323; Grossman 2006, 435).

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This profound, innate instinct for life is expressed in the novel more in gestures than in words; language appears unable to adequately describe it. Among the deported masses of Jews it is evoked in music, which in some mysterious way can touch souls beyond words: What music resurrects in the soul of a man about to die is neither hope nor thought, but simply the blind, heart-breaking miracle of life itself. A sob passed down the column. Everything seemed transformed, everything had come together; everything scattered and fragmented – home, peace, the journey, the rumble of wheels, thirst, terror, the city rising out of the mist, the wan red dawn – fused together, not into a memory or a picture but into the blind, fierce ache of life itself. Here, in the glow of the gas ovens, people knew that life was more than happiness – it was also grief. And freedom was both painful and difficult; it was life itself. (Grossman 1998b, 403; Grossman 2006, 539–40) Even if it is true that life itself can remain silent, in Life and Fate nevertheless Grossman’s profound conviction that each man remains a real and unique individual, and is therefore free, is embodied in very precise linguistic structures that are the antithesis of ideological communication made up of abstractions, conventionality, and mindless endorsement. These structures include lists of details, metaphors, dialogue, assertions, exclamations, and questions: these linguistic traces of individual consciousness in the characters are the fundamental tools Grossman employs to combat ideological discourse. An attempt will be made in the following pages to show the reader a number of examples of each. 2.1. The List: A Linguistic Form of the Unique and Unrepeatable Ego There are details in Life and Fate which capture the attention of the reader and remain in his memory. Often their mention is justified by a direct link with a character or the needs of the narrative; they constitute the book’s “artistic flesh” (Sarnov 2007, 135) and create that realism of detail that is such a fundamental element of the novel. However, alongside these, we find other types of detail, which we might call “pure”: details that are not part of a felicitous expression of the qualities of the characters or part of an illuminating narrative passage, but are presented in the form of a list of words, apparently

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without any narrative-expressive intention.22 These lists are sometimes jarringly long; long lists of nouns, adjectives, and adverbs interrupt the thread of the story with their cumulative referential power. In these lists, words don’t have just a stylistic, narrative, or figurative value. For example, Russian soldiers leaving for Stalingrad are described as “timid, gloomy, easily amused, thoughtful; womanizers, harmless egotists, idlers, misers, contemplatives, good sorts” (Grossman 1998b, 162; Grossman 2006, 229): a list that could go on forever, without any purpose that could determine its end. The reason for these detailed lists is explained by Madyarov just after stating an overly long and seemingly pointless list of characters from Chekhov (Grossman’s favourite writer): “Doctors, engineers, lawyers, teachers, lecturers, landlords, shopkeepers, industrialists, nannies, lackeys, students, civil servants of every rank, cattle-dealers, tram-conductors, marriage-brokers, sextons, bishops, peasants, workers, cobblers, artists’ models, horticulturalists, zoologists, innkeepers, gamekeepers, prostitutes, fishermen, lieutenants, corporals, artists, cooks, writers, janitors, nuns, soldiers, midwives, prisoners on the Sakhalin Islands” (Grossman 1998b, 206–7; Grossman 2006, 282). With this detailed list Madyarov wants to show that Chekhovian democracy is not an abstract ideal, but the primacy of “human beings! human beings! human beings!” (lyudi, lyudi, lyudi!; Grossman 1998, 207). This statement shows us the meaning of the many lists we find in the novel: they are one of the ways in which Grossman fights against abstraction and ideology. Pure details, presented in list form, are needed because each individual cannot be assimilated into a category, cannot be described in generic terms: he is concrete, unique, and unrepeatable, and what makes him unique and unrepeatable is everything that comes within the scope of his perception, as Grossman explains in Dobro vam (Good Wishes), when he describes with what keenness of the senses a foreigner experiences his first moments in a strange city: Your first minutes on the streets of an unfamiliar city are always special; what happens in later months or years can never supplant them. These minutes are filled with the visual equivalent of nuclear energy, a kind of nuclear power of attention. With penetrating insight and an all-pervading excitement, you absorb a huge universe – houses, trees, faces of passers-by, signs, squares,

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smells, dust, cats and dogs, the colour of the sky. During these minutes, like an omnipotent God, you bring a new world into being; you create, you build inside yourself a whole city with all its streets and squares, with its courtyards and patios, with its sparrows, with its thousands of years of history, with its food shops and its shops for manufactured goods, with its opera house and its canteens. This city that suddenly arises from nonbeing is a special city; it differs from the city that exists in reality – it is the city of a particular person. Its autumn leaves have their own unique way of rustling; there is something special about the smell of its dust, about the way its young boys fire their slingshot. And it takes only a few minutes, not even hours, to accomplish this miracle of creation. And when a man dies, there dies with him a unique, unrepeatable world that he himself has created – a whole universe with its own oceans and mountains, with its own sky. (Grossman 1998a, 161; Grossman 2013, 49) Each man, therefore, is not only real and special in himself, but also he perceives what surrounds him in a unique and subjective way; this is made clear in the mind of Colonel Novikov as he watches his men gathering their things and thoughts, apparently lost in the details, before leaving for the last great counteroffensive of Stalingrad: The thoughts of these men may have been trivial – an abandoned dog, a hut in a remote village, hatred for another soldier who’s stolen your girl … But these trivialities are precisely what matter. Human groupings have one main purpose: to assert everyone’s right to be different, to be special, to think, feel and live in his or her own way. People join together in order to win or defend this right. But this is where a terrible, fateful error is born: the belief that these groupings in the name of a race, a God, a party or a State are the very purpose of life and not simply a means to an end. No! The only true and lasting meaning of the struggle for life lies in the individual, in his modest peculiarities and in his right to these peculiarities. (Grossman 1998b, 162–3; Grossman 2006, 230) Pure details, represented in the form of lists, do not respond in the first instance to the needs of narrative realism, but to the view of the

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author, and are a mark of the highly effective juxtapositional style of Grossman’s writing. 2.2. From the Senses to Consciousness: Interpretative Synthesis Perception of detail is, nevertheless, only the start of a process that goes from the senses to consciousness. This process is clearly manifested at the moment when characters in the novel become aware of the uniqueness of their existence and feel, as Grossman says, the “sentiment of life”: it is then that the minutiae of life come together and find unity, that the meaning of life is revealed. Take for example Lyudmila, watching from the window as her daughter bids farewell to her fiancé: The moon was shining and the street was quite empty. Once again she saw Nadya arm in arm with her lieutenant; they were walking down the road towards the flat. Suddenly Nadya started to run and the young man in the military greatcoat stood there in the middle of the road, gazing after her. Everything most incompatible suddenly fused together in Lyudmila’s heart: her love for Viktor, her resentment of Viktor, her anxiety on Viktor’s behalf; Tolya who had died without ever kissing a girl’s lips; the lieutenant standing there in the road; Vera climbing happily up the staircase of her house in Stalingrad, poor homeless Aleksandra Vladimirovna … Her soul filled with the sense of life that is man’s only joy and his most terrible pain. (Grossman 1998b, 441–2; Grossman 2006, 591) The same sense of life is dramatically reawakened by music as the Jews go off to die in the gas chambers: “You carry away this sense of your life without having ever shared it with anyone: the miracle of a particular individual whose conscious and unconscious contains everything good and bad, everything funny, sweet, shameful, pitiful, timid, tender, uncertain, that has happened from childhood to old age – fused into the mysterious sense of an individual life” (Grossman 1998b, 405–6; Grossman 2006, 543).23 It is precisely in the parts of the novel that deal with the fate of the Jews that we can most clearly observe the shift from the recognition

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of details to profound consciousness, or the formation of the “sentiment of life.” We see it emblematically in the consciousness of Viktor Shtrum’s mother, Anna (Grossman 1998b, 58; Grossman 2006, 88–9). In the letter in which she bids farewell to her son, Anna relates how, toward the end, before the occupation of her city by the Nazis, she at first had developed the conviction that she was walking up a blind alley towards death: but with the growth of consciousness, the details reveal the implicit sense of having been combined, and it is a sense that is clarified in a word or image. For Shtrum’s mother, the final meaning of all such detail, as read by the attentive eyes of the doctor examining symptoms (significantly, Anna is a ophthalmologist), is not just death, but also love, above all for her son; this love makes her feel safe and protected, even from the Nazis who are about to take her away: “I can hear women weeping on the street, and policemen swearing; as I look at these pages, they seem to protect me from a terrible world that is filled with suffering” (Grossman 1998b, 62; Grossman 2006, 93). Love, the highest synthesis of Anna’s life, knows the words to express itself: “Are there words capable of expressing my love for you?” she asks at the end of her letter, and immediately gives the answer: “Live, live, live for ever … Mama” [Zhivi, zhivi, zhivi vechno … Mama] (Grossman 1998b, 62; Grossman 2006, 93). “Live, live, live for ever …” is the expression of one of the numerous interpretative syntheses at which the author of Life and Fate and his characters arrive, starting from that which they perceive with the senses; such moments of synthesis of a sentiment of life are mostly expressed in certain linguistic forms: metaphors, dialogue, exclamations, and questions. In the next sections, we will look at some examples of these. 2 .2 .1 . Me ta p hors o f K nowi ng Before being a linguistic figure, metaphor is a representation of thought, a widely used form of expressing the synthesis of human consciousness (see the reference to the “conceptual metaphor” in Lakoff and Johnson 1980). Used in day-to-day language perhaps even more than in literature, metaphor is rarely used by Grossman for a decorative or rhetorical purpose. Instead, Grossman uses metaphor as an instrument of consciousness that illuminates the meaning of certain episodes, the expression of an interpretative synthesis, or a clarifying moment.

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One of the clearest and most poignant metaphors in the novel is the chrysalis, which is linked to the figure of the Jewish boy, David. In the novel it emerges as a narrative device. David, visiting his grandmother in the country, comes upon a chrysalis that he will keep with him during his long transfer to the concentration camp (where he will be gassed). On his arrival at the camp, David feels the matchbox in his pocket where he keeps the chrysalis which, in the meantime, has come out of its cocoon. For David it is still a reassuring little creature, so much so that when he encounters the orchestra he wants to open the box just a little to let the creature see the musicians. But the music soon turns the small boy’s mind to the memory of his distant mother, and he perceives himself to be powerless in the face of the death that confronts him. Fear rises, and the chrysalis, in all its incompleteness, reminds us of the boy’s youth: “As for the chrysalis,24 it had no wings, no paws, no antennae, no eyes; it just lay there in its little box, stupidly trustful, waiting” (Grossman, 1998b, 406; Grossman 2006, 544). In narrative terms, the chrysalis moves away from David’s consciousness, it can no longer reassure him, but in so doing it is slowly transformed into a metaphor, a metaphor for his infantile and tragically helpless desire to live. And then, seeing the blocks of concrete (the gas chambers), in an unconscious premonition David, from a “chrysalis” himself, suddenly becomes an adult and makes the only gesture that can make any sense in the life of an adult: he gives up the chrysalis so that it may live, and, in his own way, becomes a father: “As the column turned, a gap appeared in the ranks and David saw that some of the buildings had their doors flung wide open. Not knowing why, he took the little box out of his pocket and, without saying goodbye to the chrysalis, flung it away. Let it live!” (Grossman 1998b, 407; Grossman 2006, 546). In this way the chrysalis becomes a symbol of life that must go on, as affirmed by David in the last moment before his martyrdom. Grossman’s cognitive metaphor, which brings together the details presented for the reader’s or character’s observation, provides a clue that is hidden in the text as a narrative device: often it emerges from the landscape, is dissolved in it, and only in the end is it revealed to have a meaning quite different from the other details described. The reader therefore has to dig deeper among the details of the descriptions: the wastewater from the concentration camp, for example, as it flows is transformed by Grossman into a metaphor for life, a life

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made of pain, but, despite the apparent contradiction, destined for happiness, because of where it comes from: Dark water forced its way sullenly and mutely between heavy blocks of stone and slabs of concrete. It was a rusty black and it smelt of decay; it was covered in green chemical foam, filthy shreds of rag, blood-stained clothes discarded by the camp operating-theatres. It disappeared underground, came back to the surface, disappeared once more. Nevertheless, it forced its way through – the waves of the sea and the morning dew were still present, still alive in the dark water of camp. Meanwhile, the condemned went to their death. (Grossman 1998b, 404; Grossman 2006, 541) 2 .2 .2 . D i a l ogue Dialogue and the interior monologue (a dialogue with oneself) are among the linguistic forms that make it possible to resist conforming and thereby to affirm life. Dialogue can take place only when the speakers cooperate, and so it is the textual form of encounter par excellence and can result in an encounter between consciousness and free will. It is of course possible that a hoped-for dialogue can not take place or that dialogue can fail. In the novel, there are numerous examples of failed dialogue, such as that between General Yeryomenko and Chuykov on the front at Stalingrad, at the end of which Chuykov murmurs to himself: “No, he certainly had not expressed all his fears and anxieties to Yeryomenko … But neither of the two men quite understood why their meeting had been so unsatisfactory; that the main thing about it was not the practical part, but what they had both been unable to say” (Grossman 1998b, 36; Grossman 2006, 57).25 But when it works, dialogue is able to express a powerful resistance to the violence of the State; one thinks of the conversations at Sokolov’s home, or the heated dialogue between Zhenya and Limonov, during which Zhenya is reanimated and overcomes the nihilism generated in her by the hard-hearted coldness of the Soviet bureaucrat Grishin: How oppressed she was by her memories of the police station! In this room full of books and periodicals … she could not get Grishin out of her mind.

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But the word, the free intelligent word has great power. There were moments when Yevgeniya quite forgot about Grishin and the depressed-looking faces in the queue. (Grossman 1998b, 85; Grossman 2006, 125) Successful dialogue often leads to a revelation, as in the conversation between Grekov, the soldier, and Krymov, the Party commissar. The latter’s apparent omniscience disappears when faced with the former’s perspicacity in recognizing the pain of his interlocutor caused by nostalgia for Zhenya: “There’s something good in your eyes … But you’ve suffered a lot” (Grossman 1998b, 318; Grossman 2006, 428) – words that stay with Krymov and enable him, in the depths of his despair, to rediscover himself. Open and sincere dialogue links many of the characters in Life and Fate (Darensky is linked with Bova, Krymov with Grekov, etc.). Darensky, Novikov, Krymov, and, above all, the physicist Shtrum all engage in dialogue at one or another point in the novel. Shtrum always tries to converse with his interlocutors in a clear and simple manner (po prostomu), with kindness, understanding almost instinctively that you cannot fight against the language of ideology and collective alienation with an opposite ideology, but only by reaffirming the personal principle, intimacy. In fact, sincere dialogue can be freed from the categorical limitations of the Party by its shift from the general to the particular and the personal (the opposite of partiynost) and its ceasing to reproduce both the false, stuffy tone of official discourse and the ostentatious joviality of those familiar with power. The way in which Grossman describes the exchange between Shtrum and his colleague Sokolov is significant here: the two engage in a brief exchange about a mutual acquaintance, and the narrator observes that a question posed by Shtrum was “unprompted and spoken in a whisper … a way of saying that some relationships are special, and have nothing to do with the State” (Grossman 1998b, 425; Grossman 2006, 569). The low voice is, however, a violation of totalitarian communication, and is the reason why the fearful Sokolov returns to the controlled Soviet mode of communication, using only the raised tone of his voice to send a clear signal to his interlocutor: “‘No, I’ve had no news from Kazan at all.’ Sokolov’s reply, delivered in a loud, unruffled voice, was a way of saying that such a relationship was no longer appropriate for them” (Grossman 1998b, 425; Grossman 2006, 570).

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The power and clarity of the “free intelligent word” that is born of frank dialogue is evoked a number of times in the novel. We have already mentioned Zhenya in her dialogue with Limonov, but it is, above all, Shtrum who seeks the “free intelligent word,” as when, after making a joke about Stalin’s ignorance of science that slipped out in front of a collaborator, he reflects: Why, why, why all these jokes? It was mad to make such jokes – like banging a flask of nitro-glycerine with a hammer. What power and clarity lies in the word! In the unfettered, carefree word! The word that is still spoken in spite of all one’s fears. (Grossman 1998b, 212; Grossman 2006, 289) And again, remembering his conversations with his brother-in-law Krymov, he thinks to himself: “What a wonderful power and clarity there is in speaking one’s mind. What a terrible price people paid for a few bold words” (Grossman 1998b, 211; Grossman 2006, 288). It is truth that has this liberating force, but not so much the ultimate truths, but any truth, even the prosaic everyday variety that demands to be openly recognized in order to counteract the duplicity that poisons everyday conversation in the totalitarian society, a duplicity that makes it impossible to call a loaf a loaf, a mother a mother, to declare that good is good, death is death. The word that is born free is an instrument of this force and is consequently always “clear.” It is clarifying and liberating. 2 .2 .3 . T he A ut hor ’s V oi c e : A s s e rt i o n s , Exc la m at i o ns, a nd Que st i o n s In Life and Fate the clarifying word is present also in the form of assertions or exclamations by the author that make explicit and recap the reader’s cognitive journey. In the episode of Lyudmila at the Saratov hospital, the surgeon Mayzel hides his hands, which, instead of saving Lyudmila’s son, Tolya, involuntarily hastened his death; the Commissar cannot face the mother’s stare and has to drink a glass of water that he had poured for her; the nurse Terentyeva is unable to hold back her tears, and after describing so much embarrassment the author states: “Everyone feels guilty before a mother who has lost her son in a war; throughout human history men have tried in vain to justify themselves” (Grossman 1998b, 104; Grossman 2006, 150).

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This concluding word of the author may also be described as an exclamation, rhetorically ingenuous, but of a liberating simplicity, similar to that which concludes the episode of the romantic Lieutenant Viktorov walking in the woods: “A young, narrow-shouldered lieutenant was walking through the forest in a worn tunic. How many people there were like him – forgotten during unforgettable years” (Grossman 1998b, 150; Grossman 2006, 162). There is also the exclamation after the counteroffensive at Stalingrad, as the Nazis see the re-emergence of life in the daze of their defeat: “Over their heads hung a terrible frozen abyss. Frosted tin stars stood out against a frostbound sky. Who among these doomed men could have understood that for millions of Germans these were the first hours, after ten years of complete inhumanity, of a slow return to human life?” (Grossman 1998b, 548; Grossman 2006, 731–2). At times Grossman’s clarifying word is hidden among those of his characters; it might be difficult to identify the author’s voice were it not for the grammar that gives him away. Take the example of Sofya Osipovna, whose heart, in the instant before she dies, is full of pity not for “them,” but for “you” men: “Her heart, however, still had life in it: it contracted, ached and felt pity for all of you, both living and dead; Sofya Osipovna felt a wave of nausea. She pressed David, now doll, to herself; she became dead, a doll” (Grossman 1998b, 414; Grossman 2006, 554). The same overlapping with the authorial voice can be seen in the concluding reflection in which the author, in the ruminations of Aleksandra Vladimirovna upon visiting her destroyed home, explains the title of the book: And here she was, an old woman now, living and hoping, keeping faith, afraid of evil, full of anxiety for the living and an equal concern for the dead; here she was, looking at the ruins of her home, admiring the spring sky without knowing that she was admiring it, wondering why the future of those she loved was so obscure and the past so full of mistakes, not realizing that this very obscurity and unhappiness concealed a strange hope and clarity, not realizing that in the depths of her soul she already knew the meaning of both her own life and the lives of her nearest and dearest, not realizing that even though neither she herself nor any of them could tell what was in store, even though they all knew only too well that at times like these no man can forge

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his own happiness and that fate alone has the power to pardon and chastise, to raise up to glory and to plunge into need, to reduce a man to labour-camp dust, nevertheless neither fate, nor history, nor the anger of the State, nor the glory or infamy of battle has any power to affect those who call themselves human beings. No, whatever life holds in store – hard-won glory, poverty and despair, or death in a labour-camp – they will live as human beings and die as human beings, the same as those who have already perished; and in this alone lies man’s eternal and bitter victory over all the grandiose and inhuman forces that ever have been or will be. (Grossman 1998b, 644; Grossman 2006, 861–2) Metaphor, dialogue, and the assertions and exclamations of the author: these are the linguistic means by which, in the midst of the intrigues of the story, in the minutiae of the story’s detail, a design takes shape and a final understanding is proclaimed. However, the most clarifying form of speech for Grossman would appear to be the question – a sincere interrogation in wonder born of experience and observation. Questions are frequently employed by the author to indicate shifts in the consciousness of his characters; think, for example, of the incredulous questions raised by Anna, Shtrum’s mother, faced with men’s evil (Grossman 1998b, 57; Grossman 2006, 86), or those of Krymov, the useless “stepson of the time” (Grossman 1998b, 31; Grossman 2006, 51), or the doubts of Shtrum, or the questions that Aleksandra Vladimirovna asks herself about the future of her loved ones as she contemplates the ruins of Stalingrad (Grossman 1998b, 643; Grossman 2006, 860–1). The questions of these characters, like those of the author, are not mere requests for information or explanation, but express more or less incredulous amazement, often indicated by the particle that the Russian language uses for this function: neuzheli (Bonola 2006). The dumbstruck question gives a voice to the amazed consciousness when, at the height of its understanding, it is able to take account of the mysterious nature of life. But, at the same time, it is also a begging for explanation, or rather, for an understanding of what is hidden behind this astonishing mystery. Such questions emerge in the novel when the characters find themselves in moments when what is happening to them is incomprehensible, or different from

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what they had imagined: in other words, when the unexpected mystery enters their experience. And so we understand why old Andreev, on hearing that his wife has died far away, asks: “Had he really (neuzheli) once sat here in a room filled with light? Had he really (neuzheli) eaten his breakfast here before going to work – with his wife standing next to him wondering whether to give him a second helping? Yes, all that remained for him now was a solitary death” (Grossman 1998, 190; Grossman 2006, 262); or the question that Zhenya asks, torn between pity for Krymov, her abandoned husband, and her attraction to Novikov: “Was (neuzheli) what had happened final, irrevocable? Poor, poor Nikolay Grigorevich! What had he done to deserve all this?” (Grossman 1998b, 243; Grossman 2006, 331); or the question posed by Shtrum as he seeks consolation for his voluntary separation from the woman he loves: “Would he (neuzheli) never see her again?” (Grossman 1998b, 568; Grossman 2006, 759). Even after his crowning scientific achievement, a question arises in Shtrum that betrays the ever-present memory of his mother who was killed by the Nazis, an open wound, suggesting the supreme question of his life: “Viktor shrugged his shoulders and frowned. Would (neuzheli) his mother never know, would she never know what her son had just achieved?” (Grossman 1998b, 262; Grossman 2006, 357). An incredulous question also arises in Mostovskoy and reveals the doubt that could undermine all of his ideological certainties: “Mostovskoy watched Liss and thought to himself: ‘Did this vile nonsense really (neuzheli) confuse me for a moment? Was I really (neuzheli) choking in this stream of poisonous, stinking dirt?’” (Grossman 1998b, 298; Grossman 2006, 401). Neuzheli also introduces another question (of Klimov or Grossman?) that reveals the real consequence of the Stalingrad counteroffensive: the rediscovered brotherhood of the Russian people. In front of the ruins of the celebrated House 6/1, the symbol of the Russian resistance, this question resonates in the consciousness of the soldier who has escaped almost by chance: “My brothers, have you (neuzheli) all been killed?” (Grossman 1998b, 325; Grossman 2006, 437). It is also through a question – though not this time one of amazement – that the shock of the horrors of the concentration camps emerges, casting doubt not only on the legitimacy of art, but even on the lives of the survivors: “How can one describe that last, quick look at a beloved face? Yes, and how can a man live with the merciless

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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 continue to exist, seeing the glow in the sky flaring up with renewed strength? Now the hands he had kissed must be burning, now the eyes that had admired him, now the hair whose smell he could recognize in the darkness, now his children, his wife, his mother” (Grossman 1998b, 404; Grossman 2006, 540–1). This question is dramatically different from that of Sofya Osipovna, who reveals her desire to remember and pass on to posterity everything that must never happen again: “As she listened to people’s cries and mutterings, she realized that their heads were filled with painfully vivid images that no words could ever convey. How could these images be preserved, how could they be fixed – in case men remained alive on earth and wanted to find out what had happened?” (Grossman 1998b, 141; Grossman 2006, 200). Finally, the incredulous question allows the emergence in Krymov of a consciousness of the meanness and the personal responsibility of those living under a totalitarian regime: But then there were some people – usually old women, lowermiddle-class housewives – who would help you send parcels to someone in camp. You could arrange for someone in camp to write to you at their address. And for some reason they were quite unafraid. These same old women, these superstitious domestics and illiterate nannies, would even take in children whose mothers and fathers had been arrested, saving them from orphanages and reception-centres. Members of the Party, on the other hand, avoided these children like the plague. Were these old women braver and more honourable than Old Bolsheviks like Mostovskoy and Krymov? (Grossman 1998b, 394; Grossman 2006, 527–8) And similar to that of Krymov, there is the question posed by the Nazi Commandant Bach regarding his complicity with the regime’s inhumanity: He had never killed a child; he had never arrested anyone. But he had broken the fragile dyke that had protected the purity of his soul from the seething darkness around him. The blood of the camps and ghettos had gushed over him and carried him away

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… there was no longer any divide between him and the darkness; he himself was a part of the darkness. What had happened to him? Was it folly, chance? Or was it the deepest law of his soul? (Grossman 1998b, 552; Grossman 2006, 737)

3. T h e R e awa k e n in g o f Cons ci ous nes s as Art i s t ic T ru t h : S im p l ic it y and Transparency Ever-fuller consciousness makes it possible to proceed from the particular to a synthesis, the supreme form of which, paradoxically, is not the definitive assertion, but rather the question – a question, moreover, of amazement. The subjects discussed above – lists of nouns, adjectives, and verbs; metaphors, dialogues, and questions – are the linguistic expression of the evolution of awareness, indications of the unique and unrepeatable nature and therefore of the freedom of man. But the transition from the multiplicity to the synthesis is also what happens in authentic art, as Michel Aucouturier reminds us, quoting a passage from Grossman’s For a Just Cause (1956): Artificial art stands between man and the world for complicated, difficult and insurmountable reasons like a heavy cast-iron grate. But there are some books that provoke their readers to say, “I too have had the same thought, I have felt and I feel the same, I too have experienced this.” Art of this kind does not separate man from the world; art in this case unites man to life, to the world, to others. It does not scrutinize human life through tinted or “ingeniously” coloured glass. Anyone who reads these pages will have the impression life is dissolving in them and that they can allow the immensity and complexity of human existence to enter their blood, their thoughts, their breath. But such simplicity is the supreme simplicity of the white light of day, the result of the complexity of light waves. In this clear, serene, and deep simplicity lies the truth of authentic art. It is like spring water: when you look at it, you can see the depth from which the water flows, the blades of grass, the rocks. But the source is not only transparent, it is also a mirror; and one can see oneself and the heart of the whole universe in which we

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suffer, struggle, live. Art brings us both the transparency of glass and the ability to see our reflection in a perfect, universal mirror. (Grossman 1998c, 147–8; quoted in Aucouturier 2007, 147) Simplicity, transparency, a reflection of the cosmos: these are the characteristics of authentic art, but also of science and, more generally, of any moment of truth achieved by man.26 The physicist Shtrum describes this well in his expression of the mental path that led him to the crowning scientific discovery of his life: Suddenly an idea came to him. Immediately, with his whole being, he knew it was true. He had glimpsed a new and improbable explanation for the atomic phenomena that up until now had seemed so hopelessly inexplicable; abysses had suddenly changed into bridges. What clarity and simplicity! This idea was astonishingly graceful and beautiful. It seemed to have given birth to itself – like a water-lily appearing out of the calm darkness of a lake. He gasped, revelling in its beauty. (Grossman 1998b, 212; Grossman 2006, 290) Clear, limpid truth is something very different from the simplifications of an ideology that cancels out all differences and decides the destiny of individuals with its labels. In the novel, Grossman represents this simplification in the geometrically precise landscape of the concentration camp and in the long, straight corridors of Lubyanka.27 Shtrum is reflecting rather on the simplicity of truth, including what he calls the “bread for the soul” (Grossman 1998b, 262; Grossman 2006, 356) of scientific truth, which is born only in freedom: “And how strange, he thought suddenly, that this idea should have come to him when his mind was far away from anything to do with science, when the discussions that so excited him were those of free men, when his words and the words of his friends had been determined only by freedom, by bitter freedom” (Grossman 1998b, 212–13; Grossman 2006, 290). The transition from complexity, from the long and varied lists, to the simple clarity of the word, the image, or a question achieved by consciousness is the defining characteristic of Grossman’s writing which determines the simple force of all of his art, not only Life and Fate.

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n otes   1 The relationship between totalitarianism and ideological construction has been examined by many, most notably Hannah Arendt: “Over and above the senselessness of totalitarian society is enthroned the ridiculous supersense of its ideological superstition. Ideologies are harmless, uncritical, and arbitrary opinions only as long as they are not believed in seriously. Once their claim to total validity is taken literally they become the nuclei of logical systems in which, as in the systems of paranoiacs, everything follows comprehensibly and even compulsorily once the first premise is accepted” (Arendt 1973, 457).   2 Regarding the concept of “totalitarian” language and communication in the context of the Soviet regime, see Kupina 1995; meanwhile for the language of the Nazi regime, reference is made to the monograph by Victor Klemperer, one of the first (1947) and now classic studies of the subject, a first-hand account and testimony showing the transformations to which the German language was subjected under the Nazis (Klemperer 2000). A similar “Soviet” version of Klemperer’s book was written by Benedikt Sarnov, as the author himself declares in his introduction (Sarnov 2002). Reflections on totalitarian communication are found not only in theoretical studies (for a collection of such studies see Bonola 1999, 1, 231–43), but also in fiction. George Orwell’s 1984 is perhaps the best-known example, but before Orwell the issue had been addressed by Yevgeniy Zamyatin in his anti-utopian novel My (“We”), published in English in 1924 and in Russian in 1927 in the émigré ­magazine Volya Rossii.   3 Quotations from Life and Fate are from both the original Russian text (Grossman 1998) and the English translation (Grossman 2006).   4 On the quotidian aspect of ideological language, Grossman’s literary ­output coincides extraordinarily with the historical testimony of Victor Klemperer concerning the effects of the propaganda of the Third Reich: “the most powerful influence [of propaganda] was exerted neither by i­ndividual speeches nor by articles or flyers, posters and flags; it was not achieved by things which one had to absorb by conscious thought or conscious emotions. Instead Nazism permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms and ­sentence structures which were imposed on them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously” (Klemperer 2000, 14).   5 Here the term is used according to the speech act theory as outlined by Austin (Austin 1962).

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  6 Also in My Zamyatin describes a telephone conversation with the dictator of the Single State as an emblematic example of totalitarian communication (cf. Kupina 1999, 24–6).   7 The inability to communicate that follows arrest is similarly described by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the opening pages of The Gulag Archipelago (Solzhenitsyn 1973, 3–4).   8 Cf. Besançon 1976. On this aspect of totalitarian communication see also Thom 1989, 65ff (originally published in French: Thom 1987). For a review of studies on the relationship between the language and reality of totalitarianism see Sériot 1985, 29–45.   9 Not in fiction, but in an autobiographical account, Victor Klemperer draws a comparison to Orwell’s “Newspeak.” He notes that under the Nazi regime, the stereotyping of stock phrases had the function of impeding thought and replacing it with an ideology conveyed by a language “that writes and thinks for you,” as Schiller said (Klemperer 2000, 14). 10 Sarnov, in his Nash sovetskiy novoyaz, presents a sort of glossary of these key terms that were loaded with ideological content, explaining them from his experience as a Soviet citizen, with examples and anecdotes that illuminate their content and communicative effect. Lenin himself included the expression “enemy of the people,” originally of Jacobin origin, in the Soviet revolutionary lexicon in 1917 (Sarnov 2002, 34–9; on the “friendsenemies” polarity in Soviet ideology see Sarnov 2002, 75–91). 11 Klemperer describes this phenomenon as it occurred in numerous episodes in Nazi Germany (Klemperer 2000). 12 For Sarnov bditelnost is the most important keyword in the Soviet political lexicon (Sarnov 2002, 21–2). 13 It is not coincidental that the Nazi regime also foresaw a kind of office called Geheimsträger, “the holder of the secret” (Arendt 1963, chapter 2). 14 Note the allusive nature of the dialogue, which was also typical of totalitarian communication, both in verbal (the quotation marks an expressive indication of tone) and gestural communication. 15 The history of the term langue du bois has been traced by Sériot 1985, 21–9: it appeared in France in the period 1968–70 in a journalistic context and was used to denote the stereotyped style of political discourse used by the Eastern European and French communist parties. It has been thought that the expression may have originated in Poland in the 1950s, but this theory was refuted by Sériot (Sériot 1985, 24). M. Głowiński introduced the term nowomowa to refer to official political discourse in Poland, a term which is a translation of Orwell’s “Newspeak” (Głowiński 1991; see also Weiss 1986).

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16 Chukovskiy had already coined this term (formed by the base word kantselyar- followed by the suffix -it, as in the names of illnesses, e.g., difterit, meningit) at the beginning of the 1960s, using it to refer to the contamination of natural language by bureaucratic language (Chukovskiy 1990, 571–600). 17 Klemperer speaks metaphorically of a sort of “vow of poverty” professed by the language of the Third Reich and of its terrible uniformity (Klemperer 2000, 17); for a discussion of the morphosyntactic and lexical characteristics of “Newspeak,” see Thom 1989. 18 The final part of the monograph by Thom (1989, 159–203) is devoted to the evolution of novoyaz, from its origins up until the Gorbachev period. She traces the roots of novoyaz back to revolutionary France: the language of the French Revolution and novoyaz exhibit a shared Manicheanism and pathos, but not the impersonal style typical of the language of Marxist utopia. In arriving at its Soviet form, novoyaz passed – according to Thom – through the linguistically repugnant school of the Russian Hegelian tradition that introduced cold and abstract terms, mostly of Latin derivation (obekt, subekt, konkretnyy, etc.), from the ­philosophy of the 1840s. This proto-novoyaz, so confident in its scientific nature and perfection, would become fixed in the public proclamations of the 1850s, above all in the pages of “Sovremennik” and in the writing of N.G. Chernyshevskiy; subsequently, the language of ideology increasingly distanced itself from “­natural” Russian, and blotted out the original meaning of words by ­distorting them. At a later stage, we see the formation of a Marxist novoyaz, which would become an extremely important tool of political struggle: Lenin’s speeches did not attempt to convince with logic, but rather launched a series of words used to identify enemies and friends, and were replete with slogans, insults, and emotional statements of the Bolshevik ideal. When Stalin came to power, Soviet novoyaz lost its exhortative nature and passed from agitation (a political-rhetorical concept typical of the 1920s) to composed and logical persuasion, but no less false and violent. The Nazi form of “Newspeak,” in contrast, was always a language of agitation; it was all talk, speeches, appeals, and incitement (Klemperer 2000, 21ff). 19 Natalya Kupina discusses “linguistic resistance” (yazykovoe soprotivleniye), which involves actively fighting against novoyaz, or ignoring it by continuing to use traditional language without ideological substitution or addictions. According to Kupina, this linguistic resistance took on different forms: popular (e.g., in jokes of the chastushki); sub-linguistic, that is, belonging to the subculture; or individual (for example, the discourse of

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particular authors, e.g., in My by Yevgeniy Zamyatin or in the short stories of Mikhail Zoshchenko). On this subject see also Wierzbicka 1990; for a collection of studies on the subject, see Bonola 1999. 20 The manipulative function of euphemism in novoyaz is clear (Thom 1989, 53–7; Orwell 1949, 314). Hannah Arendt underlines the euphemistic nature of the bureaucratic-administrative jargon used by the Nazi hierarchy (instead of “killing” we have the “final solution,” in place of “deportation,” “work in the east,” etc.) and she reminds us of the famous decree by which Hitler built the first gas chambers in 1939, which spoke of “granting a merciful death” to “incurable people” (cf. Arendt 1963, 83–112). 21 Klemperer also devotes a number of pages to what he calls, in an astute definition, the “mendacious euphemism” (Klemperer 2000, 116), citing an historical episode strikingly similar to the one quoted here in Life and Fate in which a guard at the Belsen concentration camp called the prisoners Stücke (“pieces”) (Klemperer 2000, 139). 22 The numerous lists of details in the novel refer both to the cosmic movement of events (such as in the description of the snow that covers everything in the now-silent Stalingrad, the snow of the present and of oblivion: Grossman 1998b, 595; Grossman 2006, 797) and to mass phenomena, such as the details of the gulag that slowly extend their presence to the whole of Soviet society (Grossman 1998b, part 3, chapter 57; Grossman 2006, part 3, chapter 56), or the details of the queues at the entrance to the Lubyanka prison (Grossman 1998b, 510–11; Grossman 2006, 682–3). 23 The accumulation of detail in the consciousness of a self that is alive is the opposite of what happens to Krymov during his interrogation: the subject is unable to hold together the details of his life, but these are instead ­gathered together in the investigator’s file as fragments deformed by the manipulative interpretations of the kg b: “Inside the file, his life had somehow lost its proportions, lost its true scale. The whole of his life had coagulated into grey, sticky vermicelli and he no longer knew what mattered: his four exhausting years of underground work in the sultry heat of Shanghai, the river-crossing at Stalingrad, his faith in the Revolution – or a few exasperated words he had said at ‘The Pines’ sanatorium, to a journalist he didn’t know very well, about the wretchedness of Soviet newspapers” (Grossman 1998b, 580; Grossman 2006, 775). 24 Here it seems more correct to use the word “chrysalis” rather than “cocoon” as in the English translation. 25 The theme of silence in Life and Fate is extremely complex and would require more detailed analysis; often one is silent because there are no words to express the pain attendant to a subject; but one may also remain

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silent because of an inability to express oneself, as in the encounter between Zhenya and Novikov (Grossman 1998b, part 2, chapter 4; Grossman 2006, part 2, chapter 4). In the totalitarian state, one is almost always silent for fear of denunciation, but, above all, in Life and Fate characters are silent before the ineffability of being that emerges in beauty as in death, and then silence becomes music – think of the song of the soldier Zubarev on the ruins of the houses of Stalingrad: “If anyone asked why he [Zubarev] risked his life to sing among heaps of rubble, he wouldn’t answer. It may have been from a desire to prove – to himself, to his comrades and even to the enemy – that life’s grace and charm can never be erased by the powers of destruction, even in a place that stank day and night of decaying corpses” (Grossman 1998b, 188; Grossman 2006, 260). 26 “All this is not only found in art: it is also found at the highest levels of science and politics. We can see this even in the strategy applied to a national war, a war of a people for its life and freedom” (Grossman 1998c, 148). 27 “How strange it was to walk down this long, straight corridor. Life itself was so confusing – with all its winding paths, its bogs, streams and ravines, its dust-covered steppes, its unharvested corn … You squeezed your way through or made long detours – but fate ran straight as an arrow. Just corridors and corridors and doors in corridors” (Grossman 1998b, 464; Grossman 2006, 622–3).

R efer enc e s Aucouturier, Michel. 2007. “Vasilij Grossman e Lev Tolstoj: il romanzo e la filosofia della storia.” In Il romanzo della libertà: Vasilij Grossman tra i classici del XX secolo, edited by G. Maddalena and P. Tosco, 147–63. Soveria Mannelli, Italy: Rubbettino. Austin, John L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford, uk : Clarendon Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1963. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. London: Faber & Faber. – 1973. The Origins of Totalitarianism, 3rd ed. San Diego, ca, New York, and London: Harcourt, Brace & World. Besançon, Alain. 1976. Court traité de soviétologie à l’usage des autorités civiles, militaires et religieuses. Paris: Hachette. Bonola, Anna. 1999. “L’evoluzione della lingua russa dopo la Perestrojka.” L’analisi linguistica e letteraria 6, no. 1: 231–43. – 2006. “Le particelle come manifestazioni del connettivo nella lingua russa (con esempi da Il giocatore - Igrok - di F.M. Dostoevskij).” In

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Sýndesmoi: Connettivi nella realtà del testo, edited by G. Gobber and S. Cigada, 199–220. Milan, Italy: Vita e Pensiero. Chukovskiy, Korney. 1990. Zhivoy kak zhizn. In K. Chukovskiy, Sochineniya v dvukh tomakh, I, 571–600. Moscow: Pravda. Głowiński, Michał. 1991. Nowomowa po polsku. Warsaw: Wydawnic­ two p e n . Grossman, Vasily. 1998a. Dobro vam. In V. Grossman, Sobranie Sochineniy v 4-kh t., vol. 4. Moscow: Vagrius-Agraf. – 1998b. Zhizn i sudba. In V. Grossman, Sobranie Sochineniy v 4-kh t., vol. 2. Moscow: Vagrius-Agraf. – 1998c. Za pravoe delo. In V. Grossman, Sobranie Sochineniy v 4-kh t., vol. 2. Moscow: Vagrius-Agraf. – 2006. Life and Fate. Translated by R. Chandler. New York: New York Review of Books Classics. – 2013. An Armenian Sketchbook. Translated by R. Chandler and E. Chandler. London: Maclehose Press. Klemperer, Victor. 2000. The Language of the Third Reich: lti : Lingua Tertii Imperii. London: Athlone. (German original: Victor Klemperer. 1947. lti : Notizbuch eines Philologen. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag.) Kupina, Natalya A. 1995. Totalitarnyy yazyk: Slovar i rechevye reaktsii. Ekaterinburg-Perm, Russia: Izdatelstvo Uralskogo Universiteta. – 1999. Jazykovoe soprotivlenie v kontekste totalitarnoy kultury. Ekaterinburg, Russia: Izdatelstvo Uralskogo universiteta. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. The Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, i l: University of Chicago Press. Orwell, George. 1949. 1984. New York: The New American Library. Sarnov, Venedikt. 2002. Nash sovetskiy novoyaz: Malenkaya entsiklopediya realnogo sotsyializma. Moscow: Izdatelstvo “Materik.” Sériot, Patrick. 1985. Analyse du discours politique soviétique. Paris: Institut d’Etudes Slaves. Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I. 1973. The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation. Translated by Thomas P. Whitney. New York, Evanston, i l, San Francisco, c a , and London: Harper & Row Publishers. Thom, Françoise. 1989. Newspeak: The Language of Soviet Communism. London and Lexington, ky: The Claridge Press. Ushakov, Dimitriy N., ed. 1935–40. Tolkovyy slovar russkogo yazyka: V 4-kh t. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatelstvo inostrannykh i ­natsionalnych slovarey. http://dic.academic.ru/library.nsf/ushakov/. Weiss, Daniel. 1986. “Was ist neu am ‘Newspeak’? Reflexionen zur Sprache der Politik der Sowjetunion.” In Slavistische Linguistik:

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Referate des XI. Konstanzer slavistischen Arbeitstreffens. Innsbruck 10.- 12.9.1985, 247–325. Munich, Germany: Peter Lang. Wierzbicka, Anna. 1990. “Antitotalitarian Language in Poland: Some Mechanisms of Linguistic Self-Defense.” Language in Society 19: 1–59.

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4 Everything Flows but Ivan Grigorevich Stands Still: Grossman, Heraclitus, and the Prodigal Son Gi us e p p e G h i n i

1 It is far from a coincidence that in the last words of Grossman’s novel Everything Flows, an image clearly clashing with that of the title suddenly pops up: “Here he stood – grey-haired, stoop-shouldered, yet still the same as ever, unchanged” [On stoyal zdes – sedoy, sutulyy i vsyo zhe tot zhe, neizmennyy] (Grossman 2010, 222; VT 1989, 108). This is no coincidence because, as reported by Plato, Heraclitus’s formula (Cratylus, 402a) sets change and stillness against each other: “Everything flows and nothing stands still” [panta xōrei kai ouden menei]. Consequently, a full interpretation of Grossman’s novel cannot avoid completing Heraclitus’s aphorism, nor considering what does not flow in his novel. The first thing that does not flow seems to be Ivan Grigorevich, the leading character of the novel. After enduring loads of troubles and a bit of consolation, and after offering a thorough analysis of Soviet ideology, at the very end of the flow that is the novel, he stands still like the ancient elements of the world. The exact meaning of Heraclitus’s formula is not in fact so easy to discern. If we take into consideration the whole set of his so-called “river fragments,” we reach a new, more comprehensive meaning: the set of fragments – including the famous “you cannot step twice into the same river” (Cratylus, 402a) – “contrasts the sameness of the river with the other waters that fill it. It is, in other words, a given

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that the river remains the same even while the waters change” (Graham 2014, 27). We see an example of these ideas in the last chapter of Everything Flows, where Grossman compares Ivan Grigorevich’s stillness to the moving stillness and eternity of sea and wind: The train went right along the shore. During a short stop, Ivan Grigorevich got out and looked at the green-and-black water. It was always moving, and it smelled cool and salty. The wind and the sea had been there when the investigator summoned him for interrogations during the night. They had been there while a grave was being dug for a prisoner who had died in transit. They had been there while guard dogs barked beneath the barrack windows and the snow creaked beneath the boots of the guards. The sea was eternal, and the eternity of its freedom seemed to Ivan Grigorevich to be akin to indifference. The sea had not cared about Ivan Grigorevich when he was living beyond the Arctic Circle, nor would its thundering, splashing freedom care about him when he ceased to live. No, he thought, this is not freedom. This is astronomical space come down to earth, a ­splinter of eternity, indifferent, always in motion. The sea was not freedom; it was a likeness of freedom, a symbol of freedom … How splendid freedom must be if a mere likeness of it, a mere reminder of it, is enough to fill a man with happiness. (Grossman 2010, 222; V T 1989, 107)1 As we can see, neither Ivan nor the sea just stands still. Actually, they both stand still while at the same time they are always moving. Troubles, disillusionments, consolations, ideologies – they have filled Ivan’s life, they have moved it. However, he stands still, like Heraclitus’s river, like the eternal sea:2 The world became divinely still; the dear sanctuary of his childhood was eternal and immutable. His feet had long ago trodden these cool cobbles; his child’s eyes had gazed at these rounded hills now touched by the red rust of autumn. He listened to the noise of the stream, on its way to the sea amid watermelon rinds, gnawed corncobs and other town detritus. An old Abkhazian man, wearing a black sateen shirt girded by a thin leather belt,

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was carrying a basket of chestnuts towards the bazaar. Ivan Grigorevich might perhaps, in his childhood, have bought figs and chestnuts from this same unchanging old greybeard. And it was the same southern morning air – both cool and warm, smelling of the sea and of the mountain sky, of roses and of garlic from the kitchens. And the same little houses with closed shutters and drawn curtains. And behind these shutters were sleeping the same children – children who had never grown up – and the same old men as forty years ago – still not gone to their graves. He came out onto the main road and began to climb the hill. There was the sound of the stream again. Ivan Grigorevich could remember its voice. (Grossman 2010, 223; VT 1989, 107)3 Stillness and immutability penetrate the whole world, rising to conjure up Ivan’s childhood, to touch the old Abkhazian. Stillness and sameness spread through the air, the houses, the children, and the men. Never before had he seen his life as a whole – but now here it was, lying before him. And, seeing his life, he felt no resentment towards anyone. All of them – those who had prodded him with their rifle butts as they escorted him towards the investigator’s office, those who had subjected him to long interrogations without letting him sleep, those who had said vile things about him at public meetings, those who had officially renounced him, those who had stolen his camp ration of bread, those who had beaten him – all of them, in their weakness, coarseness, and spite, had done evil without wanting to. They had not wanted to do evil to him. They had betrayed, slandered, and renounced because there had been no other way for them to survive. And yet they were people; they were human beings. Had these people wanted him to be making his way like this to his abandoned home – old, alone and without love? People did not want to do evil to anyone, but they did evil throughout their lives. All the same, people were people, they were human beings. And the wonderful, marvellous thing is that, willingly or unwillingly, they did not allow freedom to die. In their terrible, distorted, yet still-human souls, even the most terrible of them looked after freedom and kept it alive. (Grossman 2010, 223–4; V T 1989, 108)4

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Here, the opposition between change and sameness becomes even more clear. Change is represented by all the evil deeds that the Soviet people did: Grossman provides a very long list, typical of his poetics, of his poetics of difference (see Ghini 2011). Sameness is what these people nevertheless kept alive in their distorted, yet still-human souls – the sameness of freedom. Ivan Grigorevich embodied sameness: “He had achieved nothing … He had created no school of thought, no political party, and he had no disciples. Why had his life been so hard? He had not preached; he had not taught; he had simply remained what he had been since birth – a human being” [On nichego ne dostig … On ne sozdal shkoly, partii, u nego ne bylo uchenikov. Pochemu tak byla tyazhela ego zhizn? On ne propovedoval, ne uchil, on ostavalsya tem, kem on byl ot rozhdeniya – chelovekom] (Grossman 2010, 224; V T 1989, 108). Ivan Grigorevich is making the last turn of a long homecoming. Not surprisingly he hopes that stillness has protected his childhood home: “Perhaps his own home would still be as unchanged as the town streets and the stream?” [Mozhet byt, rodnoy dom stoit takoy zhe neizmennyy, kak neizmennyy pokazalis ulitsy, ruchey] (Grossman 2010, 224; V T 1989, 108). Unfortunately, it has not: It would be at the next turn of the road. For a moment it seemed to him as if an improbably bright light, brighter than any light he had ever seen, had flooded the whole earth. A few more steps – and in this light he would see his home, and his mother would come out towards him, towards her prodigal son, and he would kneel down before her, and her young and beautiful hands would rest on his grey, balding head. He saw thickets of thorns and hops. There was no house and no well – only a few stones shining white amid dusty grass that had been burned by the sun. (Grossman 2010, 224–5; V T 1989, 108) His childhood home is completely ruined. No home, no mother’s hug. Yet, as we have seen before, something persists. Ivan Grigorevich himself stands still: “Here he stood – grey-haired, stoop-shouldered, yet still the same as ever, unchanged” (Grossman 2010, 225; V T 1989, 108). Sameness and stillness permeate the entire last chapter of Everything Flows, as an antipode to change and flow, and Ivan found them to be present in the paintings at the Hermitage (chapter 6).

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He visited the Hermitage – to find that it left him cold and bored. How could all those paintings have remained as beautiful as ever while he was being transformed into an old man, an old man from the camps? Why had they not changed? Why had the faces of the marvellous madonnas not aged? How come their eyes had not been blinded by tears? Maybe their immutability – their eternity – was not a strength but a weakness? Perhaps this was how art betrays the human beings that have engendered it? (Grossman 2010, 54; V T 1989, 108) Now we understand what is common and what is different in all these images of stillness and sameness. When Grossman refers to things – sea, wind, paintings – sameness and eternalness are equivalent to indifference; their immutability reveals a lack of interest in human destiny. On the contrary, when Grossman uses “sameness” in reference to human beings and to their lives and memories, it reveals the eternalness of human nature, and reveals freedom as the substance which remains despite all men’s failures and betrayals. Everything flows, but sea and wind stand indifferent while flowing. Everything flows, but the Soviet people remain essentially the same in spite of their betrayals, and Ivan Grigorevich remains always the same, unchanged.

2 Everything Flows takes the reader on many digressions: Semyon Lipkin argues that the “combination of creative and essayistic writings is the result of a conscious decision, and not haste, as many think” (1990, 106). Nevertheless, it is clear that the structure of the novel is based on a homecoming, Ivan Grigorevich’s homecoming. After years in labour camps, Ivan comes back home, as Odysseus did after years of facing obstacles and diversions. His return is different from those described by Platonov (The Return, 1946) and by Viktor Nekrasov (In the Hometown, 1955). In fact, Ivan is not a veteran, he is not a returnee from war; he is a zek, a former prisoner in the gulag. In the passage quoted above, Grossman establishes a connection to another return, the return of the prodigal son: “In this light he would see his home, and his mother would come out towards him, towards her prodigal son, and he would kneel down before her, and her young and beautiful hands would rest on his grey, balding head.” A generic parallel to this parable is quite widespread throughout the

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whole of Russian literature: you can find a comprehensive review of these echoes in Elza Rad’s doctoral dissertation, “Istoriya ‘bludnogo syna’ v russkoy literature” – in which, by the way, Grossman is not mentioned. Here, however, Grossman presents a more clearly defined image: in the light in front of his family home, Ivan, like the prodigal son, kneels down before his mother while she caresses his balding head. Where does this image come from? I think that here Grossman alludes to Rembrandt’s painting The Return of the Prodigal Son, which has been in the collection of the Hermitage since the time of Catherine the Great (1767). In Rembrandt’s painting, a picture well-known to every member of the Russian intelligentsia, the father and the prodigal son stand out against the light; the son kneels, while in many other depictions father and son both stand, as the Gospel suggests (cf. the paintings of the scene by Guercino, Laurent Pecheux, Leonello Spada, etc.). Moreover, the son is shaved bald, and this is something unique to Rembrandt’s depiction. A young man such as the prodigal son is never represented as bald. Finally, Rembrandt follows the Gospel story insofar as it shows the old father as the one hugging the prodigal son, but the father has a strange appearance, with a feminine right hand (see Nouwen 1992). We will return to this point later. But first, it is important to point out the many references to Rembrandt in Grossman’s work and to underline the so-called Wirkungsgeschichte (history of effects) of Rembrandt’s Return in twentieth-century Russian culture. Rembrandt’s name is mentioned many times in Grossman’s works. In the short story In Kislovodsk (1962–63), Grossman refers to the film Rembrandt starring Charles Laughton (in which the Return of the Prodigal Son is not mentioned). In another short story, The Sistine Madonna (1955), the Dutch painter is mentioned twice, and another allusion can be found in the novel Good Wishes (1962–63). Regarding the Wirkungsgeschichte of Rembrandt’s Return, let us simply recall the final scene of Solaris (1972), Andrey Tarkovskiy’s adaptation of Stanisław Lem’s novel. In Tarkovskiy’s film, a perfect re-enactment of Rembrandt’s Return is presented: at the end of his journey, Kelvin kneels down before his father, while the father caresses his shoulders. Because Rembrandt’s Return has been part of Russian culture for 250 years, Tarkovskiy can use it as a sort of antonomasia: it is the Return.

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Figure 4.1  Rembrandt, Return of the Prodigal Son, ca. 1668, Hermitage State Museum, Saint Petersburg, Google Art Project.

Henry Nouwen wrote probably the most insightful commentary on Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son. Regarding the father’s right hand, he writes: Some commentators have suggested that the masculine left hand is Rembrandt’s own hand, while the feminine right hand is similar to the right hand of The Jewish Bride painted in the same period. I like to believe that this is true. As soon as I recognized

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Figure 4.2  Andrej Tarkovskiy, Solaris, 1972. Image from Tarkovskiy Archive, Florence, courtesy of Andrey Andreyevich Tarkovskiy.

the difference between the two hands of the father, a new world of meaning opened up for me. The Father is not simply a great patriarch. He is mother as well as father. He touches the son with a masculine hand and a feminine hand. He holds, and she caresses. He confirms and she consoles. He is, indeed, God, in whom both manhood and womanhood, fatherhood and motherhood, are fully present. That gentle caressing right hand echoes for me the words of the prophet Isaiah: “Can a woman forget her baby at the breast, feel no pity for the child she has borne? Even if these were to forget, I shall not forget you. Look, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.” (Nouwen 1992) Indeed, Ivan Grigorevich is looking for both support and consolation. He is longing for his father and his mother. Furthermore, he is looking for the immutable principles of his life, as were preserved in the dear sanctuary of his childhood. Beyond change and flow, in this embrace he will find the very foundation of his life. We can find the same opposition between change and immutability in a tribute to Chekhov written by Grossman in 1946: The genius of Chekhov extracted them [his characters] from the muddy chaos of pre-revolutionary Russian life, and was able

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to place their lives as bright as crystal in our consciousness. Chekhov gave these characters his own faith in the success of morality, goodness, education, reason and creative work over the dark world of arrogant ignorance, cruelty and prejudice. Chekhov brought to reality himself in these remarkable characters – charming, intelligent, awkward, graceful and kind, which were able to keep their own spiritual immutability, their integrity and nobility in the dark of pre-revolutionary Russian life. In these characters, he brought to reality his own spiritual being, made it visible, ponderable and powerful. (Grossman 1993, 269–70) This paragraph describes something that happens to Ivan Grigorevich: he comes back in order to kneel down before his parents, to recover the immutable principles of his life.

3 The prodigal son of the parable comes home. He is full of repentance, and is going to ask for forgiveness. The theme of repentance and longing for forgiveness is central in Grossman’s novel: it is an integral part of the image we have of Ivan at the end of the book, but it occurs earlier in the book many times. The first example concerns Ivan Grigorevich’s cousin, Nikolay, whom Ivan visits immediately after his release from the camp, as Nikolay is his only relative in the world. Nikolay’s conduct was not always moral in the past, but he seems eager to take advantage of Ivan’s return to make a new start. As he waited for his cousin to arrive, Nikolay Andreyevich thought about his own life. He was preparing to tell his story, to make a confession to Ivan … This aching sense of repentance grew only stronger. Now that the divinely impeccable State was repenting of its crimes, Nikolay Andreyevich began to sense that the State’s body, the State’s flesh, was in fact mortal and earthly. (Grossman 2010, 28, 12; V T 1989, 33, 40) Since the State is repenting of its crimes, a new feeling is growing in Nikolay’s heart: an “aching sense of repentance” in the Chandler-Aslanyan translation; “sentimento struggente, penitente” in Zveteremich; and “sentimento tormentoso, espiatorio” in Venturi’s

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translation (see Grossman 1971, 37; Grossman 1987, 36). Indeed, Nikolay repents of his wrongdoings and wants to expiate them, beginning with a confession to Ivan. In the following chapter, Grossman makes this feeling even more clear. As for Nikolay Andreyevich, he was now experiencing a strange feeling that had arisen entirely involuntarily. While he had been waiting for Ivan, he had thought with intense feeling about how he would be supremely honest and sincere with him, as he had never been with anyone in his entire life. He had wanted to confess to Ivan all the sufferings of his conscience, to speak with humility of his own vile and bitter weakness. Let Vanya pass judgement on him. If he could, Vanya would understand; if he could, he would forgive. And if Vanya could not understand and forgive, well then, so be it. He had felt moved; tears had clouded his eyes as he repeated to himself Nekrasov’s famous lines: The son knelt down before the father; He washed the old man’s feet … (Grossman 2010, 39–40; V T 1989, 44) Nikolay wants to confess his sins and makes manifest this desire by quoting the homecoming scene from a very well-known Russian poem, Dedushka, written by Nikolay Nekrasov (1870). In the poem, the father, not the son, returns home: exiled to Siberia as a revolutionary Decembrist (making him a victim of Tsarism), he returns, and his son kneels before him. The poem describes this homecoming from the point of view of the grandson Sasha, and this is the reason for the title (dedushka means grandfather). Let us not be deceived by the difference in the physical positions of the characters in this scene from the parable – the one who has remained at home kneels before the one who comes back. Let us consider it from a moral point of view. It is always the one who repents and asks for forgiveness that should kneel: the prodigal son, Nikolay Andreyevich, the Decembrist’s son. The one who has sinned is looking for the forgiveness of the one who has remained honest, intact. This is a small fact demonstrating the connection between the prodigal son, the Decembrist’s son, and Nikolay Andreyevich. They all want to kneel before their counterparts. In Nikolay Andreyevich’s case, in fact, when he has to face his cousin, he finds out that he is not bold enough to kneel before him. This is the decisive dialogue:

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But Ivan Grigorevich … asked his cousin in a sullen tone, “And you? Did you sign the letter condemning the Killer Doctors? I heard about that letter in the camps …” “What a dear, sweet eccentric you are!” said Nikolay Andreyevich – and he faltered, and fell silent. Deep inside him everything had gone cold with anguish, and at the same time he could feel that he had broken out in a sweat, that he had gone red, that his cheeks were burning. But he didn’t fall on his knees. He said, “My friend, my dear friend, it’s not only in the camps that people had hard lives. Our lives have been hard too.” “I’m not judging you!” Ivan Grigorevich said hurriedly. “I’m not judging you – or anyone else. Heaven forbid! No, no … How could I! Anything but …” (Grossman 2010, 46; VT 1989, 46–7) The phrase “Deep inside him everything had gone cold with anguish, and at the same time he could feel that he had broken out in a sweat, that he had gone red, that his cheeks were burning. But he didn’t fall on his knees” is a clear reference to the previous quotation from Nekrasov. In the Zabolotskaya Manuscript this reference is even more explicit. Actually, as can be seen on page 48 of this manuscript (see Figure 4.3), Grossman wrote, “Deep inside him everything had gone cold with anguish, and at the same time, like in Nekrasov’s poem, he really would have liked to kneel. He could feel that he had broken out in a sweat, that he had gone red, that his cheeks were burning. But he didn’t fall on his knees.” Let us come back to Nikolay’s longing for forgiveness. A new, opposite feeling unexpectedly emerges: And suddenly, almost the moment he caught sight of Ivan, an entirely opposite feeling had appeared inside him. The man in the padded jacket, in soldier’s boots, with a face eaten away by the cold and the makhorka-filled air of a crowded camp barrack – this man had seemed alien, unkind, hostile … He felt now that Ivan had come here to strike a line through his whole life. Any moment now – and Ivan would humiliate him; he would talk down to him, he would treat him with condescension and arrogance. (Grossman 2010, 40; V T 1989, 44) From this point onward, Nikolay lets this second feeling overcome his repentance and longing for forgiveness, and the reader feels this

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Figure 4.3  V.S. Grossman, Vse techet, Zabolockaya Manuscript, typescript with autograph manuscript corrections, 1963. John and Carol Garrard collection. Houghton Library, Cambridge, Mass., MS Russ 129 (8).

as a new betrayal. Nikolay would have liked to kneel, like Dedushka’s son, before his cousin, and yet he could not. He would have liked to confess his betrayal, and yet he was not brave enough.

4 In his novel Grossman overturns Tolstoy’s saying that “no one in the world is guilty” [net v mire vinovatykh!] with the new formula “everyone is guilty – there is not one innocent person anywhere” [vse, mirom, vinovaty, i net v mire ni odnogo nevinovnogo] (Grossman 2010, 73; V T 1989, 56). Nikolay and his wife are corrupted and guilty; Ivan’s friend Pinegin, who betrayed him, is guilty, as are all the Soviet Judases. Unexpectedly enough, Ivan’s only soul mate in the novel is guilty, too. After being in Moscow and Leningrad, Ivan reaches a little village where he meets a young widow, Anna Sergeyevna. Because of her personal story, she becomes very close to him, and they share their sufferings. However, she proclaims her guilt, declaring: “I was beautiful, but I wasn’t a good person. I wasn’t kind” (the Russian, “Ya krasivaya byla, a vsyo zhe plokhaya, nedobraya,” sounds rougher). She wants to repent too. As for me – don’t be angry if I say I look on you as Christ. I keep wanting to confess – to repent before you, as if before God. My good one, my desired one, I want to tell you about it. I want to recall everything that happened. (Grossman 2010, 124; VT 1989, 74)

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Anna seems to suffer because of all the evil that is around her. It is not by coincidence that in a previous version, she added at this point: “There was a lot of evil, without any doubt” [Plokhogo mnogo bylo, ty ne dumay] (z M 1963, 114). Evil is spread throughout the world, and renders everyone guilty. This universal guilt requires a universal repentance and a universal forgiveness. In fact, we cannot find an explicit universal repentance and universal forgiveness in the novel. At its end, we see only Ivan coming back to his childhood home, which is completely destroyed. However, Ivan comes back like the prodigal son, a homecoming that is explicitly parallel to the prodigal son’s return. And, as Nouwen writes about Rembrandt’s Return, “the young man being embraced by the Father is no longer just one repentant sinner, but the whole of humanity returning to God. The broken body of the prodigal becomes the broken body of humanity, and the baby-like face of the returning child becomes the face of all suffering people longing to reenter the lost paradise” (Nouwen 1992). If Ivan Grigorevich echoes the prodigal son, and particularly Rembrandt’s prodigal son, his balding head recalls the head of a baby who has returned to the womb of God, a God who is Mother as well as Father (Nouwen 1992). After Grossman has introduced an entire list of characters not brave enough to recognize their guilt, after all the Soviet Judases with their explanations and alibis, we see Ivan, humble and repenting, kneeling before his mother: “He knew that there is only one power in the world before which it is good and wonderful to feel that you yourself are small and weak[: the power of a mother]” (Grossman 2010, 39; V T 1989, 44).5 Ivan sums up universal guilt and, like the prodigal son, expresses a request for forgiveness – for universal forgiveness. In his comment on Rembrandt’s painting, Nouwen writes: The young man held and blessed by the father is a poor, a very poor man … He returns with nothing: his money, his health, his honor, his self-respect, his reputation … everything has been squandered … The kneeling son has no cloak … This man dispossessed of everything … except for one thing, his sword. The only remaining sign of his dignity is the short sword hanging from his hips – the badge of his nobility. Even in the midst of his debasement, he had clung to the truth that he still was the son of his father. (Nouwen 1992)

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Like Rembrandt’s prodigal son, Grossman’s Ivan returns to his childhood home with nothing. The quotation from above is again especially apt: “He had achieved nothing. He would leave behind him no books, no paintings, no discoveries. He had created no school of thought, no political party, and he had no disciples. Why had his life been so hard? He had not preached; he had not taught; he had simply remained what he had been since birth – a human being” (Grossman 2010, 224). Yes, he returns with nothing, except for the badge of his nobility and his human condition, his humanity. With this badge of nobility, Ivan, the same as ever, unchanged, kneels before his mother, and asks for a personal and universal forgiveness. Like the prodigal son.

n otes   1 Italics added. Different scholars and translators use different systems of transliteration. While we use a modified version of the Library of Congress system of transliteration, we decided to keep the choices of others in quotations and references.   2 Strange as it may sound, there are no specific studies about the relationship between Grossman’s thought and Heraclitus, yet generic references can be found. Whereas Bocharov and Aucouturier do not deal with this in their research, Frolova writes, “The title of the novel compels the reader to presuppose that the text deals with the time, which rapidly changes” (2014, 45), and Nivat remarks only that “Grossman sarcastically quotes Heraclitus’ aphorism” (2007, 432).   3 Italics added.   4 Italics added.   5 The translators missed the last two words of this phrase: sila materi.

R efer enc e s Possev 1970 Grossman, Vasily S. 1970. Vsyo techyot. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Possev-Verlag. V T 1989 Grossman, Vasily S. 1989. Vsyo techyot. Edited by F. Guber and E. Korotkovaya. Oktyabr 6: 30–108. Z M 1963 (Zabolotskaya Manuscript): Grossman, Vasily S. 1963. Vsyo techyot: typescript with autograph manuscript corrections, 3 folders. John and Carol Garrard collection of Vasily Semyonovich Grossman papers. Houghton Library, Harvard College Library.

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Grossman, Vasily S. 1971. Tutto scorre: Romanzo. Translated by P. Zveteremich (original version Possev 1970). Milan, Italy: Mondadori. – 1987. Tutto scorre… Translated by G. Venturi (original version Possev 1970). Milan, Italy: Adelphi. – 1993. “Pamyati A.I. Roskina.” Voprosy literatury 1: 260–70. – 2010. Everything Flows. Translated by R. Chandler and E. Chandler, with A. Aslanyan. London: Vintage Books. Bocharov, Anatoliy G. 1990. Vasily Grossman: zhizn, sudba, tvorchestvo. Moscow: Sovetskiy pisatel. Chernov, Aleksandr V. 2013. “Arkhetip ‘bludnogo syna’ v russkoy literature XIX veka.” Problemy istoricheskoy poetiki 11: 151–8. Ellis, Frank. 1994. Vasiliy Grossman: The Genesis and Evolution of a Russian Heretic. Oxford, u k, and Providence, r i: Berg. – 2010. E le loro madri piansero: La Grande guerra patriottica nella letteratura sovietica e postsovietica. Genoa and Milan, Italy: Marietti. Frolova, Olga E. 2014. “Vremya i istoriya v povesti V. Grossmana ‘Vsyo techyot.’” Russkaya rech 5: 44–51. Gabdullina, Valentina I. 2006. Motiv bludnogo syna v proizvedeniyakh F.M. Dostoevskogo i I.S. Turgeneva: uchebnoe posobie. Barnaul, Russia: bgpu. – 2013. “Motiv bludnogo syna v romanakh I.S. Turgeneva.” Problemy istoricheskoy poetiki 11: 135–49. – 2015. “Variatsii motiva ‘bludnoy docheri’ v narrative romana F.M. Dostoevskogo ‘Unizhyonnye i oskorblyonnye.’” Problemy istoricheskoy poetiki 13: 234–52. Ghini, Giuseppe. 2011. “Fusione senza confusione, Il rapporto singolo-­ collettività in ‘Vita e destino.’” In L’umano nell’uomo: Vasilij Grossman tra ideologie e domande eterne, edited by Pietro Tosco, 231–42. Soveria Mannelli, Italy: Rubbettino. Graham, Daniel W. 2014. “The Early Ionian Philosophers.” In The Routledge Companion to Ancient Philosophy, edited by J. Warren and F. Sheffield, 16–33. New York: Routledge. Huffstetler, Joel W., and Carl R. Holladay. 2009. Boundless Love: The Parable of the Prodigal Son and Reconciliation. Lanham, md: University Press of America. Lipkin, Semyon. 1990. Zhizn i sudba Vasilya Grossmana. Moscow: Kniga. Nivat, Georges. 2007. Vivre en Russe. Lausanne, Switzerland: L’Age d’Homme. Nouwen, Henri J.M. 1992. The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming. New York: Doubleday (Kindle edition).

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Rad, Elza A. 2014. “Istoriya ‘bludnogo syna’ v russkoy literature: modifikatsii arkhetipicheskogo syuzheta v dvizhenii epokh.” Dissertatsiya na soiskanie uchenoy stepeni doktora filologicheskikh nauk. Saratov, Russia: fg bou vpo - Povolzhskaya gosudarstvennaya sotsialnogumanitarnaya akademiya. Sirotkin, V. 1989. “Vsyo menyayetsya!” Literaturnaya gazeta 34 (22 August): 4.

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5 A Few Sad Short Stories: A Closer Look at Grossman’s Later Works Mauri zi a C a l u s i o To the best of my abilities I wrote about ordinary human beings, and about their pain, their joys, their mistakes, and their deaths. I wrote of my love for human beings and my sympathy for their suffering. (V. Grossman, letter to Khrushchev, February 1962)

1 During World War II, Vasily Grossman was one of the most popular writers in the Soviet Union. After Stalin’s death in 1953 and into the 1960s, during the years of Grossman’s artistic maturity, three different literary fates befell him. His reputation as a successful practitioner of socialist realism remained intact, but he also became “the leading authentic dissident of Russian literature” (Markish 1983, 9), whose masterpieces would remain unedited and unpublished in his homeland for decades; at the same time, he authored short stories of extraordinary quality, but far outside the canons of the official literature. These were not appreciated by even the most “liberal” press during the period of Khrushchev’s “Thaw,” and were published only partially. “Grossman wrote better with each decade, and it is his last stories that are his greatest” (Chandler 2010, 10), but only a few sensitive readers, for the most part friends, writers themselves, were able to grasp this, as his late novels Life and Fate and Everything Flows, and most of his late short stories, remained unpublished for decades. His works written before Stalin’s death in 1953 were published – For a Just Cause (re-edited in 1954, 1955, 1959); Stepan Kolchugin

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(re-edited in 1955, 1960); The People Immortal; and the stories from the 1930s and 1940s (re-edited in 1958, 1962) – but only a very small portion of his works written after Stalin’s death were published: the short stories “6th August” (in the first volume of Literaturnaya Moskva, 1956), “The Road” and “A Few Sad Days” (in Novyy mir, 1962, no. 6, and 1963, no. 12, respectively), and “The Elk” and “The Young Woman and the Old” (both in the more “conformist” literary magazine Moskva, 1963, no. 1, and 1964, no. 9, the latter a short while after his death on 14 September 1964). “The Young Woman and the Old” as well as “A Few Sad Days” were revised versions of stories written in 1940 and left in a drawer, whereas the other three stories published in Novyy mir and Moskva date to the mid-1950s (for the dates of composition, see Bocharov 1990, 176–7, and Chandler in Grossman 2010). Before they were accepted by Moskva, “The Elk” and “A Young Woman and an Old Woman” had already been rejected in 1956 by Literaturnaya Moskva and in 1958 by the literary magazine Znamya, which also rejected the short story “Tiergarten” (it would appear posthumously). “It feels so strange and it feels so pleasant seeing this short story ready for printing … I feel like Robinson setting foot on asphalt,” commented Grossman in 1962 (see Guber 1998), as he was correcting drafts of “The Road.” At that point, it had been six years since he had been able to publish any new stories – and in February 1961 Life and Fate had been confiscated. Both the “dissident” Grossman of Life and Fate and Everything Flows and the author of the striking, late short stories remained virtually ignored for years after his death. On the one hand there was the dull official Party literature of the time, and on the other the clandestine literature, accessible through the Samizdat and Tamizdat. Grossman – whose non–socialist realist work went for the most part unpublished – was not read by Samizdat followers,1 and his previous socialist realist pieces remained simply old-fashioned Soviet classics. The appearance of some short stories alongside “An Armenian Sketchbook,”2 with significant cuts, soon after Grossman’s death, did not succeed in changing his posthumous fortune. And so, for the vast majority of Soviet readers, he remained an outdated socialist realist classic war novelist (see Nemzer 2002, 364), enshrined as such, soon after his death, in the official Kratkaya literaturnaya entsiklopediya (Small Literary Encyclopaedia).

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Outside his small circle of friends, the existence of the clandestine Grossman remained largely ignored. The confiscation of Life and Fate did not create any uproar, as opposed to the scandal caused by the publication abroad of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. And unlike many other works deemed dangerous by the Soviet authorities which were passed from hand to hand in secret, Life and Fate did not circulate in the Samizdat before being published in the West.3 In the ussr, the “dissident” Grossman would be published only at the end of the 1980s. Amidst the buzz created by the appearance of Life and Fate and Everything Flows, works such as “Mama,” “Living Space,” “In the Great Circle,” “Eternal Rest,” and the essay “The Sistine Madonna” went almost unnoticed. Other than A. Bocharov’s pioneering 1970 monograph, edited and corrected in 1990, only a few scholars commented on these: S. Markish (1983), L. Lazarev (Grossman 1989), Garrard (1996; see Garrard and Garrard 2012), and more recently Robert Chandler, in the introduction to his English-language collection of Grossman’s short stories and other works titled The Road (2010).4 It is Chandler who noticed how the late short stories, together with Everything Flows, “stylistically, structurally, and even philosophically … are more daring than Life and Fate … These last works not only extol freedom; they also embody freedom. The subject matter is most dark, but the liveliness of Grossman’s intelligence makes these works surprisingly heartening” (Chandler 2010, 183). In his 2010 collection, Chandler divided Grossman’s short stories into three chronological sections (titled “The 1930s,” “The War, The Shoah,” and “Late Stories”5), and pointed out that “[t]he distinction between the ‘establishment’ writer of the 1930s and 1940s and the ‘dissident’ who wrote Life and Fate and Everything Flows in the last fifteen years of his life is essentially one of degree. There is no single moment – or even year – that can be seen as having marked a political ‘conversion’” (Chandler 2010, 10).6 It is by analyzing the short stories that we may be able to understand how Grossman’s art changed from the first years of his career and the war (Ehrenburg has noted that Grossman was “still looking for a theme, and a language” before the war), to the years between his two novels For a Just Cause and Life and Fate (during which Grossman composed “traditional” short stories such as “6th August” and “Tiergarten”), and finally concluding with the period following the confiscation of Life and Fate (which coincides with his most

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extraordinary works). In all three of these phases, Grossman wrote short stories about both great sociopolitical events (including the war, the Shoah, and Stalin’s repression) and everyday life. The stories both on “big” and on “small” themes are narrated with ever-increasing psychological subtlety over time. Powerless creatures – children and animals above all – occupy a more significant place. Over time, Grossman’s literary genres merge into one another, as the short story takes on aspects of the essay and vice versa (as may be seen in “The Sistine Madonna,” “Eternal Rest,” “An Armenian Sketchbook,” and others). Babel and Gorkiy, Grossman’s models for the first short stories, are definitively replaced by Chekhov, who is “evidently of central importance to Grossman at least from the beginning of his professional career” (Chandler 2010, 12). The “most democratic of the Russian authors,” as Grossman describes Chekhov in Life and Fate, acquired a greater importance and philosophical significance for Grossman over time: “The Chekhovian sense of life has not abandoned us, it has not become literature yet, but it carries on living in our soul” (letter to S. Lipkin, 1963, in Grossman 2016). Among the four stories that Grossman was able to publish in the 1960s, “A Few Sad Days” offers a unique opportunity for those studying Grossman’s literary path over the decades, as both the original manuscript dating back to 1940 and a typewritten copy with the author’s undated handwritten corrections7 are still well-preserved. A comparison of the manuscript, the edited copy, and the final printed version published in Novyy mir allows us to trace the transformation of Grossman’s writing in the crucial passage from the “establishment” writer of the 1930s and 1940s to the later “dissident” writer. The first results of this analysis are set forth in the second part of this study.8

2 When “A Few Sad Days” appeared in the twelfth issue of Novyy mir in 1963, Viktor Nekrasov (like Grossman, born in Ukraine; author of the most popular novel about the war, Front-Line Stalingrad [1946], as well as of Kira Georgiyevna [1961], one of the greatest successes of the “Thaw” period; emigrated in 1974) wrote to his older friend: “I have read your short story in Novyy mir with pleasure. Subtle, delicate, and sad. I wonder why sad stories give us more pleasure (perhaps we need a different word) than happy ones?” (see Guber 2007, 114).

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Nekrasov was not the only critic who appreciated this story. Aleksandr Borshchagovskiy (also a writer from Ukraine, who had been a victim of Stalin’s campaign against “rootless cosmopolitans” at the end of the 1940s) wrote to Grossman after reading A Few Sad Days: “Here in Peredelkino we talk about it often, with excitement and even intelligence, and we talk about it not to argue or because we do not agree, but because the story is so profound, and it mysteriously allows you to discover new and surprising as well as ancient things in it, things that bewitch you more and more” (Guber 2007, 116). According to Borshchagovskiy, the quality of the story is determined to some extent by the fact that it remained unpublished for so long (the period of composition, 1940–63, was set forth in Novyy mir at the end of the text): “It is the layers of time that have been laid down on the story, plus our new comprehension skills, our new ethical needs, that have given it a surprising strength. You long to see how it ‘works,’ to grasp the skill behind it, and you simply cannot: the current grabs you, the music echoes, and you can only recover at the end” (Guber 2007, 114–15). Besides its artistic qualities, Borshchagovskiy underlines the freshness of the story: “In a time when critics persistently want to disorient us, trying to bring literature back to the primitive models of unforgettable years, and while others go back to the unbearable speculative game of the percentages of ‘positive’ and ‘negative,’ you wrote a story using an exalted formula of literature, in which it is clear what the writer’s job is and what his responsibilities are toward time and people. In this story I see courage in everything: in the fact that it was written and not published at once and left in a drawer without getting old and that, finally, it was published today” (ibid.). Because we have the manuscript, the corrected typewritten version, and the printed text of “A Few Sad Days,” we can undertake what was impossible for Borshchagovskiy: understanding how Grossman worked on this text, preserving its late-1930s spirit while turning it into a new piece of work. The subject of the story remains the same from one version to another; there are no variations in the plot. The action takes place in 1940, and develops between Moscow – where Grigoriy Pavlovich Lobyshev, a civil war veteran and now an important official on one of the People’s Commissars, lives with his wife Mariya Andreyevna, their little son, and a servant – and the poor province of Kazan, the city of Mariya’s dead brother, Nikolay Andreyevich. Nikolay Andreyevich

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was an engineer, and when he died he left behind his wife, two children, elderly mother, and a mentally retarded nephew (the orphan of his brother Viktor, who perished in the 1937 purges, as is stated in the published version). Offering an explicit reference to The Death of Ivan Ilich (a novella dear to Grossman since his youth), the story begins with the news of the death of Nikolay Andreyevich (in the first draft named Ivan). Mariya Andreyevna receives this news with relief: she had feared for a brief moment that the telegram had come from Central Asia, where her beloved husband was deployed. Kept in Moscow by her son’s illness, Mariya Andreyevna will only reach Kazan to visit her brother’s family and her elderly mother after the funeral. The atmosphere of the house in Kazan is imbued by “intellectual” virtue (this clearly means that the family was heir to the revolutionary tradition of the 1870s, a status which Grossman was always keen to note; see “The Elk”), and would become unbearable to Mariya Andreyevna. In the meantime, her husband, on returning to his dear Moscow, welcomes his friends Dmitriy Mokhov (his name was Vladimir Monakhov, from monakh, “monk,” in both the manuscript and the typed version, and in those versions he was a ladies’ man who indulged in quoting the Bible) and Matilda Serezmund, both scientists, both representatives of a Soviet intelligentsia that was well-integrated into the Stalinist society of the late 1930s. Grigoriy Pavlovich shares his concerns regarding his job with these old friends (specifically, he is worried about the ambiguous loyalties of his deputy, who made his career during the Great Terror), and he tries to find comfort during his wife’s absence. In the Lobyshevs’ cozy dining room, while Grigoriy Pavlovich speaks on the phone in his study, Mokhov and Matilda declare their love in a subtle and allusive manner. It is only at the end of the story, in the fifth and last chapter, that husband and wife finally find themselves again in the welcoming living room of their home, happy and eager to tell each other what happened during their long days apart. But nothing will be told: they are so happy to be back together, to recover their usual familiarity, that they do not speak of those sad days of the recent past. The juxtaposition between “happy” and “unhappy” figures is frequently repeated in the story. In many of his works, Grossman juxtaposes successful characters, such as high officials and eminent scientists (e.g., the six friends in “Phosphorus,” Nikolay Andreyevich9 and Pinegin in Everything Flows) and “failures” such as Ivan Grigorevich, the protagonist of Everything Flows, and David Kruglyak

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in “Phosphorus” (“the only one in our lot who doesn’t have any phosphor nor salt, and doesn’t shine in the university lecture halls”). The latter figures are “superfluous men,” outsider characters not common in the Soviet literature of the time, profoundly human and profoundly free anti-heroes whom Grossman juxtaposes with more conformist and respectable characters who fit into the age of “socialist realism.” The “happy” figures remain untouched by Stalin’s purges (at least for now, as the printed version of “A Few Sad Days” hints at), and cravenly and hypocritically keep their distance from their victims. It is no surprise that the Lobyshevs, as the reader learns in the fourth chapter, did not offer any help to the deceased Nikolay Andreyevich, when, in 1937, he was “accused of God knows what” (as we read in the manuscript and in the typewritten document), namely, “of relations with the enemy of the people, his brother Viktor” (as we read in the in the printed version). As is usual in Grossman’s mature works, the final draft of the story does not include any wholly positive or negative characters. It is not surprising when, near the end of the story, Mariya Andreyevna utters: “How intricate life is!” She simultaneously feels annoyance, love, and pity toward both her deceased brother and her relatives in Kazan, together with a certain feeling of shame for having been so lucky in life compared to the others. According to the Garrards, the central theme of the story may be fear and the defences we build to face it, based on Grossman’s own experiences:10 “In the late 1930s, Grossman drew upon his own experiences and emotional responses to the recent past, attempting a scrupulously fair and objective treatment of the failure of Muscovites like himself and his wife to give support to close relatives arrested or threatened with arrest … In ‘A Few Sad Days’ … Grossman explores the psychological defenses of Mariya Andreyevna, a woman who manages to continue living her comfortable existence in Moscow with her successful husband and son even after the arrest and execution of her older brother Viktor and his wife in 1937. She is reminded of these unpleasant events when she visits Kazan after the sudden (natural) death of another brother, Nikolay” (Garrard and Garrard 2012). But it should be noted that the theme of “fear” with respect to the purges appears – at that, rather briefly – only in the final, printed version: “And Viktor? How scared they were, her and Grisha, when they knew he had been arrested! How unreasonable Kolya had been to take Lyovushka with him!” (Grossman 1963). On the other hand,

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in all three versions, the word “uzhas,” meaning “fear” or “horror,” occurs on multiple occasions to indicate the emotion felt by Mariya Andreyevna when she believes that it is her husband, rather than her brother, who is dead. For his part, Markish believes that the story (together with “The Elk” and “The Collapse,” the latter published in 1966) could be part of a trilogy: “in which takes place, within an ordinary frame, without any apparent relation to eternal questions, a psychological and philosophical conflict of extreme violence. Maybe this is due to the fact that the three stories gravitate around the theme of death, even though it is natural death, occurring at an advanced age. As for me, I find these stories remarkable” (Markish 1983, 168). Originally composed in the years of the most acute literary crisis of the Stalin era, Grossman’s story may in fact have its origins in the theme of death, which bursts into the happy daily existence of a couple of successful Soviet intellectuals. The dangerous emergence in the story of the theme of the purges – discussion of which was banned at that time – probably led Grossman to set it aside and resume writing it twenty years later. Among the few scholars who have analyzed “A Few Sad Days,” only Bocharov in his monograph – which still remains, even with its gaps and ideological “oversights,” the most complete critical work dedicated to Grossman’s shorter works – quotes the manuscript version. Further, although he does not mention the typewritten document, he does cite a few fragments from it; thus, it seems, he had consulted both versions in the Moscow archive (Bocharov 1990, 102). He believes that perhaps the story was published in 1963 only “with a few author corrections,” since “the final draft simply points out circumstances which at that time [i.e. in the 1930s–1940s] no one was allowed to speak out about, although they were in fact present in the narration” (Bocharov 1990, 101). However, even a brief comparison of the three versions allows us to notice how the corrections of the last version were not limited to the minimal interventions mentioned by Bocharov. In the typewritten version, Grossman added to the original manuscript a significant set of stylistic corrections (handwritten); later, in the printed version, besides emphasizing these “adjustments,” he intervened on a thematic level as well. In fact, not only does he make certain themes explicit, themes it was only possible to discuss during the later years of deStalinization (i.e., the arrests and repression of 1937, which in the

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manuscript and the typewritten version remain only hinted at), but he also dramatically reduced the role of the central theme of socialist realism: work. Themes that were marginal in the manuscript, or even absent from it altogether, attained significance in the printed version. This is the case, for example, with the theme of guilt felt about the victims of the repression, a theme which is central in the mature Grossman and is prominent in the last chapter of “A Few Sad Days.” As happened to the two previously mentioned “winners” in Everything Flows, Nikolay Andreyevich and Vitaliy Pinegin, Mariya Andreyevna, who felt a certain sense of pity for the unlucky relatives living in Kazan, ceases to feel guilt concerning them as soon as she finds herself back in her house with her beloved husband: “She felt like she would spend the whole night telling her husband everything she had been through, all the thoughts she had in Kazan. ‘Tell me’ – said her husband, and he put some jam on his saucer. And when he said that, she felt she didn’t want to remember those hard days which were now passed. She was happy. She was feeling light and calm again: the feeling of guilt had abandoned her” (Grossman 1963; italics added). In the manuscript and typewritten version the last sentence was different: “The oppressive, rough sense of transitoriness had abandoned her.” From one version to the other, Grossman revised the text radically, adding not only new single words, but sometimes whole sentences at a time; more often than not, however, he cut down the text significantly, so that from the manuscript to the printed version the story became two-thirds shorter. The way the narration is managed also differs among the versions. In the manuscript (and, with less pedantry, in the typewritten document) Grossman entrusted his story to an impersonal and didactic narrator who never shies away from clichés while dutifully describing the characters’ moods. In the final version, thanks to the cuts, the narrator has become laconic and dry, and avoids describing unimportant actions or giving superfluous details. He limits himself to presenting the raw facts in the simplest way possible. The dialogue between the characters has become much shorter. If we analyze the syntax in more detail, we notice that there is a considerably lower number of subordinate clauses in the printed version; simple clauses ended up dominating the text. In addition to eliminating many participles and gerunds, Grossman also eliminated a large number of adjectives and adverbs. As a result of this work,

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the rhythm of the sentences changed radically, and also the lyrical and psychological tension became more noticeable. Let us take the third paragraph of chapter 1 as an example. In the manuscript we read: “In that moment she clearly felt that her husband was the most important thing in her life. She loved her son, her mother, she was happy when she received their letters, but all of this was nothing compared to what she felt for Grisha. And in the seconds she believed that he had left this world, she understood this with terrible simplicity: she could never live without Grisha.” Two changes were added in pen on the typewritten document: a minor variation in wording (“second” rather than “seconds”) and the elimination of a repetition (indicated below in strikethrough text): “In that moment she clearly felt that her husband was the most important thing in her life. She loved her son, her mother, she was happy when she received their letters, but all of this was nothing compared to what she felt for Grisha. And in the seconds second she believed that he had left this world she understood this with terrible simplicity: she could never live without Grisha.” In the final version nothing is left except for two statements, as quick as the thought that crosses Mariya Andreyevna’s mind and makes her cry out in relief: “Grisha is alive!” The psychological tension is felt and conveyed in its terrible simplicity: “She loved her son, her mother, her brother, but all of this was nothing compared to what she felt for Grisha. She understood this with terrible simplicity: she could never live without Grisha.” Looking at these aspects of Grossman’s revisions,11 it becomes rather clear that he not only pursued a stylistic ideal of concision, but even more, the maximum expressive simplicity; the same simplicity and clarity he thought to be the main characteristics of the great masters – Pushkin, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and his friend Platonov.

n otes  1 Only Everything Flows (in the version published in 1970 in Frankfurt) ­circulated in the Samizdat.  2 An Armenian Sketchbook is the title of the English translation by R. Chandler (Grossman 2013) of the Russian Dobro vam (lit., “Good to you,” from the Armenian greeting Barez dzez, “I wish you well”).  3 Life and Fate appeared first in Lausanne in 1980 and was published in the us s r in 1988.

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  4 For other translations of the short stories into English, see the bibliography in Garrard and Garrard 2012.  5 Eternal Rest is found in the final section of the volume, after the letters to his mother, and is presented as “a meditation on cemeteries and on the relationship between the living and the dead” (Grossman 2010, 273).   6 This viewpoint has today been fully embraced by critics, drawing on the observations of Semyon Lipkin and Benedikt Sarnov, among others. It clashes with what, a few decades ago, Simon Markish (1991, 946) maintained when he said that “the gap between the two Grossmans is frightful and insurmountable.”   7 The two pre-publication versions are preserved in Moscow, specifically in fund 1710 of the rg ali (Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts), in op. 1, ed. khr. 86 (the manuscript); and op. 3, ed. khr. 18 (the typewritten copy). Unfortunately no early versions of the short story “The Young Woman and the Old,” in which the theme of the purges has an equally ­significant role to that in “A Few Sad Days,” have been preserved. “The Young Woman and the Old” has been translated into English by R. Chandler (see Grossman 2010).   8 Other than comments about its remarkable literary qualities, “A Few Sad Days” (Bocharov defines it as “the most plastic among Grossman’s prewar short stories”; 1990, 98) has not received significant critical attention and has yet to be translated into English. There is a German translation (Einige traurige Tage) in Grossman 2009.   9 The same name as the character in “A Few Sad Days”; not infrequently Grossman’s characters share the same name across different works. 10 “It is possible that Mariya Andreyevna’s visit to Kazan owes something to his own visit to Berdichev in the mid-1930s to console his elderly mother and Uncle David on the death of David’s wife, and Grossman’s favorite aunt, Anyuta. In addition, Uncle David had a daughter, Natasha, who recalls Victor’s retarded son” (Garrard and Garrard 2012). 11 For a closer examination of this topic, in Russian, see Calusio et al. 2016, 119–40.

R efer e nc e s Bocharov, Anatoliy. 1990. Vasiliy Grossman: Zhizn, tvorchestvo, sudba. Moscow: Sovetskiy pisatel. Calusio, Maurizia, Anna Krasnikova, and Pietro Tosco, eds. 2016. Grossmanovskiy sbornik: Nasledie sovremennogo klassika / Grossman Studies: The Legacy of a Contemporary Classic. Milan, Italy:

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E D U Catt. http://system.educatt.com/libri/ebookRepository/9788893350952.pdf. Garrard, John, and Carol Garrard. 2012. The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman. Barnsley, u k: Pen & Sword Military. (First publication: 1996. The Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman. New York: The Free Press.) Grossman, Vasily. 1963. “Neskolko pechalnykh dney.” Novyy mir (December 1963): 44–59. – 1989. Neskolko pechalnykh dney. Moscow: Sovremennik. http://modernlib.ru/books/grossman_vasiliy_semenovich/neskolko_pechalnih_ dney_povesti_i_rasskazi/read/. – 2009. Tiergarten: Erzählungen. Translated by K. Narbutovich. Berlin: Claassen. – 2010. The Road. Translated by R. and E. Chandler with O. Mukovnikova, commentary and notes by R. Chandler with Yu. BitYunan, afterword by F. Guber. New York: New York Review of Books. – 2013. An Armenian Sketchbook. Translated by R. Chandler. London: MacLehose Press. – 2016. “Pisma Semenu Lipkinu (1949–1963).” Znamya (June 2016). http://magazines.russ.ru/znamia/2016/6/pisma-semenu-lipkinu19491963.html. Guber, Fyodor. 1998. “V. Grossman v poslednie gody zhizni.” Voprosy ­literatury (July–August). http://magazines.russ.ru/voplit/1998/4/grosspr.html. – 2007. Pamyat i pisma. Kniga o Vasile Grossmane. Moscow: Probel. Markish, Simon. 1983. Le Cas Grossman. Paris: Julliard, l’Age d’Homme. – 1991. “Vasilij Grossman.” In Storia della letteratura russa: III. Il Novecento: 3, edited by E. Etkind, G. Nivat, I. Serman, and V. Strada, 945–68. Turin, Italy: Einaudi. Nemzer, Andrey. 2002. “V. Grossman: Nerasslyshannaya bol.” In Pamyatnye daty. Moscow: Vremya.

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6 “What Is Human in Man”: The Levels of Freedom in Vasily Grossman Gi ovanni Ma d da l e n a

Only rarely is the thematic nucleus of Vasily Grossman’s work addressed from a theoretical point of view. Philosophically speaking, Grossman’s work belongs first of all to political philosophy – the subject of which is the relationship between individual freedom and power – and to moral philosophy, because he treats of themes and questions surrounding the definition of the good and of happiness, as well as the human faculties and strategies that can achieve them.1 Nevertheless, Grossman is at the same time a “philosopher” who is concerned with theoretical philosophy: that is, that branch of philosophy addressing the meaning and truth of human experience. As I  have commented elsewhere, artists “do” philosophy, embodying meaning into their artwork.2 In fact, writers do philosophy by embodying meaning into scenes and characters. In this sense, writing is a synthetic form of reasoning in which we perform “complete gestures” (such as writing): namely, actions with a beginning and an end that carry on a meaning. Therefore, we can understand theoretical positions implied in a poem or a novel by analyzing actions and characters as well as words, the latter of which will be considered here to be symbolic outcomes of gestures. I will take as given the existential circumstances that led Grossman to his moral conclusions. I will not concern myself, therefore, with describing the social, historical, political, and personal circumstances that led our author to discover the indomitable nature of the individual as he or she faces any force or power, of which the totalitarian state and anti-Semitism are merely tragic examples and symbols.3 Granted,

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such circumstances are important in order to understand how, according to Grossman, good and evil present themselves in the life of every person: the forces that shake history are the same ones that trouble the heart of man. The state is not an impersonal monster – as Grossman demonstrates in Life and Fate by showing both Hitler and Stalin preoccupied with their ordinary, everyday thoughts (Grossman 2006, 644–8, 657–9) – but rather the amplification writ large of the personal good and evil that reside in every single human existence, of the desire for purity and the voracious appetite for domination that exist within each of us (Maddalena and Tosco 2007, 3–9). Above all, Grossman shows with clarity that ideology is an eternal temptation of every human being. Totalitarianism has displayed this part of human nature with clamorous evidence for all to see, but any human being can be ideological in any part of his or her life. By not treating the circumstances of Grossman’s life, I am following the example of Grossman himself, for whom there is no psychosociological justification that can hinder a man from choosing to be good: the Soviet soldier who kicks and humiliates the German prisoner of war is just as responsible for his actions as the Soviet soldier who rebukes and denounces that inhumane act (Grossman 2006, 713–14). I will focus, instead, first on identifying the characteristics of this indomitable force of the individual, its orientation, and to what it aspires. Second, I will move from these moral considerations to theoretical ones that concern the essential nature and the ontological end of this force. Finally, in reference to Grossman – but perhaps beyond Grossman – I would like to propose certain theoretical implications that he hints at in two short stories contemporary to Life and Fate – Eternal Rest and The Sistine Madonna.

1 . T h e F o u r L e v e l s of Freedom What is this indomitable force that each single man or woman uses to oppose power, be it that of the state or something smaller, even the power of another person or the power present in themselves? What leads a woman like Zhenya, who was separated from her husband and involved with another man, to return to her husband when she finds him locked up in Lubyanka prison (Grossman 2006, 813–17)? What is stronger than emotions and the need for personal safety? Grossman is unequivocal: the name of this mysterious force is “freedom.” But how can one describe it (setting aside, for the moment, its

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definition, which we will examine later)? I will provide a description of its various levels in order to bring out its nuances; these are not meant to be exhaustive, but rather indicative of the diverse, progressively significant functions that Grossman ascribes to this ability to “be oneself,” to preserve one’s own identity. The first level of this freedom, elementary yet not to be taken for granted, is an appreciation of one’s own “human-ness” – that which is most truly human in a human being – which Grossman identifies as the fact of having ideals and the faculty of reason. We could say that the most elementary level of freedom according to Grossman has an Illuminist tone, which we can find again in the preface to The Black Book, whose publication was an important event in the author’s personal and literary life.4 In this work, Grossman described the absence of “human-ness”: The pure heart of the people was deeply shaken by seeing rivers of innocent blood spilled. Old peasant women and young kol­ khozniks, workers, teachers, doctors, professors, and clergy did everything in their power to save the condemned, often putting their own lives and those of their loved ones at risk … Through the dark clouds of racial madness, in the disgusting fog of hatred toward mankind, the eternal, inextinguishable stars of reason, good, and humanitarianism continued to shine, announcing the imminent decline of the horrible empire of darkness and the approach of a new dawn. Though they sought to drown them in a sea of blood, the Fascists were unable to subdue the forces of good and of reason lying dormant in the soul of the people. (Grossman and Ehrenburg 1999, 19) The first level contains the idea of freedom as autonomy, and it is this autonomy in us that cannot bear dictatorship in our politics or repressive control in any realm of our lives. This autonomy is the liberal root of Grossman’s political philosophy, and will be important to our discussion of the other levels.5 The second level is freedom of expression. There are parts of Life and Fate that show the inherent necessity of man to communicate himself, an experience which is necessary in order to maintain one’s identity. Freedom, however, does not exist without human ties, and man is therefore free – that is, himself – only when he can be in a relationship with others, as Grossman’s hero of freedom, Darensky,

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expresses in his dialogue on Soviet politics with the unknown lieutenant Bova, lost in the night of the Kalmykian steppe. We can see from the end of this dialogue the psychological echoes of this beginning of liberation: “Darensky felt that he still hadn’t dug down to what really mattered, that he still hadn’t been able to find the simple words that would cast a new, clear light on their lives. But he was happy to have thought and talked about what he had only very seldom thought or talked about. ‘Let me say one thing. I can tell you that, whatever happens, I shall never ever regret this conversation of ours’” (Grossman 2006, 390–1). This level of freedom is often taken for granted. However, there are many private and public spaces in which one cannot engage in dialogue, if by “dialogue” is meant entrusting oneself to another person by sharing thoughts, words, and gestures. The second level is certainly part of the first, rooted in autonomy. However, in Grossman it leans more toward the necessity of dialogical relationships than toward the liberal, abstract right to express opinions. Going more deeply, the third level of freedom is its connection with the truth, as we see in Shtrum’s conversations at Sokolov’s house where, at a certain point, Grossman’s alter ego Shtrum says: “Let me tell you the truth. Why should I lie when I know the truth?” (Grossman 2006, 285) – and in the stunned silence of the Soviet army after their victory, a silence in which everything becomes new, true, and original again. This silence … gave birth to many different sounds that seemed new and strange: the clink of a knife, the rustle of a page being turned in a book, the creak of a floorboard, the sound of bare feet, the scratching of a pen, the click of a safety-catch on a pistol, the ticking of the clock on the wall of the bunker … These minutes of silence were the finest of their lives. During these ­minutes they felt only human feelings; none of them could understand why it was they had known such happiness and such sorrow, such love and such humility … There is only one truth. There cannot be two truths. It’s hard to live with no truth, with scraps of truth, with a half-truth. A partial truth is no truth at all. Let the wonderful silence of this night be the truth, the whole truth … Let us remember the good in these men; let us remember their great achievements. (Grossman 2006, 660–1)

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The problem of the “good” in Grossman emerges at this third level of freedom, linked to the problem of truth, as in any classic philosophy. Grossman’s work makes clear that human beings are free when they perform an unexpected, unpredictable good gesture. There is no doubt that for Grossman, the real “good” consists not in some philosophical doctrine that has a tendency to become ideological, but in the single, unique act of kindness that in some inexplicable, irrational, and yet undeniable way wells up, beyond any logical or analyzable possibility, in a single individual. Man’s bitter victory over his tragic destiny, understood as mechanical fate, can be seen in this illogical and supreme possibility of being moved by another’s destiny. The “bitter victory” of human beings over cruel fate is shown by the old peasant woman who takes care of the Nazi whose patrol has arrested and will execute her husband (Grossman 2006, 408–9), or by Darensky’s defence of the humiliated German prisoner (Grossman 2006, 711–14), or by the woman who gives a loaf of bread to the hated German prisoner (Grossman 2006, 805–6). In all these cases, human beings win because they accept life and existence notwithstanding all the violence they have suffered. It is a noble ideal, similar in many ways to the classical ideal of the Stoics, even if it differs from the latter precisely in its conception of freedom: the universe is not a cosmic necessity that imposes a duty that must be endured, but rather a concrete truth to be accepted with goodwill, in whatever way this acceptance is reflected in the psychology of each individual. Nevertheless, it is not an ideal that leads to happiness; Grossman knows this and says it. Grossman’s short story from 1960, The Resident, portrays the inadequacy of this ideal as it relates to the human spirit’s longing for justice. In the story, a letter arrives addressed to an old woman, dead and forgotten by her astonished neighbours, who are playing cards at the time; the letter rehabilitates her husband, who had been killed in a gulag twenty years earlier. The bureaucratic absurdity magnifies the incommensurability between the evil visited upon that single individual and any justice that could be rendered to him, in some way, by his fellow man: After conferring together on what should be done, the residents opened the envelope and read the typewritten sheet aloud. “… In connection with circumstances which have recently come to light regarding the ruling of the Military Board of the

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Supreme Court of the ussr on the 8th of May 1960, we inform you that your husband, Ardasheliya Terentiy Georgevich, deceased in detainment the 6th of June 1937, is posthumously rehabilitated; the sentence issued by the Military Board of the Supreme Court on the 3rd of September 1936 is hereby overturned and the legal proceedings are declared closed, as the crime was not committed.” – Well, now what do we do with this paper? – Nothing. We send it back … For a little while they sat in silence, then a man’s voice said: – Why are we just sitting here? Who was playing? (Grossman 1991, 55)6 More autobiographically, in Phosphorus, Grossman tells the story of the good friend who remains faithful to his friend but becomes ostracized and is condemned to social isolation because of the conformist mentality of the regime (Grossman 1991). And yet this extraordinary and courageous kindness does not make either the actor performing the kindness or its recipient happy. Freedom is related to truth and kindness, which is the only available form of good as we have seen, but this kind of freedom is not full liberation: it makes us able to endure life but does not necessarily make us happy – happiness occurs only in somewhat rare, isolated cases. This is why there must be a deeper sense of freedom that sustains gestures of kindness and truth, avoiding any rationalist mechanism and any random, irrational event. The fourth and last level of freedom can be defined as pertaining to the moment in which man perceives, unconsciously, that he has questions and needs that exceed his own abilities and possibilities. Rationally, for Grossman, these questions and needs are met by a positive response: there must be some sort of positive meaning in life. For this reason, Grossman identifies this fourth level of freedom as the highest, and it pervades nearly every page of Life and Fate: freedom is that level of life in which life poses questions about meaning, and life itself suggests a positive, even if vague or equivocal, answer. In this acknowledgment of absolute human greatness, which consists in questioning life so deeply that the existence of the questions themselves implies the existence of the longed-for meaning, Grossman shows a peculiar sort of religious sense. As we will see, theoretically speaking, Grossman is no metaphysician and, in religious terms, is an agnostic. However, his

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characters and their actions lead to the affirmation of a meaning in life, a positive ending, or, paradoxically, to an “atheist God,” for whom life is worth living and who can lead one to be calm and serene, if not happy. While the first three levels of freedom were already present, in different forms, in For a Just Cause (Grossman 2000), the first part of the Stalingrad saga, this fourth level was covered by the philosophy of history proposed by the communist regime. Life and Fate is full of questions about the meaning of everyone and everything, thousands of questions for which, according to the author, answers must exist, answers that must be characterized by a positivity toward reality, even though the author cannot describe these answers.7 At this last level of freedom, human beings are representative of the entire cosmos in the name of which they raise their questions. This is why there is a profound communion between man and nature and why they participate in a common destiny. In many passages of Grossman’s work this communion is so deep the reader cannot tell where the distinction lies, “like a husband and wife who have spent their whole lives together” (Grossman 2006, 291). Nature itself speaks from within Grossman’s hero while he is watching an old Kalmyk rider galloping on his horse, after having chatted a little with the colonel: “The old man gave a sudden cry, waved his hand in the air and galloped down the hill with extraordinary grace and speed. What was he thinking as he galloped through the steppe? Of his sons? Of the father of the Russian lieutenant-colonel whose jeep needed mending? Darensky watched. One word pounded like blood at his temples: ‘Freedom … freedom … freedom …’” (Grossman 2006, 293). Man’s freedom coincides here with “the self-awareness of the cosmos” (Giussani 2000). That’s why the steppe is, for Darensky, the memory of freedom as an open question about life and its destiny, a question that implies a strange certainty about the existence of a positive meaning.

2 . A p o r ia in G ro s s m a n’s Phi los ophy Cosmological considerations on human beings and nature lead us to metaphysical ones, and thus we move from the moral plane to the ontological one. What is the origin of this freedom? What is its precise, essential nature?

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The pamphlet of God’s fool Ikonnikov, a crucial character in Life and Fate, provides an initial answer to these questions. In some passages of the pamphlet which were certainly not foreign to Russian culture, upon which German Idealism in general, and Schelling in particular, had a strong influence, Grossman implicates the entire cosmos in the problem of freedom. In these passages, the author admits to having once believed that nature was free from evil, that evil was to be found only in mankind. Instead, there is no part of nature that is not pervaded by the same thirst for unrestrained selfaffirmation, and by the same tendency to ideology that can lead to the violent oppression of the other. Therefore, we must look for the origin of freedom in single individuals, and we must begin our inquiry at the moment just before that in which the human relationship with truth, kindness, positive meaning turns into ideology and into the need to annihilate the other. The previous questions can be clarified in the following way: what is the origin of freedom, even if it is used for evil ends? Or, more existentially, how can man hope with the evil of the extermination camps before his eyes, camps created by a freedom which is of the same nature as his own? Grossman’s answer is unequivocal, even if it leaves him open to a great deal of criticism: the origin of freedom is life. Life is the ultimate and only origin of and explanation for kindness, while the capitalized “Good” is merely an ideological misunderstanding of this origin. The kindness that is born in the individual is a recognition of the fact that life is good because it exists, or better, because it lives. “Live, live, live forever” (Grossman 2006, 93) is the cry of Shtrum’s mother, the fictional representation of the author’s own mother, to whom – not coincidentally – the book is dedicated. Many observations could be made about this individualistic vitalism. Like every vitalism, it risks slipping into racism (of any kind) or into irrationalism. But it is the autonomous content of the first two levels of freedom that keeps Grossman off these theoretical paths: the individual is good, whoever he may be, whatever he may be, because he exists, because he lives. As Adriano Dell’Asta has explained, Grossman counters ideology with experience – not with another idea, not even the “right” idea of the individual (Dell’Asta 2007). The serious objection that can be raised arises from another point of view and strikes at the “forever” of the crucial letter from his mother: what happens when a man dies? How is it possible to live “forever”? Here Grossman’s vitalism meets defeat. When a man dies,

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when life ends, freedom ends as well: “When a person dies, they cross over from the realm of freedom to the realm of slavery. Life is freedom, and dying is a gradual denial of freedom” (Grossman 2006, 555). And yet the fact remains that this freedom is unique and some part of it exists eternally: “What constitutes the freedom, the soul of an individual life, is its uniqueness. The reflection of the universe in someone’s consciousness is the foundation of his or her power, but life only becomes happiness, is only endowed with freedom and meaning when someone exists as a whole world that has never been repeated in all eternity” (Grossman 2006, 555). The individual’s freedom dies with him, but everything cries out that that freedom is “eternal” (Grossman 2006, 555). This crying out reflects a beautiful, sweet yearning that proves how deep this desire for eternity is and how this desire is the very essence of life itself, even if in Grossman’s philosophy it is and always will be a desire which has no fulfillment: when the life of the individual dies, the universe is extinguished and freedom ends in nothingness.

3 . T h e M a d o n n a Soluti on: G ro s s m a n ’ s U n iq u e Reli gi ous Sens e Is Grossman, then, a nihilist? The theoretical answer would seem to be “yes,” and it would seem to be a cosmic nihilism. Everything ends up in nothingness. However, as was stated earlier, his passion for the single individual pushes Grossman beyond himself, or rather, makes him emphasize a direction of thought that is contrary to nihilism. After all, the experience for many reading Life and Fate is that, while the bitterness and dissatisfaction of the humanist paradigm is always present, there is nothing at all of a dark shadow of the void or, on the moral plane, of the uselessness of that which exists. The fact is that Grossman, although theoretically convinced that the individual is extinguished forever in death and that the universe in some way experiences the same end, concentrates less on the end of the individual and the universe than on their origins. He continues to emphasize the singular existence of the individual and his amazement at his or her presence in order to affirm absolute freedom, while leaving the individual’s end and purpose indeterminate. In other words, Grossman is able to say nothing about the result, but he is able to say something about the origin: the origin is a free action, proven by the fact that freedom exists and is the only law of life, as was discussed

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above in the description of its various levels. Between the origin and the end an apparent contradiction emerges. Both the individual and his universe die; yet at the same time Grossman is convinced that the experience of freedom, that with which man experiments in all its degrees and tonalities, somehow hints at a positive, meaningful sense of life, so vital that it cannot accept even the logical conclusion that everything dies. This paradox is the essence of life itself, the very “spirit of life” (Grossman 2010, 314), or “what is human in man” (Grossman 2010, 185), the secret of life and freedom, that which does not change among the never-ending changes occurring in man and the world. What is this “spirit of life,” or, to use the same Heraclitian jargon that Grossman loved, what is “the hidden harmony” (frag. 54) that flows through everything? Or, to keep to our previous terms: what is the origin of life, what is the origin of this freedom, an origin so powerful as to throw us into this paradox? Grossman doesn’t answer, but says that this origin exists and it is good. For this reason, the freedom of the individual dies with the end of life; but we know that it cannot die, that life can have a happy ending. When and how does Grossman indicate this good origin of life? The answer is: on every page of Life and Fate, if one remembers that its characters accept what happens to them because it is given. Unlike the Stoics, they are unable to bear the weight of “moral obligations” (consider Shtrum, who signs the hated petition, betraying his own convictions) (Grossman 2006, 831–41), but they don’t want this failure to end their lives, they don’t want to commit suicide, neither as a gesture of supreme duty, nor out of disappointment over their own inconsistencies. They remain attached to the life they are given. Before the attack, Novikov’s soldiers feel this “will to live” as the only reason for the mixture of exaltation and fear that fills them (Grossman 2006, 643). But there is one case in which this deep emotion, this unique vibration that occurs when facing events, becomes exceptional: when one discovers something absolutely new. An example of this is what happened to Shtrum when he discovered a new law of physics – a discovery that clarified for him the fundamental elements of this “feeling of life,” as he described in a conversation with his wife: “‘It’s a strange feeling, you know. Whatever may happen to me now, I know deep down in my heart that I haven’t lived in vain. Now, for the first time, I’m not afraid of dying. Now! Now that this exists!’ He showed her a page covered in scrawls that was lying on his table. ‘I’m not exaggerating. It’s a new vision of the nature of the forces within the

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atom. A new principle. It will be the key to many doors that until now have been locked … And you know, when I was little … No, it’s as though a lily had suddenly blossomed out of still, dark waters … Oh, my God …’” (Grossman 2006, 350). In spite of everything that came before, truth is a gift, an unexpected event, clear and bright and illuminating. In the face of a new discovery, the attitude one has when facing all of reality emerges clearly: the characters in Life and Fate accept reality because it is there, and living is always good, but it can be said that this is so because reality and life are things not made by man – that is to say, they are gifts. As we have seen on the moral plane, the only answer on the metaphysical plane is that the existence of truth and kindness, and all our human questions about them, are signs of the existence of a good and positive origin of everything. Again, we can posit an “atheist God,” but we can also posit Mystery, incomprehensible to man but not foreign or hostile. In Grossman’s work there is an example of this good Mystery of life in a short article on the Sistine Madonna, written in 1955 after he visited the Moscow museum where Raphael’s masterpiece, which had so struck Dostoevsky, was on temporary exhibit. Grossman describes the Sistine Madonna as an “atheist Madonna,” according with his concept of the “spirit of life” and with his highest aspirations. What I saw was a young mother holding a child in her arms … The helplessness – the new motherhood – of a girl, of a little girl, still almost a child. After the Sistine Madonna one can no longer refer to this special grace as ineffable or mysterious. In this Madonna Raphael has revealed the mystery of maternal beauty. But the secret of the painting’s inexhaustible life lies elsewhere. The secret of the painting’s life, of the Madonna’s great beauty, is that the young woman’s body and face are – in fact – her soul. In this visual representation of a mother’s soul lies something inaccessible to human consciousness. We know about thermonuclear reactions during which matter is transformed into an enormous quantity of energy, but we cannot as yet conceive of the reverse process – the transformation of energy into matter. Here, though, a spiritual force – motherhood – has been crystallized, transmuted into a meek and gentle Madonna. (Grossman 2010, 183)

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Here Grossman proclaims his desire for the incarnation of the origin of life. Grossman doesn’t believe in God – as his adopted son, Fyodor Guber, said, “He was interested only in the human side of God”8 – but he wanted all the energy that gives life to the cosmos to bring out and foster the “humanity of humanity,” according to the expression he worked out in the short story Eternal Rest (Grossman 2010, 300–17). The qualities that he discovered in the Sistine Madonna are this “humanity of humanity” fully realized. Grossman’s Madonna is, in fact, above all the mother who gives life: “There have been moments when I have felt that this Madonna expresses not only all that is human but also something that is a part of earthly life in a still broader sense, something that is present in the animal world as a whole. I have felt that the Madonna’s miraculous shadow can be glimpsed in the brown eyes of a horse, dog or cow that is feeding its young” (Grossman 2010, 183–4). She is also mankind’s companion in conflict, accompanying him along life’s difficult road: It was she, treading lightly on her little bare feet, who had walked over the swaying earth of Treblinka; it was she who had walked from the “station” from where transports were unloaded, to the gas chamber … I saw her in 1930, in Konotop, at the station. Swarthy from hunger and illness, she walked towards the express train, looked up at me with her wonderful eyes and said with her lips, without any voice, “Bread” … We met his mother more than once in 1937. There she was – holding her son in her arms for the last time, saying goodbye to him, gazing into his face and then going down the deserted staircase of a mute, manystoried building. A black car was waiting for her down below; a wax seal had already been affixed to the door of the room. (Grossman 2010, 187–90) Finally, and it is this which reinforces Grossman’s pure freedom on each of its levels, the Sistine Madonna is able to let her Son go to meet his destiny, his death, because she is sure to love him even more by relinquishing him to all mankind. This ability to sacrifice is a miracle that in Christian terms is called “virginity,” and which in the entire Christian era is the supreme ideal because it represents the resolution of the dilemma of freedom, keeping together the autonomy of choice and the recognition of truth and meaning, the two roots of Grossman’s

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four levels of freedom. Here the Son freely chooses to sacrifice Himself for the good of all the universe, recapitulating freedom as choice, adherence to the destiny of the entire cosmos, and liberation. Yet neither anxiety nor pain grips our hearts. Instead we feel something new, something we have never experienced. It is a human feeling, a new feeling, and it seems as if it has just arisen from the salty and bitter depths of the sea … Here lies another unique quality of the painting. It engenders something new, as if an eighth color has been added to the seven colors of the spectrum that we already know. Why there is no fear on the mother’s face? Why have her fingers not fastened around her son’s body so tightly that even death cannot untwine them? Why does she not wish to keep her son from his fate? Rather than hiding her child, she holds him forward to meet his fate. And the child is not hiding his face in his mother’s breast. Any moment now he will climb down from her arms and walk forward on his own little bare feet to meet his fate. How are we to explain this? How are we to understand it? They are one – and they are separate. They see, feel, and think together. They are fused, yet everything says that they will separate from each other, that they cannot not separate, that the essence of their communion, of their fusion, lies in their coming separation … The Madonna with her child in her arms represents the human in man. This is why she is immortal. (Grossman 2010, 184–5)

n otes   1 See Dell’Asta 2007, Ellis 2007, Riconda 2007. See also Nissim 2011, Graybosch 2011, Ghini 2011, Guglielminetti 2011, Mrowczynski-Van Allen 2011, Shulga 2013, Dachayev 2013, Guillaume and Finney 2013.   2 See Maddalena 2015.   3 See Strada 2007, Aucouturier 2007, Garrard and Garrard 2007, Anissimov 2011, Feldman 2011, Bit-Junan 2011, Finney 2013.   4 Cf. Garrard and Garrrard 1996, 177–8, 201–12. See also Boschiero 2015.   5 For Grossman’s (political) “experiential liberalism,” see Maddalena 2016. See also Berti 2016.   6 My translation.   7 Cf. Tosco 2013.   8 Private conversation with the members of the Grossman Study Center.

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r efer enc e s Anissimov, Myriam. 2011. “L’ebraicità di Vasilij Grossman.” In L’umano nell’uomo: Vasilij Grossman tra ideologie e domande eterne, edited by Pietro Tosco, 113–30. Soveria Mannelli, Italy: Rubbettino. Aucouturier, Michel. 2007. “Vasilij Grossman e Lev Tolstoj; il romanzo e la filosofia della storia.” In Il romanzo della libertà: Vasilij Grossman tra i classici del XX secolo, edited by G. Maddalena and P. Tosco, 147–63. Soveria Mannelli, Italy: Rubbettino. Berti, Francesco. 2016. “The Two Revolutions and the Nature of Totalitarianism: Vasily Grossman’s Reinterpretation of Bolshevism.” In Grossmanovskiy sbornik: Nasledie sovremennogo klassika / Grossman Studies: The Legacy of a Contemporary Classic, edited by M. Calusio, A. Krasnikova, and P. Tosco, 319–36. Milan, Italy: EDUC att. Bit-Junan, Jury. 2011. “Diritto alla verità.” In L’umano nell’uomo: Vasilij Grossman tra ideologie e domande eterne, edited by Pietro Tosco, 143– 66. Soveria Mannelli, Italy: Rubbettino. Boschiero, Manuel. 2015. “Intorno alla nuova edizione del Libro nero.” Russica Romana 22: 109–25. Dachayev, Alex. 2013. “Ethics after Auschwitz: Vasily Grossman and Senseless Kindness.” Journal of European Studies 43, no. 4: 357–72. Dell’Asta, Adriano. 2007. “Dal sogno all’incubo: Nazismo e comunismo in Vasilij Grossman.” In Il romanzo della libertà: Vasilij Grossman tra i classici del XX secolo, edited by G. Maddalena and P. Tosco, 41–68. Soveria Mannelli, Italy: Rubbettino. Ellis, Frank. 2007. “La rivelazione della libertà e gli inizi della saggezza in Vita e Destino di Vasilij Grosssman.” In Il romanzo della libertà: Vasilij Grossman tra i classici del XX secolo, edited by G. Maddalena and P. Tosco, 175–98. Soveria Mannelli, Italy: Rubbettino. Feldman, David. 2011. “Un intrigo letterario alla sovietica.” In L’umano nell’uomo: Vasilij Grossman tra ideologie e domande eterne, edited by Pietro Tosco, 131–42. Soveria Mannelli, Italy: Rubbettino. Finney, Patrick. 2013. “Vasily Grossman and the Myth of the Great Patriotic War.” Journal of European Studies 43, no. 4: 312–28. Garrard, John, and Carol Garrard. 1996. The Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman. New York: The Free Press. – 2007. “Finalmente libero: Vasilij Grossman e la battaglia di Stalingrado.” In Il romanzo della libertà: Vasilij Grossman tra i classici del XX secolo, edited by G. Maddalena and P. Tosco, 69–98. Soveria Mannelli, Italy: Rubbettino. Ghini, Giuseppe. 2011. “Fusione senza confusione: Il rapporto singolocollettività in Vita e Destino.” In L’umano nell’uomo: Vasilij Grossman

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tra ideologie e domande eterne, edited by Pietro Tosco, 231–42. Soveria Mannelli, Italy: Rubbettino. Giussani, Luigi. 2000. L’autocoscienza del cosmo. Milan, Italy: Rizzoli. Graybosch, Anthony. 2011. “Una telefonata da Stalin.” In L’umano nell’uomo: Vasilij Grossman tra ideologie e domande eterne, edited by Pietro Tosco, 215–30. Soveria Mannelli, Italy: Rubbettino. Grossman, Vasily. 1991. Fosforo. Genoa, Italy: Il nuovo melangolo. – 2000. Pour une juste cause. Lausanne, Switzerland: L’Age d’Homme. – 2006. Life and Fate. Translated by R. Chandler. New York: New York Review of Books Classics. – 2010. The Road. Edited by R. Chandler. London: MacLehose Press. Grossman, Vasily, and Ilya Ehrenburg. 1999. Il libro nero. Milan, Italy: Mondadori. Guglielminetti, Enrico. 2011. “L’orientamento del ‘due’ in Vita e destino.” In L’umano nell’uomo: Vasilij Grossman tra ideologie e domande eterne, edited by Pietro Tosco, 243–60. Soveria Mannelli, Italy: Rubbettino. Guillaume, Laura, and Patrick Finney. 2013. “‘It is a terrible thing to condemn even a terrible man’: Vasily Grossman on Judging Perpetrators.” Journal of European Studies 43, no. 4: 344–56. Maddalena, Giovanni. 2015. The Philosophy of Gesture. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. – 2016. “Three Paradoxes of Experiential Liberalism.” Politica.eu 1, vol. 2: 5–16. Maddalena, Giovanni, and Pietro Tosco, eds. 2007. Il romanzo della libertà: Vasilij Grossman tra i classici del XX secolo. Soveria Mannelli, Italy: Rubbettino. Mrowczynski-Van Allen, Artur. 2011. “Letteratura e stato totalitario: l’icona e l’idolo. Da Solov’ëv a Grossman.” In L’umano nell’uomo: Vasilij Grossman tra ideologie e domande eterne, edited by Pietro Tosco, 261–78. Soveria Mannelli, Italy: Rubbettino. Nissim, Gabriele. 2011. “Il pensatore del bene insensato.” In L’umano nell’uomo: Vasilij Grossman tra ideologie e domande eterne, edited by Pietro Tosco, 193–214. Soveria Mannelli, Italy: Rubbettino. Riconda, Giuseppe. 2007. “La religione in Grossman.” In Il romanzo della libertà: Vasilij Grossman tra i classici del XX secolo, edited by G. Maddalena and P. Tosco, 221–50. Soveria Mannelli, Italy: Rubbettino. Shulga, Jekaterina. 2013. “The Freedom Within: Time, Trauma and Temporality in Vasily Grossman’s For a Just Cause and Life and Fate.” Journal of European Studies 43, no. 4: 299–311. Strada, Vittorio. 2007. “Russia e Germania nei romanzi di Vasilij Grossman.” In Il romanzo della libertà: Vasilij Grossman tra i classici

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del XX secolo, edited by G. Maddalena and P. Tosco, 31–40. Soveria Mannelli, Italy: Rubbettino. Tosco, Pietro, ed. 2011. L’umano nell’uomo: Vasilij Grossman tra ideologie e domande eterne. Soveria Mannelli, Italy: Rubbettino. – 2013. “‘Ho scritto quello che ho visto,’ La poetica di Grossman e il problema della verità.” Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Verona, Italy.

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7 The Russian Idea, Lenin, and the Origins of the Totalitarian State in Vasily Grossman’s Forever Flowing F rank El l i s In t ro du cti on Even by the standards of Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, the publication of Forever Flowing in Russia in June 1989 was a remarkable event. It still seems that way. The extensive descriptions of dreadful suffering and ghastly cruelty which unfold in the pages of Forever Flowing, overshadowed by the presence of Lenin and Stalin, accompanied and illuminated by the lives and fates of countless other characters, make Forever Flowing, because of Grossman’s refusal to accept any ideological preconditions, one of the most morally and intellectually inspiring works of the twentieth century. Now Grossman may be wrong when he argues that Lenin was the primary source of Soviet totalitarianism and, indeed, of twentieth-century totalitarianism generally – I shall consider some of the counter-arguments in due course – but his arguments are historically based and are consistent with what happened rather than with what ought to have happened or might have happened in some parallel, ideologically pristine, socialist universe. Moreover, and remarkably for a writer who was initially seduced by Marxism-Leninism, they are based on a great insight which eluded Marx, Engels, Lenin, and their Western admirers: that individual freedom – that great, ineffable, and hard-to-define value – matters. Where individual freedoms have the chance to grow, they can, over time and with a fair wind, set limits on the power of the state – the collective, the party, the commune – to dispose of people as just

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another raw material. Such a political, evolutionary path shall most certainly not fashion paradise on earth, but there is a good chance that it might prevent something infernal, and that the beast of arbitrary and tyrannical rule can be contained. In this world man can expect no more.

T h e R u s s ia n I dea When an emerging nation (or any nation) attains a certain critical mass in population, wealth, or success in war, or finds or encounters some unexpected and compelling new expression of religious destiny, the effect can transform the way that nation (or eventually empire) sees its place in the world. It acquires a sense of mission: it can believe that it has divine sanction to forge the world anew in its own image and, given this blessing, that it has the right, the obligation, to resort to the sword as well as exhortation in order to accomplish this goal. Rome, the rise of Islam, the Crusades, the Spanish and British Empires, Napoleonic France, the Soviet experiment, the empire of the American Republic, and in the early twenty-first century China rising all underline the tenacious appeal and seduction of imperial prestige. Russia’s history shows that she has not been immune to the follies and temptations of imperial power, nor to a sense of intellectual and moral separateness. When Philotheus of Pskov presented the Russians with the doctrine of the Third Rome, he gave them a reason to believe that Russia – Muscovy – was God’s favourite. Rome and Byzantium had succumbed to apostasy. Philotheus interpreted this as a shift in political and religious power and influence. As he famously noted: “Two Romes have fallen, the Third Rome stands and a Fourth Rome there shall not be.” If Moscow fell into apostasy there would be no Fourth Rome. Heresy became a sin of barely imaginable proportions and was punished mercilessly. Russia was certainly not unique in the zeal with which heretics were executed and exiled, but, and this may be crucial for Grossman’s thoughts on the evolution of nesvoboda (lack of freedom), the zeal to punish religious dissenters, and in the twentieth century ideological ones, has never been seriously challenged nor ameliorated by Western ideas of individual rights and freedoms. Russia’s collision with the West in the nineteenth century provoked an acute identity crisis in Russian thought and letters, introducing a cultural and intellectual schizophrenia that has been well-documented in the writings of Pushkin, Turgenev, Goncharov, Gogol, and

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Dostoevsky. Gogol and Dostoevsky are two famous exponents of the idea that Russia has a special mission to save the world by providing an example of spiritual excellence and purity. Whereas Gogol’s thoughts on Russia’s sacred mission strike this author as bittersweet flights of entertaining hyperbole and imagination running riot, Dostoevsky approaches this subject with deadly seriousness and conviction. Grossman proceeds to the question of the “myth of the national Russian character” (Grossman 1974, 173),1 and, arguably, to the most bitterly disputed part of Forever Flowing in chapter 22, appropriately placed between a merciless analysis of Lenin (chapter 21) and the rise of Stalin (chapter 23). Taken to task are the nineteenth-century prophets of Russia’s brave new world, among them Chaadayev, Belinsky, Gogol, and Dostoevsky, who, according to Grossman, failed to ­realize that “the peculiarities of the Russian soul had not been born in freedom; that the Russian soul – was a thousand-year-old slave” (Grossman 1974, 175). This harsh judgment derives from Grossman’s belief that there exists a crucial difference between Western and Russian notions of freedom. Western notions of freedom enter the Russian body politic as something alien and artificial. They are, to use Grossman’s word, “imported” (Grossman 1974, 175, emphasis added). On the all-important question of freedom, any similarities between Russia and the West are superficial, and in his typically relentless fashion, Grossman explains why this is so: “This chasm consisted in the fact that the West’s development was impregnated by the growth of freedom, whereas Russia’s development was nurtured by the growth of slavery” (Grossman 1974, 178). The only time in Russia’s history, Grossman suggests, when the institution of Russian slavery appeared to have been weakened was the abolition of serfdom in 1861: “Russia’s revolutionary thinkers failed to evaluate the significance of the emancipation of the serfs carried out in the nineteenth century. This event, as the following hundred years showed, was more revolutionary than The Great October Revolution. The emancipation shook the thousand-year-old foundations of Russia, foundations which neither Peter nor Lenin touched: the dependence of Russia’s development on Russian slavery” (Grossman 1974, 179). In his discussion of the origins of the Russian soul and specifically its origins in slavery, Grossman concedes that the physical and topographical characteristics of Russia have contributed to the Russian myth that it has a special role among the nations, and, moreover, that had the same conditions that obtained in Russia existed for the

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Germans, the French, or the English, the political outcomes would have been the same. Grossman is right to make this point but ignores the not-inconsiderable fact that conditions for the Germans, the French, and the English were not the same. Here, I suggest, Grossman succumbs to the fallacious reasoning adopted by some of his critics, who have argued that he is wrong to see any link between Stalinism and Lenin – blaming the latter for preparing the ground for the former – because Leninism was not the same as Stalinism and had Lenin survived, things would have turned out differently and the devastation of Stalinism would have been avoided. We have no way of knowing this. All we are left with is what did happen and on that basis an attempt can be made, as Grossman does, to offer an explanation. Nevertheless, when seeking answers explaining Russia’s political evolution, Grossman touches upon something very important when he refers to Russia’s “tragic vastness” (Grossman 1974, 182). Implicit in this observation is the possibility that Russia’s very vastness contributed to the conditions which led to the curse of nesvoboda. In Property and Freedom (Pipes 1999), the American historian Richard Pipes explores the relationship between freedom and property over the centuries. What makes this study so eminently relevant for Russia and Grossman is that Pipes uses his analysis of Russia and England to argue that the institution of private property is the bedrock of other freedoms. When Pipes considers the size of a state and how this size determines the society’s political and cultural institutions, especially the relationship between ruler and ruled, he offers some substantial support for Grossman’s view that Russia’s “tragic vastness” has contributed to the condition of nesvoboda. In summary, when a state covers a vast area and the bulk of the land and its assets are owned by a tsar and a small group of retainers, there is no need for extensive laws to protect property rights. Conflict and disputes can be avoided by moving somewhere else, or the tsar may adopt the simple expedient of seizing the property and exiling or executing the offending retainer. Clearly, English monarchs, Henry VIII prominent among them, rather liked seizing the property of offending noblemen, but they never enjoyed the unfettered powers of Russian tsars and were compelled to seek consensus, where in similar circumstances a tsar would place his own interests first. The smaller the geographical domain, the greater the need for peaceful ways of resolving property disputes. In a country such as England, in which, over the centuries from Magna Carta (1215) onwards, a vast

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corpus of legal wisdom dealing with property has accumulated, the power of monarchs and their successors to behave arbitrarily toward the property of their subjects (citizens) is, unlike in Russia past and present, severely limited and subject to careful scrutiny by the courts. It can also be noted that property rights stimulate, and indeed require, a legal system that is independent of the monarch, further weakening the options for monarchical privilege and the monarch’s intervention in the property rights of the citizenry. During a broadcast on British radio in March 1976, Solzhenitsyn referred with approval to the English saying that an Englishman’s home is his castle.2 The other great freedom that starts to emerge alongside private property is free speech. It is the exercise of free speech which leads to Ivan Grigorevich’s arrest and his long journey through the Soviet gulag system. A man who is secure in his property and livelihood possesses the confidence to challenge authority. Independence in property predisposes one toward an independence of mind and an indifference toward state ideology and propaganda. The state is not seen as the sole repository of political wisdom. All these developments are moves away from the collectivist, authoritarian, and eventually totalitarian ethos of Russian culture and history. They mark the first steps toward a genuine representative democracy with all its well-­ documented strengths and weaknesses.3

L e n in Consolidating the attacks on Stalin and Stalinism which were made in Life and Fate, Grossman takes the logical but utterly heretical step of subjecting the Lenin cult to the same critical appraisal to which Stalin had earlier been subjected. In fact, this was always implicit in the open and public discussions of Stalin taking place from the mid1980s onwards. Sooner or later, someone was going to go beyond Stalin and examine the role of Lenin in the October Revolution. In a series of chapters and digressions, Grossman shows Lenin as the destroyer of freedom, the man who orchestrated the extermination of so many of Russia’s finest, and who established the operational principle, never abandoned by the Party throughout the Soviet period, that terror, mass terror to begin with and selective thereafter, was perfectly acceptable when dealing with so-called enemies of the people. Grossman’s truly shocking and – for some – monstrous contribution is to attribute to Lenin unchallenged status as the founder of

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twentieth-century totalitarianism. If this was not bad enough, Grossman places Lenin and then Stalin firmly within his articulated tradition of Russia’s serfdom and lack of freedom (nesvoboda), thus alienating those who venerated Lenin and those who regarded Lenin and the Bolsheviks as utter aberrations from Russia’s spiritual, cultural, and historical norms. The revolutionary ethos of Lenin that led him to 1917 and that emerges in Forever Flowing is remarkably consistent with the ideals of underground terrorist groups, such as Zemlya i volya (“Land and Freedom”) and Narodnaya volya (“The People’s Will”). Forever Flowing abounds in references to revolutionary figures. Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876), Nikolay Chernyshevskiy (1828–1889), Nikolay Kibalchich (1853–1881), Pyotr Lavrov (1823–1900), Timofey Mikhailov (1859–1881), Sergey Nechayev (1847–1882), Sofya Perovskaya (1853–1881), and Andrey Zhelyabov (1850–1881) all add to Grossman’s portrait of Lenin. Impatient for change and scornful of the democratic process, these figures accepted the need for violence to further their goals. Revolutionaries were men and women apart. The call of History demanded the expedience of revolutionary violence, which was immune to the demands of bourgeois morality. In keeping with this late-nineteenth-century revolutionary tradition, Lenin combines abstract love of the people with fanaticism, and contempt for the suffering of others with a willingness to bow down before abstract ideological principles. Grossman’s vignette of Lenin the revolutionary places the Bolshevik leader firmly in the insurrectionist and terrorist tradition of Nechayev and the members of Narodnaya volya: “Lenin’s impatience, the unshakeable striving for the goal, the contempt for freedom, the cruelty in relation to dissenters and the ability, without any hesitation, to wipe from the face of the earth not only fortresses but also administrative districts and provinces which contested his orthodox truth – all these features did not come to the fore in Lenin after the October Revolution. These features were innate to Volodya Ulyanov. And these features have deep roots” (Grossman 1974, 169). Directed at class enemies, revolutionary violence is an essential weapon of class struggle. The willingness to use violence, the belief that it is justified by the revolution, is something that Lenin imbibed totally and acted on after seizing power in 1917. In the words of Grossman: “The surgeon’s knife is the great theoretician, the philosophical leader of the twentieth century” (Grossman 1974, 167).

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Lenin, of course, was the “great theoretician” of the Bolshevik cause, who in arguments with political opponents, as Grossman observes, “did not seek the truth but victory” (Grossman 1974, 169). Lenin’s eristic method of argumentation and his mode of writing and explication had three profound consequences for political rivals and political discourse in the Soviet Union. First, they were the grounds for the creation of a unique censorship apparatus, already adumbrated in Lenin’s hatred and fear of the institution of free speech in Chto delat? (What Is to Be Done? 1902) and his deep suspicion of the pecuniary motive for writing, set out in Partiynaya organizatsiya i partiynaya literatura (Party Organization and Party Literature, 1905). This censorship apparatus, which eventually assumed gargantuan proportions and which disfigured all intellectual endeavour in the Soviet Union, lasted until it was formally abolished in 1990. Second, the method of disputation pioneered by Lenin meant that truth became the exclusive property of the Party and so the moral compass and wisdom of the centuries, imperfect to be sure, were rendered useless, null, and void. Third, critically and murderously for what came after 1917, Lenin created an ideological climate in which all arguments could only be won or lost, often with fatal consequences for those deemed to have lost. Marxism-Leninism made no provision for the fact that there are not always clear-cut answers to political problems and that compromise is required. This win-or-lose approach to political and economic problems could possibly be seen as an advantage in the underground phase, where it produced a sense of unity and cohesion under the pressure from tsarist enemies. With power seized, under a revolutionary ethos that saw the world through the distorted prism of class struggle and History’s mandate, and, indeed, which reacted to the fear of heresies and collectivism that had earlier left their marks on Russian history, a reaction that surfaced in the assertion of virulent Party orthodoxies such as demokratichesky tsentralizm (“democratic centralism”), partiynaya pravota (“Party truth”), and revolyutsionnaya printsipyalnost (“revolutionary principles”), intraParty struggles were just as likely to follow the murderous precedents of the French experience of 1789. In fact, the Russian revolutionaries exceeded the French precedents by many orders of magnitude, engaging in behaviour that would have left even the French regicides and sans culotterrie aghast. Grossman examines the consequences of ideological war through the Party’s genocidal campaign to collectivize agriculture in the early

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1930s. In harrowing detail, Grossman sheds light on the Party’s policy of grain seizures and the mass starvation which followed through the eyes of Anna Sergeyevna, the former Party activist. She describes people as being “bewitched” (okoldovannye) (Grossman 1974, 117). The Party speaks of the kulaks as if they were animals, beasts, and bloodsuckers, as something degenerate and poisonous. For her part, Anna Sergeyevna admits that she also was bewitched by the Party propaganda; that she was ready to believe anything bad about the kulaks: And these words started to have an effect on me, still only a child really. All said the same thing: at meetings and in special instruction and radio broadcasts, at the cinema; writers wrote and Stalin himself: the kulaks are parasites, they are burning grain and killing children. And it was declared directly: incite the fury of the masses against them, exterminate them as a class, these damned kulaks. I started to feel bewitched as well and it seemed that all misfortune was caused by the kulaks and that were they exterminated, a time of happiness would ensue for the peasantry. (Grossman 1974, 117) Where the Party is the sole provider of information and physically prevents all attempts to break its monopoly of information dissemination by censorship and incarceration, superior intelligence or education will not automatically prevent people from believing what the Partycontrolled agitation and propaganda apparatus tells them. During the campaign to expose the so-called “Doctors Plot,” Grossman notes that people who should have known better were only too willing to believe the lies and slander. The disturbing realization is that under the right conditions one’s critical faculties can be neutralized and hysteria induced; then anything becomes possible. Rational explanations for what is happening fall away, and vague, supernatural forces seem to be an alltoo-plausible explanation. Anna Sergeyevna’s recollections of the Terror Famine suggest the end of the world: “And people became somehow confused, and the animals became wild, frightened, bellowed, moaning and at night the dogs howled. And the earth started to crack … Mothers looked at their children and started to scream from fear. They screamed as if a snake had crawled into the house. And that snake was death, starvation … The countryside started to wail, it saw its death” (Grossman 1974, 124). As portrayed in Platonov’s Kotlovan

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(The Foundation Pit, 1987), collectivization was not only a war waged by the Party against so-called enemies of the people: it was a war against the land, the fields, and the totality of rural life, against Mother Earth herself. In his portrayal of the Ukrainian genocide (Holodomor), Grossman makes an explicit comparison between the extermination of the peasants, dehumanized under conditions of a totalitarian media monopoly, and the fate of the Jews in the Vernichtungslager. Anticipating their National Socialist colleagues by a decade, killers from the Soviet Communist Party demonized, dehumanized, deceived, isolated, and then finally exterminated their peasant victims.

R e s p o n s e s to Forever Flowing a n d G ro ss man Forever Flowing launches a sustained assault on three vested interests. First, Grossman pays scant regard to the sensibilities of those who, like him, loathe Lenin and Stalin, yet see both as an aberration from Russia’s true path. Second, Grossman highlights the fact that large numbers of Soviet sympathizers in the West, Western politicians, historians, and others who made a living from studying the former Soviet Union colluded in the suppression of the truth and so played their part in the denial of Stalin’s crimes. Third, by attacking Lenin he denies that it is justifiable to hold Stalin solely to account for what occurred after the founder’s death, arguing that these things were a consequence of Lenin and what he indicts as the entire Soviet-Leninist project ab ovo. Generally sympathetic to much of Grossman’s subject matter in Forever Flowing, especially the author’s depiction of the Terror Famine, Arkady Stolypin is, however, not impressed by Grossman’s vision of Russia as a thousand-year slave. “If Russia,” he asks, “is an eternal slave and is fit for nothing other than the condition of a slave, then perhaps no other system other than a totalitarian one is possible in our country? Is there any point in struggling against the contemporary system?” (Stolypin 1971, 217). The first and most depressing answer to Stolypin’s question is that some form of rule on a spectrum oscillating between authoritarian and totalitarian may indeed be Russia’s political lot. It is a Western conceit that every nation and state aspires to some form of liberal democracy, even if Russia can produce individuals of the calibre of Grossman, Vasily Bykov, Boris Pasternak, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It is inspiring that Grossman,

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isolated from the West and subjected to all the immense ideological and collectivist pressures of Soviet society, can arrive at a conception of individual freedom in Forever Flowing that recognizably has so much in common with Western thought, and is so diametrically opposed to what was ideologically correct in the Soviet Union. It suggests to this author that Grossman’s “tragic loneliness,” to use Stolypin’s words, had a liberating effect on him. It enabled him to see more clearly and fearlessly. Moreover, the freedoms that citizens in Western liberal democracies take for granted were not found readymade. They have evolved over many centuries, and Russia, assuming her people aspire to something similar, will have to pass through her own unique time of trials. Martin Malia’s observations on the growth of totalitarianism are also an explicit rejection of the Grossman thesis. Malia notes: The totalitarian nature of Communism is not to be explained as the prolongation of traditional Russian authoritarianism or Oriental despotism; nor is the collectivist nature of Soviet society to be construed as the continuation of traditional Russian communal and servile relations. It is difficult to find any such agencies of transmission from the old to the new Russia in the actual policies pursued by the Bolsheviks after 1917, but it is very easy to find the origins of these policies in the socialist purposes of the Leninist party. (Malia 1994, 134) The “agencies of transmission” are not required to survive the transition from the tsarist to the Soviet in order for a totalitarian state to be created. It is the historical, cultural, psychological, and political norms and precedents (or the absence of these in any Western sense) that are crucial. They survived 1917 and Marxism-Leninism was grafted onto them. I suggest that Malia concedes this point when he argues that “[w]hat traditional Russia contributed to the Leninist project was a lack of social and cultural antibodies sufficiently strong to resist it” (Malia 1994, 134). And the lack of “social and cultural antibodies” was a direct consequence of the long history of an authoritarian state, which after 1917 no longer had the moderating influence of the Church. In chapter 14 of Forever Flowing, Anna Sergeyevna recalls, among the many horrors, the Potyomkin villages set up for the French politician, who, after seeing them, left the country and declared that he

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had seen no starvation in the countryside. Robert Conquest suggests that this was the French radical Edouard Herriot (Conquest 1986, 315). This incident hints at something that even now, many years after the genocide, should be, but is almost certainly not, a cause for great shame among Western academics, politicians, and writers. Genuine ignorance is not a crime, but a perverse willingness to ignore the truth, a refusal to ask hard-headed questions in the presence of strong circumstantial evidence, or a knowing suppression of the truth most certainly is. One of the worst, possibly the single worst, of the many Terror Famine / Holodomor deniers was Walter Duranty, the Sovietophile foreign correspondent of the New York Times, who knew that the death toll ran into the millions yet lied about it in his dispatches. In 1932 Duranty was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. In spite of demands in 2002, the seventieth anniversary of the Terror Famine, that the award be withdrawn, the Pulitzer board took no action against Duranty. The publication of the first Russian-language edition of Forever Flowing in the West (Frankfurt) in 1970, together with the English translation in 1972, failed to have the impact that a work of this importance should have had. Again, the reasons may lie in Grossman’s relentless exposure of Soviet crimes at a time when many Westerners in the academy were still willing to ignore Lenin’s and Stalin’s crimes and were even sympathetically disposed toward the Soviet state. Again, the prevailing intellectual fashions, especially a growing acceptance among Western academics and intellectuals that the Soviet state did not merit the label “totalitarian,” and that truth is relative, or that it is a social and political construct or even that there is no such thing as truth, cannot have produced a climate in which Grossman, who was obsessed with the truth, as only people who have lived in the Land of the Lie can be, would be given a fair hearing. In such circumstances it is far easier to ignore the troublesome messenger or misrepresent his warning. A striking example of the attempt to kill Forever Flowing by omissions and misrepresentations can be seen in a review published in, of all places, the London Times Literary Supplement in 1973. The anonymous reviewer completely ignored Grossman’s analysis of Lenin and his role in the creation of the Soviet totalitarian state, and Grossman’s thoughts on the nature of freedom.4 A request by the author of this chapter to the Times Literary Supplement for the identity of the reviewer met with no success. The publication of Forever Flowing in 1989 was accompanied by an exceptionally long article written by G. Vodolazov (1989, 3–29),

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a senior Soviet academician, suggesting that Grossman’s views of Lenin, Stalin, and the course of Russian history inspired a mixture of fear and loathing among a certain segment of the soon-to-be-renderedredundant Soviet literary and Party establishment. It is a reasonable assumption that Vodolazov’s accompanying article was the necessary concession demanded of the Oktyabr editorial board for Forever Flowing seeing the light of day in the Soviet Union. The main task of Vodolazov’s article was to explain the nature of Grossman’s ideologically incorrect thoughts for the benefit of the Soviet reader and so blunt the full force of his analysis of Lenin and his role in the creation of the Soviet state. Vodolazov begins by trying to justify the need for such a long article (an implicit recognition of just how dangerous Grossman’s ideas were still regarded as in 1989), and while he acknowledges that Forever Flowing is “magnificent, veracious and merciless” (Vodolazov 1989, 3), he objects to Grossman’s analysis of the causes of, reasons for, and roots of Stalinism, and rejects Grossman’s identification of Stalin with Lenin and Leninism with Stalinism. Above all, Vodolazov attempts to defend Lenin from Grossman. One contemporary consideration for this defence of Lenin in 1989 was to be found in the late perestroika slogan of “socialist pluralism.” Vodolazov saw the ideological inspiration for this in Lenin and on this basis he defended Lenin from Grossman’s uncompromising assault. The problem is not pluralism per se, but socialist pluralism. By its very wording, socialist pluralism is self-limiting, as is Lenin’s infamous example of “democratic centralism.” Vodolazov refers to other nouns whose essential meaning and therefore the range of permitted responses to them is drastically changed by converting them into socialist categories: “socialist realism”; “socialist humanism”; “socialist internationalism”; “socialist democracy” (Vodolazov 1989, 4). Vodolazov’s style remains loyal to the man he wishes to defend: socialism, asserts Vodolazov, is democracy taken to its logical end. Unfortunately, we are not instructed by Vodolazov on how any impasse between those who desire socialist democracy and those who do not want socialism (with or without any modifiers) is to be resolved. Are the advocates of socialist pluralism / socialist democracy deemed to possess superior, decisive wisdom to which the ideologically ignorant masses must defer, or is the matter to be decided by a free and secret ballot? The goals which Vodolazov sees as being crucial for socialism are to be achieved on the basis of the common ownership of the means

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of production. Equality throughout the areas noted by Vodolazov cannot be achieved when human beings, who are not equally endowed in their intellectual, physical, and moral faculties, are left to pursue happiness in their own way and without trespassing on the rights of others, as envisaged by the Founding Fathers of the American Republic. This can only mean that the goals of socialism, as envisaged by Vodolazov, can only be achieved by coercion (compulsory socialism). It is at this point that the socialist enterprise takes its first steps to the Leninist / Stalinist state described by Grossman. Sentimental appeals to the “common good” will, inevitably, fail to achieve the Brotherhood of Man. At some point, the socialist ideologues and planners will have no choice but to use the coercive powers of the state to impose their objectives; or they must abandon their attempt to create a socialist commonwealth. It is possible, as the example of Britain in 1945 bears witness to, that electorates will select a government which openly proclaims its intention to secure the common ownership of the means of production. But what happens when those who voted for socialism change their minds and want to remove a government committed to founding a socialist state? Marx provides no mechanism for the proletariat to get rid of such a government, and Lenin, like Hitler after him, had no intention of relinquishing the levers of power seized in the coup d’état in 1917. Lenin, Vodolazov’s unsullied leader, simply crushed Russia’s incipient democracy. Those who had doubts about socialism after 1917, even if they were only confined to Lenin’s version, were declared “enemies of the people.” For example, in an article published in 1918, Lenin denounced Karl Kautsky (1854–1938), the German social democrat, as a renegade for criticizing the Bolshevik Revolution (Lenin 1950, 207–302). Vodolazov’s attempts to postulate “socialism as democracy taken to its conclusion” and to differentiate it from “socialist” democracy, a Stalinist aberration, are far from convincing. The question that is so clearly begged by Vodolazov (and many others) is that Stalinism must be an aberration because “true,” “genuine,” “real,” “proper,” or “correct” socialism would never have led to genocide in Ukraine; it would never have reduced workers to cogs in a machine; it would never have led to a totalitarian state, control by an unaccountable Party, sham elections, a ubiquitous secret police, and labour and death camps for dissenters (real or mainly imagined). Only a violation of socialism, it is claimed, could lead to these things. And because “real” socialism never leads to anything like Stalinism,

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Stalinism cannot have anything in common with socialism. What Vodolazov fails to consider, or possibly cannot bring himself to consider, is that the basic assumptions of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, encapsulated in the notion of the common ownership of the means of production, may be, are, deeply flawed and that the attempt to build the socialist commonwealth based on them is the cause of all the genocide, penury, and human misery that has always resulted whenever the socialist experiment has been implemented. Whenever Vodolazov uses the term “objective truth,” one suspects that what he means is that this “objective truth” must be congenial towards the “Leninist tradition”; otherwise it cannot be considered the “objective truth.” What he cannot accept is the overwhelming evidence that “objective truth” is not necessarily – and is in fact never – the same as the “Leninist tradition” or “socialist pluralism.” Despite all his attempts to argue in favour of a free, open discussion, one can note Vodolazov’s attempt to site that discussion within a framework that will be implicitly friendly to socialist pluralism (note that he completely ignores Lenin’s hatred of free speech and the fact that Lenin introduced a vicious and long-lasting censorship). In offering us what he believes is Grossman’s rhetorical view of the Party, in order to highlight his allegedly false depiction of it as “a closed medieval order, a privileged caste which dominates the people and decides all questions concerning the fate of the people in secret” (Vodolazov 1989, 12), Vodolazov describes what is all too obvious: the Party was indeed all those things and his rhetorical devices merely confirm what Grossman has correctly described. Vodolazov then invites the reader to consider that the Party was in actual fact “an open, democratic organisation, which voluntarily assumed the obligation to carry out the will of the people and to be accountable to, and controlled by, the people at every step” (Vodolazov 1989, 12). Such an assessment of Communist Party behaviour underlines the immense and unbridgeable gulf which separates Grossman from Party apologists. Given what, by 1989, was known about the cpsu, Vodolazov’s assessment is not merely wrong but mendacious and perverse. By his very attempt to discredit Grossman’s portrayal of the Partystate under Stalin, Vodolazov’s attacks paint an accurate picture of what existed in the Soviet Union. Grossman’s observations on socialism are confirmed not just by what existed in the former Soviet Union but also by the experience of other parts of the world that copied the Soviet model.5 Vodolazov has no understanding of the vital differences

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between socialism and the market economy. He ignores the fact that it was Lenin who introduced censorship and that the censorship apparatus survived intact until it was dissolved by Gorbachev’s Press Law.6 He would have the reader believe that Lenin was well aware that the conditions for socialism did not exist in Russia. So can it be that the use of terror, censorship, and executions were intended to prepare the ground for socialism? One of Grossman’s most important insights in Vsyo techyot, namely the all-important link between economic freedom and other freedoms (free speech, etc.), was completely disregarded by Vodolazov. Stalinism did not just appear from nowhere. Grossman sees it as being part of Russia’s long history and the absence of individual rights: the state is everything. Vodolazov’s attempt to brush off Stalin and Stalinism as some kind of deformation is unconvincing. He asserts: “The most difficult – and of course the most important – thing is to understand the sources of this shift from the norm to a deformation” (Vodolazov 1989, 17). Again, we have returned to the begged question – since socialism is noble and good, the problem cannot lie with socialism itself. Could it be that socialism itself is the deformation from which all else follows? Terror against so-called “enemies of the people” was sanctioned by Lenin, and Stalin merely continued this policy (Vodolazov 1989, 19). The most striking thing about Vodolazov’s long article is the lack of any detailed discussion of Forever Flowing. Not only does Vodolazov fail to convincingly account for the rise of Stalin – as can be seen in the absence of any discussion of what Marx and Lenin contributed – this rise in fact becomes removed from Soviet and Russian history altogether, acquiring the status of some supernatural event; he also ignores the demonstrable parallels with other totalitarian socialist states in Eastern Europe and China. If “Stalinism is, in its essence, against the people” (Vodolazov 1989, 22), what is Leninism? The growth of a massive, all-pervasive state bureaucracy is unavoidable when all non-state institutions are destroyed. He then tries to excuse the growth of the state bureaucracy by arguing that the peasants lacked education. They may well have lacked education at the inception of Soviet power, but the brutal truth is that no matter how educated the peasants were, they would never have been welcomed as equals in running the country. Vodolazov concedes that the existence of the bureaucracy was inevitable but that Stalinism was a terroristic bureaucracy. This ignores the fact that organizations such as the VChK and the ogpu, both based on the

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use of police terror, had emerged and were preparing the way for the n k v d and its successors while Lenin was still alive. Vodolazov’s case against Grossman fails, in my opinion, to withstand scrutiny, whereas Grossman’s case against Lenin is upheld: Lenin is guilty as charged.

C o n c l u s ion Forever Flowing and the earlier Life and Fate belong to a select group of books which are indispensable reading for any student of Soviet and Russian history and letters who is seeking some of the answers to Russia’s apocalyptic twentieth century. The most striking feature of Forever Flowing is Grossman’s relentless honesty and his willingness to confront the origins and nature of the Soviet state: the deification of Lenin and his role in preparing the totalitarian state; the failure to grasp the nature of human freedom; the rise of Stalin; and the consummation of the Soviet project initiated in 1917. Had Grossman confined himself and his wide-ranging analysis in Forever Flowing to Russia’s twentieth-century woes, instead of describing a historical trajectory that explained the course of Russian history in terms of the evolution of slavery (nesvoboda), and which explicitly rejected the view of so many nineteenth-century Russian thinkers that Russia was destined to carry out a special mission (easily co-opted by Lenin), Grossman, today, in the opinion of this author, would be more deeply embedded in the Russian national consciousness. If Forever Flowing is uncomfortable and at times even shocking reading for Russians, it should also be seen as a warning to the West. If, according to Grossman, the difference between the political evolution of the West and that of Russia lies in the way freedom has evolved in the former and been ruthlessly sacrificed first to the prerogatives of the tsars and then to the ideological program of Marxism-Leninism in the latter, then it is proper to ask whether freedoms, once won, can be lost. Can the historical and intellectual evolution of the centuries toward what we take for granted as inviolable and inalienable freedoms be reversed? In the presence of evil and those who would deny truth, the special status of individual freedoms can never be secure. Nor can any society survive that accepts the notion that good and evil are outdated religious prejudices. Good and evil are eternal, at the very heart of man’s nature. Each age must confront them anew. I suggest that this is implicit in the very last word of the novel, which,

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evoking the title, Grossman uses to describe Ivan Grigorevich, his soldier of truth: neizmennyy (unchanged). Everything flows, but the constant, the irreducible, in all ages and in all times is freedom: its duties, its burdens, its sacrifices.

n otes   1 My translation.   2 The broadcast was made on 24 March 1976 and was published in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Warning to the Western World, 43.   3 In chapter 10, Ivan realizes that economic freedom and free speech go hand in hand: “Earlier, I used to think that freedom was freedom of speech, the press and conscience. But freedom, well, it is the entire life of all people. It is the freedom to sow what you want, to make shoes, coats, bake grain which you have sown, sell it or don’t sell it; and the metal worker, the steel worker and artist work live as you please and don’t be ordered about. And there’s no freedom either for those who write books or among those who sow corn and make boots” (Grossman 1974, 85).   4 “Synthesis with Slaves,” Times Literary Supplement, 23 February 1973, 197.   5 See Viktor Kravchenko, I Chose Freedom: The Personal and Political Life of a Soviet Official (1946); Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind (1953); and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (1973–75–78), and subsequent to the publication of Vodolazov’s article, Harry Wu’s Bitter Winds: A Memoir of My Years in China’s Gulag (1994) and The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (1999).   6 This law – Zakon o pechati i drugikh sredstvakh massovoy informatsii – was signed by Gorbachev on 12 June 1990 and took effect on 1 August of that year.

r efer enc e s Conquest, Robert. 1986. The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. London: Hutchinson. Grossman, Vasily. 1974. Vsyo techyot, 2nd ed. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Possev-Verlag. Lenin, Vladimir I. 1950 [1918]. Proletarskaya revoliutsiya i renegat Kautsky, 4th ed. In V.I. Lenin, Sochineniya, vol. 28, 207–302. Moscow: o gi z . Malia, Martin. 1994. The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991. New York: The Free Press. Pipes, Richard. 1999. Property and Freedom. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

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Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. 1976. Warning to the Western World. London: Bodley Head and bbc. Stolypin, Arkady. 1971. “Oshibochnaya istoricheskaya kontseptsiya Vasiliya Grossmana.” Grani 80: 216–23. – 1973. “Synthesis with Slaves.” Times Literary Supplement, 23 February, 197. Vodolazov, Grigory. 1989. “Lenin i Stalin: filosofsko-sotsiologichesky kommentarii k povesti V. Grossmana Vsyo techyot.” Oktyabr 6: 3–29.

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8 Vasily Grossman, Human Rights, and Political Institutions Mi ch e l e Ro s b o c h

1 . In t ro ducti on Vasily Grossman’s body of work is at the heart of the most important historical and political reflections on the twentieth century. It offers jurists significant material for reflection and commentary, which, in recent years, has been developed by many important scholars.1 In the Russian author’s greatest work, Life and Fate,2 one can find many references to legal relationships and institutions. Additionally, this book laid the twentieth-century anthropological foundations for man’s dignity and human rights. Because of this, Grossman’s work can be compared in its significance to other important historical, philosophical, and literary works of the past century. These fundamental works include the writings of Hannah Arendt, those of the “school” linked to Charta 77, and those of the authors of the Russian dissent (Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov). Even though they used different approaches, by recreating the dynamics of the totalitarian phenomena, these authors, like Grossman, contributed to a sharply focused description of ideological power and its abuses, power and abuses which were throughout the century met with resistance and assertions of the inalienable rights of man.3 Grossman’s institutional and legal commentary should be read within the broader picture presented by some of the most important scholars of the relationship between law and institutional structure, including Robert Nisbet, Augusto Del Noce, and Paolo Grossi. From different perspectives, these authors have described the development

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of political institutions in the modern and contemporary epoch. I consider Grossman’s liberal, anti-totalitarian thought as belonging to the field of thought delimited by the analyses of these authors showing the contradictions inherent in modern political institutions which are the products of ideological states. In this field, Grossman’s contribution is outstanding for its description of totalitarian institutions and for its defence of the value of individual human beings facing these institutions. We can highlight the value of Grossman’s thought on legal and institutional topics because of its solid foundation in human rights, at the levels of both the individual and the community (Rosboch 2014a). In particular, I believe Grossman’s contribution to the field of law may be developed by following the considerations raised by three lines of inquiry: first, an identification of the building blocks of the totalitarian state; second, the interplay between the individual and the state; and finally, the concept of freedom as the foundation and necessary historical embodiment of human rights.

2 . T h e to ta l ita r i an State: A b o l it io n o f C iv i l S oci ety a n d t h e N u l l if ic at i on of Ri ghts “In totalitarian countries societies as such no longer exist” (Grossman 2006, 487). In this way, Grossman vividly and realistically expresses one of the most striking aspects of the totalitarian state: an everpresent aspiration, to whatever degree, to abolish civil society in favour of the prerogatives of the State.4 In a totalitarian state, all aspects of life are absorbed into and regulated by the political. The important Italian philosopher and political thinker Augusto Del Noce (1910–1989) put it this way: “Totalitarianism is the novelty of completely including ethics within politics” (2015, 65).5 The reductionist nature of totalitarianism may be seen in the tragic elimination of not only those who are considered “enemies,” but also those who are considered “useless” in developing the power of the state. Grossman stated it as follows: “She had not been included in the small number of craftsmen and doctors whose lives were considered useful enough to be preserved” (Grossman 2006, 204). Life and Fate is set against the backdrop of the claims made by the totalitarian state in the Soviet Union and in Nazi Germany starting from the 1930s. Grossman argued that communism was nothing more than the overweening power of the Soviet state and that the leader

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of that state, Stalin, embodied the most absolute power in Russian history: “For a thousand years Russia had been governed by an absolute autocracy, by Tsars and their favorites. But never had anyone held such power as Stalin” (Grossman 2006, 770).6 In this way, absolutism and statism complemented each other, suffocating institutional pluralism and the normal flow of civil society.7 Grossman compared the Soviet state to the nationalistic and antiSemitic components of the National Socialist state. One of his characters, the Nazi Liss, describes the terrifying ideology of the National Socialist state after his long dialogue with the SS captain, Eichmann: “He had some ideas of his own about personal relations within the State. Life in a National Socialist State couldn’t just be allowed to develop freely; every step had to be directed. And to control and organize factories and armies, reading circles, people’s summer holidays, their maternal feelings, how they breathe and sing – to control all this you need leaders. Life no longer has the right to grow freely like grass, to rise and fall like the sea” (Grossman 2006, 482). Grossman highlights the originality of the totalitarian phenomenon, conceived as controlling every aspect of society, striking fear into every institution in society, both spiritual and material. The totalitarian experience cannot be compared in any way to past experiences with autocratic and dictatorial states.8 Grossman’s reflections on the ideological nature of the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century is of major importance in his work: “Arguably, therefore, the origins, growth and consequences of totalitarianism constitute the major theme in Grossman’s art” (Ellis 1994, 149). As stated by Nisbet, “This is the true horror of totalitarianism. The absolute political community, centralized and omnicompetent, founded upon the atomized masses, must ceaselessly destroy all those autonomies and immunities that are in normal society the indispensable sources of the capacity for freedom and organization. Total political centralization can lead only to social and cultural death” (Nisbet 1969, 210–11). Grossman observed and highlighted the parallel ideological development of Nazism and Communism at the very moment in which Germany and Russia faced each other head-on in Stalingrad in the battle that would determine the outcome of the Second World War, and stressed the remarkable similarities between the two opposing militaries.9 The late-night conversation between Liss and the Russian Mostovskoy is noteworthy – it describes “totalitarian culture” and compares the two totalitarian ideologies, whose basic characteristics, in fact,

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seem to reflect each other (Grossman 2006, 391–403).10 This is one of the most well-known passages in Life and Fate, in which Grossman brings out the denial of humanity involved in both ideologies and in their creation of rituals and “mythologies” offering only illusions and suffocating people’s lives. The experience of twentieth-century Russia provided millions of case studies showing that “the extreme violence of totalitarian social systems proved able to paralyze the human spirit throughout whole continents” (Grossman 2006, 215). In totalitarian societies, violence and various kinds of restrictions on freedom substitute for persuasion: they constitute a sort of “adequate preparation” for the subservience of consciences, strengthened and justified further by the climate of hatred toward “enemies” (for example, Jews, kulaks, or the followers of Trotskiy and Bukharin), who are held responsible for all the evils of society.11 There is only one expected outcome from this process: “Experience showed that such campaigns make the majority of the population obey every order of authorities as though hypnotized” (Grossman 2006, 213). Everyone was ensnared: The instinct for self-preservation is supported by the hypnotic power of world ideologies. These call people to carry out any sacrifice, to accept any means, in order to achieve the highest of ends: the future greatness of the motherland, world progress, the future happiness of mankind, of a nation, of a class. One more force co-operated with the life-instinct and the power of great ideologies: terror at the limitless violence of a powerful State, terror at the way murder had become the basis of everyday life. The violence of a totalitarian State is so great as to be no longer a means to an end; it becomes an object of mystical worship and adoration. (Grossman 2006, 215) Of all the totalitarian state’s systematic atrocities, Grossman identifies the tragedy of anti-Semitism and the denial of religious identity as the worst. Grossman, a Jew and a war correspondent, was among the first to enter Treblinka after the liberation, and among the first to speak openly in Russia about the massacre of Jews in Ukraine decreed by Stalin in the 1930s: “Anti-Semitism can take many forms – from a mocking, contemptuous ill-will to murderous pogroms … Anti-Semitism is always a means rather than an end; it is a measure

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of the contradictions yet to be resolved. It is a mirror for the failings of individuals, social structures and State systems” (Grossman 2006, 484).12 As already mentioned, ideology is often closely connected to nationalism, as Grossman has one of his characters proclaim: “And so Communists have created idols, put on uniforms and epaulettes, begun preaching nationalism and attacking the working class. If necessary, they’ll revive the Black Hundreds … But here in the camp the same instinct tells people not to change, not to change during all decades they spend here – unless they want to be buried straight away in a wooden jacket. It’s the other side of the coin!” (Grossman 2006, 193). In the same sense, Grossman writes: “The birthmarks of Russian social democracy were finally erased. And this process finally became manifest at a time when Stalingrad was the only beacon of freedom in the kingdom of darkness. A people’s war reached its greatest pathos at the time of the defence of Stalingrad; the logic of events was such that Stalin chose this moment to proclaim openly his ideology of State nationalism” (Grossman 2006, 665). At this point, a few structural features of totalitarian societies as they appear in Grossman’s work may be taken into consideration.13 First, an abolishment of differences and a levelling of society is a typical feature of totalitarian ideology as well as of the human, social, and cultural expression of totalitarian societies. In contrast, Grossman’s novel focuses on the “cult” of individuality, even in its natural manifestations:14 “Then the fence of the camp appeared out of the mist: endless lines of wire strung between reinforced-concrete posts. The wooden barrack-huts stretched out in long broad streets. Their very uniformity was an expression of the inhuman character of this vast camp. Among a million Russian huts you will never find even two that are exactly the same. Everything that lives is unique. It is unimaginable that two people, or two briar-roses, should be identical … If you attempt to erase the peculiarities and individuality of life by violence, then life itself must suffocate” (Grossman 2006, 19). Second, in a totalitarian society there is constant conflict between the people and the state. This was suspended during the battle of Stalingrad as described in Life and Fate – the state and the people were committed to fighting the Nazi enemy together, side by side – but the latent opposition was not resolved: “The victory of Stalingrad determined the outcome of the war, but the silent quarrel between the victorious people and the victorious State was not yet over. On

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the outcome of this quarrel depended the destiny, the freedom, of Man” (Grossman 2006, 657). The conflict never found a solution because the nationalist element intervened, in Russia as elsewhere, to strengthen the burden of the state’s power. About this historical development of the totalitarian state, Grossman wrote in Forever Flowing (his second masterpiece, written in the last period of his life, 1955–63): “The Leninist synthesis of non-freedom and socialism shook the world more violently than the release of atomic energy. The European preachers of nationalist revolutions saw the flame in the East. First the Italians, and then the Germans, proceeded to develop the concept of national socialism in their own ways” (Grossman 1997, 216).15 This remark echoes Del Noce again, who wrote about the origins of totalitarianism in Russia and in Europe more broadly as resulting from a mixture of ideology and nationalism, using the state as the instrument of implementation. Del Noce provided original reflections on the “New Totalitarianism” formed by a toxic brew of scientism, eroticism, and the theology of secularization (Del Noce 2014, 92–117).16 Third, the totalitarian state is characterized by the overbearing power of bureaucracy, which “is” the state at its highest level. This power leads to clear irrationalities such as those described in Life and Fate, including those experienced by Zhenya when she was desperately seeking a residence permit, finally granted thanks to the goodwill of a Party leader (Grossman 2006, 121–9), or the story told by Bova in which it was impossible to have foodstuffs delivered to a division surrounded by Germans only because it was impossible to sign the receipt: “What’s really terrifying is when you realize that bureaucracy isn’t simply a growth on the body of the State. If it were only that, it could be cut off. No, bureaucracy is the very essence of the State. And in wartime people don’t want to die just for the sake of the head of some personnel department … Any flunkey can kick some soldier’s widow out of his office. But to kick out the Germans you have to be strong. You have to be a man” (Grossman 2006, 390). Grossman documents the “unjust justice” which was employed in the service of the Party: the dominant ideology which availed itself of denunciations, accusations, and extracted confessions based on prejudice and arbitrary findings of guilt. As stated by Krymov’s interrogator: “The concept of personal innocence is a hangover from the Middle Ages. Pure superstition! Tolstoy declared that no one in the

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world is guilty. We Chekists have put forward a more advanced thesis: ‘No one in the world is innocent.’ Everyone is subject to our jurisdiction. If a warrant has been issued for your arrest, you are guilty – and a warrant can be issued for everyone. Yes, everyone has the right to a warrant. Even if he has spent his whole life issuing warrants for others” (Grossman 2006, 635).17 Lastly, a clear sign of the totalitarian state as described in Grossman’s work is the widespread violence at all levels of society – physical, social, and psychological violence, leading to the systematic and destructive violence of camps and gulags, the real icons of the suffering man, violated and annihilated in the twentieth century.18 Grossman offers a rich, sustained account of this: for example, the tragedy of Sofya Osipovna Levinton and of the little boy, David (both killed in a camp), and the story of Ershov (killed in a concentration camp after having tried to set up an underground organization) (Grossman 2006, 531, 541–54). Grossman concludes: “The State has the power to dam life up. Like water squeezed between narrow banks, hunger will then cripple, smash to pieces or exterminate a man, tribe or people … All that is human in a man can perish. He can turn into a savage animal that murders, commits acts of cannibalism and eats corpses” (Grossman 2006, 556).

3 . T h e O r ig in o f H uman Ri ghts Starting from this description of totalitarian power and brutality, Grossman goes on to offer an extremely significant contribution concerning the foundation of individual human rights, highlighting the absolute value of human freedom even in such terrible conditions. For Grossman, man is greater than the violence he is tragically capable of; even in the midst of terrible violence and ideological destruction, he does not stop relentlessly yearning for freedom. Grossman describes the absolutely indomitable nature of each individual vis-à-vis any form of power. This nature is witnessed by man’s great questions about the meaning of existence, which are characteristic of his heart and reason, even in the most dramatic circumstances of life. Understanding the origin of human rights is very important for understanding the true basis of our individual relationships with others, as well as the true basis for relationships among nations. Grossman bases his reflections on human rights, with deep philosophical speculation about the nature of man:19

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When a person dies, they cross over from the realm of freedom to the realm of slavery. Life is freedom, and dying is a gradual denial of freedom. Consciousness first weakens and then disappears. The life-processes – respiration, the metabolism, the circulation – continue for some time, but an irrevocable move has been made towards slavery; consciousness, the flame of freedom, has died out … What constitutes the freedom, the soul of an individual life, is its uniqueness. The reflection of the universe in someone’s consciousness is the foundation of her power, but life only becomes happiness, is only endowed with freedom and meaning when someone exists as a whole world that has never been repeated in all eternity. Only then can they experience the joy of freedom and kindness, finding in others what they have already found in themselves. (Grossman 2006, 555) It is important to point out that the reflection quoted here follows the dramatic death of Sofya Osipovna and the boy David in the camp, and is preceded by the following from Sofya as she and the boy are marched to their death: “However passionately it might long to, your soul could never betray this secret [of your own particular past]. You carry away this sense of your life without having ever shared it with anyone: the miracle of a particular individual whose conscious and unconscious contain everything good and bad, everything funny, sweet, shamed, pitiful, timid, tender, uncertain, that has happened from childhood to old age – fused into the mysterious sense of an individual life” (Grossman 2006, 543). Grossman’s appreciation of the absolute value of human existence recalls most Western considerations of the topic of human rights, considerations that are not typically treated in traditional Russian thought: “Human beings! He said something no one in Russia had ever said. He said that first of all we are human beings … 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 … Our Russian humanism has always been cruel, intolerant, sectarian. From Avakkum to Lenin our conception of humanity and freedom has always been partisan and fanatical. It has always mercilessly sacrificed the individual to some abstract idea of humanity” (Grossman 2006, 283).

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This irreducibility of each human being constitutes an essential condition for the existence of “human rights,” and is the only basis for freedom. In Life and Fate, the primordial yearning for freedom is based on two principles: first, the underlying power of man’s questions (from the most banal to those about “life and fate”),20 and second, altruism in its various forms and gestures (based on goodwill, not ideology), an altruism that men are capable of in the worst and most tragic circumstances (such as war).21 Man remains man in any given situation. He is not defined by prerogatives stemming from political powers; he is endowed with inalienable rights and capable of “stupid kindness.” As stated by the holy fool Ikonnikov in Life and Fate: Yes, as well as this terrible Good with a capital “G,” there is everyday human kindness. The kindness of an old woman carrying a piece of bread to a prisoner, the kindness of a soldier allowing a wounded enemy to drink from his water-flask, the kindness of youth towards age, the kindness of a peasant hiding an old Jew in his loft. The kindness of a prison guard who risks his own liberty to pass on letters written by a prisoner not to his ideological comrades, but to his wife and mother. 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. But if we think about it, we realize that this private, senseless, incidental kindness is in fact eternal. It is extended to everything living, even to a mouse, even to a bent branch that a man straightens as he walks by. Even at the most terrible times, through all the mad acts carried out in the name of Universal Good and the glory of States, times when people were tossed about like branches in the wind, filling ditches and gullies like stones in an avalanche – even then this senseless, pathetic kindness remained scattered throughout life like atoms of radium. (Grossman 2006, 407–8) Grossman’s novels describe man’s resistance to violence and suggest the “metaphysical” origin of human rights with simple references to normal human life:22 for Grossman, human dignity and human rights are not abstract concepts. They have tangible meaning and weight in the context and crucible of concrete human experience

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– lived in the light of history, freedom, reason, and community.23 As stated further by Ikonnikov: The harm from time to time occasioned a society, class, race or State by this senseless kindness fades away in the light that ­emanates from those who are endowed with it. This kindness, this stupid kindness, is what is most truly human in a human being. It is what sets man apart, the highest achievement of his soul. No, it says, life is not evil! (Grossman 2006, 409) Man’s most profound characteristic, according to Grossman, is his surprising capacity for “stupid kindness,” a quality that reveals the greatness of his soul and his absolute dignity, and is more important than the approval or judgment of the state or society. Grossman argues that the judgment of human actions by a particular human being, by a single, fallible sinner, is more important than any judgment by the state or the society: “There is a divine judgment, there is the judgment of a State and the judgment of society, but there is one supreme judgment: the judgment of one sinner over another. A sinner can measure the power of the totalitarian State and find it limitless: through propaganda, hunger, loneliness, infamy, obscurity, labour camps and the threat of death, this terrible power can fetter a man’s will. 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” (Grossman 2006, 536). Grossman’s considerations do not end here – they are further developed through extensive reflections on the relationship between the state and the individual. These reflections can be found in a lengthy conversation (one of those open and sincere conversations in Life and Fate between cultured and passionate men, who will pay dearly for their sincerity)24 involving some of the main characters in the novel – the scientist friends and colleagues of the physicist Viktor Shtrum. It is worth quoting some of this conversation at length:25 Individualism is not the same as humanity, he explained. Like everyone else, you confuse the two. You think the decadents are much criticized now? Nonsense! They’re not subversive of the State, simply irrelevant to it. I am certain that there is no divide between Socialist Realism and the decadent movement …

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Socialist Realism is the affirmation of the uniqueness and superiority of the State; the decadent movement is the affirmation of the uniqueness and superiority of the individual. The form may be different, but the essence is one and the same – ecstatic wonder at one’s own superiority. The perfect State has no time for any others that differ from it. And the decadent personality is profoundly indifferent to all other personalities except two; with one of these it makes refined conversation, with the other it exchanges kisses and caresses. It may seem that the decadents with their individualism are fighting on behalf of man. Not a bit of it. The decadent are indifferent to man – and so is the State … … 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 … There’s still no place in our house for democracy – for a true humane democracy. (Grossman 2006, 281–4) The above quotation can be placed into the present-day debates about the foundation of rights in Western democracies, which these democracies seem unable to adequately explain (as has been strongly stressed by Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde).26 Actually, current Western theories of human rights suffer from their hyper-individualistic grounding; Grossman adds to this individualism a discussion of the importance of traditional identity and patriotism.27 Traditional identities were important to win the war. However, immediately afterwards, the state suppressed freedom again, playing on letting freedom be only a prerogative either of the individual or of the state. The popular sense of freedom was lost between “the sly fingers of history”: “Stalingrad itself had continued to hold out … 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” (Grossman 2006, 487). The events and characters in the novel lead Grossman to develop a political philosophy highlighting man’s inalienable rights, not only from a historical point of view, but also suggesting an anthropological dimension and even in some ways a “metaphysical” one.28 An “insular,” abstract individual can, according to Paolo Grossi’s masterful reflections (2007a, 43–82, 125–63), easily become a victim of demagogy and of an abuse of statist power and impersonal

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bureaucracy. Demagogic, totalitarian states negate any attempts to solemnly proclaim “equal rights” and any commitment by public institutions to improved social conditions.29

4 . F r e e d o m a n d H u m an Associ ati on: A n t h ro p o l o g y a n d t he Hi s tori cal E m b o d im e n t o f H u man Freedom Beyond the level of the individual, we can underline the relevance of historical social relationships and traditions as places of the living embodiment of human rights and of the protection of human freedom. According to Grossman, the foundations of man’s dignity and of human rights, along with their concomitant responsibilities, are deeply rooted in the history of the Russian people, in their beliefs and human associations, active and operating even in the most tragic and desperate moments.30 There are many examples of resistance to both invaders and dictators in Grossman’s Life and Fate. One is Major Ershov, who works untiringly while interned in a Nazi camp to set up an underground organization, with the intent of spreading it throughout all the German camps for the prisoners’ mutual support and, ultimately, for the purpose of fomenting an insurrection against the Nazis (Grossman 2006, 298–305 and 529–31).31 Ershov is the champion of a resistance based not on individual effort or ideological forces, but on the power of freely chosen human association. In general, Grossman’s body of work is a foundational description of how the historical continuity of human associations becomes relevant to any resistance to totalitarianism. That is why he underlines the legacy bestowed on the Russian people by their traditional identities, which were developed over their long history in various social, religious, cultural, and institutional circumstances. He also speaks of the power of resistance growing out of these traditional identities, even in the darkest times.32 On the contrary, the revolutionary attitude tends to cancel this powerful history of associations. In fact, Grossman notes the manner in which totalitarian powers attempt to “rewrite” history and redefine the parameters of a nation’s heritage: “The might of the State had constructed a new past. It had made the Red cavalry charge a second time. It had dismissed the genuine heroes of longpast events and appointed new ones. The state had the power to replay events, to transform figures of granite and bronze, to alter

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speeches long since delivered, to change the faces in a news photograph. A new history had been written. Even people who had lived through those years had now had to relive them, transformed from brave men to cowards, from revolutionaries to foreign agents” (Grossman 2006, 274–5). This effort to rewrite history ignores the fact that the very traditional identities that the Russian people felt they belonged to were at the heart of the patriotic virtues of both the army and the civilians during the Second World War. As was shown again and again in Life and Fate, it was the power of those traditional identities that gave the army in Stalingrad the strength to heroically resist the Nazis, well beyond the strength that might have been provided by Soviet ideology alone, and which determined the outcome of the Second World War.33 Vittorio Strada pointed out the exceptional nature of Grossman’s novel: “Under the circumstances, besides the ‘detrimental falsifications’ of the Soviet power then and the Russian one now, the Russian literature of the Second World War, that is, the Great Patriotic War, is of particular interest, and undoubtedly Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate stands out because it was written under extreme conditions of ideological control and total censure” (2010, 15–16). The novel highlights a central point of Grossman’s conception of society: that is, the importance of human aggregations whose “universal” value lies mainly in defending and supporting the dignity and irreducibility of individual human beings. This reflection from the first part of the novel clearly documents this: “Human groupings have one main purpose: to assert everyone’s right to be different, to be special, to think, feel and live in his or her own way. People join together in order to win or defend this right. But this is where a terrible, fateful error is born: the belief that these groupings in the name of a race, a God, a party or a State are the very purpose of life and not simply a means to an end. No! The only true and lasting meaning of the struggle for life lies in the individual, in his modest peculiarities and in his right to these peculiarities” (Grossman 2006, 230). It should be noted that Grossman does not oppose the ideological, standardized sense of belonging in a totalitarian society with an “individualistic” solution; such a “decadent” option (which characterizes parts of Western political culture) cannot establish the basis for peaceful coexistence, respect for human rights and human dignity, and democracy.34 Grossman emphasizes instead the communal support for resistance to totalitarianism.

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Grossman considers a well-defined social structure to be a positive element supporting the development of individual human beings. Man can rely on social structures when facing difficult situations and ­making the sacrifices that life inevitably forces upon us.35 Free human groupings (“creative minorities” or a “parallel polis,” as they have been referred to elsewhere)36 are part of a healthy social structure, making human beings aware of the diversity of traditions, and embodying and representing human strength, even heroism. Grossman communicates the importance of these parallel social structures in Life and Fate with his description of the vicissitudes of “House 6/1.” House 6/1 was the basement of a blown-up building in Stalingrad, in the heart of an area controlled by the Germans, where a few Russian troops, led by Captain Grekov, managed to resist the German assault for many months, isolated from the rest of the army to the point of being forgotten and at a certain point considered to be no better than deserters (Grossman 2006, 411–41).37 He [Grekov] was very different from any of the officers she’d seen round Kotluban. He never threatened people or shouted at them, but they obeyed him. He just sat there, smoking and chatting away like one of the soldiers. And yet his authority was immense. … “Good,” said Krymov. “There are still a few question to be settled. We can talk in private.” “Why?” asked Grekov. “My men and I fight together. We can settle whatever needs settling together.” Although Grekov’s audacity made Krymov furious, he had to admire it. He didn’t want Grekov to think of him as just a bureaucrat. He wanted to tell him about his life before the war, about how his unit had been encircled in the Ukraine. But that would be an admission of weakness. And he was here to show his strength. He wasn’t an official in the Political Section, but the commissar of a fighting unit. “And don’t worry,” he said to himself, “the commissar knows what he’s doing.” (Grossman 2006, 425) Man’s fundamental rights, including legal protections, are indispensable for his welfare, but their primary bulwark is small, freely chosen social structures, including friendships, acting as alternatives to the huge state organization.38 We can find in Grossman the presence of

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“islands of freedom,” small societies that work insofar as their goal is the single individual’s development and enhancement. House 6/1 and – in a different, more partial way – Shtrum’s friends are good examples of the liberating power of these societies that Grossman describes, for both personal creativity and individual sentiments.39 Finally, the importance of the family as another human community must not go unmentioned. Family is another small, free social structure that can help in the resistance to totalitarianism. Life and Fate is the story of a family whose training and education allow them either to resist totalitarianism or at least to realize the truth of what is going on in human terms. Grossman does not consider the family in Life and Fate in an abstract sense, but instead he emphasizes the strong bonds among members of the Shaposhnikov family, especially as highlighted in the book’s last pages (Grossman 2006, 858–71). In Aleksandra Vladimirovna’s reflections one can hear the human tone that is the real alternative to the power of the State. What was in store for her? Although she was seventy years old, she had no idea. What was in store for the people she loved? Again she had no idea. Through the empty windows of her house she could see the spring sky looking down at her. The lives of those close to her were unsettled, confused, full of doubts and mistakes, full of grief. What would happen to Lyudmila? What would be the outcome of her family troubles? Where was Seryozha? Was he even alive? How hard were things for Viktor Shtrum? What would happen to Vera and Stephan Fyodorovich? Would Stepan be able to rebuild his life again and find peace? What path would Nadya follow – that clever little girl who was so difficult and so kind-hearted? And Vera? Would she be broken by the hardships and loneliness she had to endure? And Zhenya? Would she follow Krymov to Siberia? Would she end up in a camp herself and die the same death as Dmitry? Would Seryozha forgive the State for the deaths of his innocent mother and father? Why were their destinies so confused, so obscure? As for those who had been killed or executed, they were still alive in her memory. She could remember their smiles, their jokes, their laughter, their sad lost eyes, their hopes and despairs. (Grossman 2006, 860–1)

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5 . C o n c l u si on Grossman was not a jurist, and even if one can find many references to legal relationships and institutions in his works, he did not cultivate a specific interest for them. Life and Fate clearly brings to light important elements for a deeper understanding of the development of civilization based on law in the twentieth century, a period in which it was often confronted by the excessive powers of the ideological State and totalitarian violence. Life and Fate documents the essence of the totalitarian state and describes the life force of human beings as an irreducible source for the notion of human rights, to which traditions and human aggregations offer fertile soil for growth and irreplaceable support. In fact, human rights can be defended only if there is effective respect for the irreducible value of an individual human being, for the larger order of Being, and for traditional identities. If social structures and cultural identity are missing, individualism results in a sort of anarchy paving the way for a new totalitarian order grounded on violence and oppression.40 The alternative to the pure arbitrariness of the State is not the mere arbitrariness of the individual but bottom-up institutions grounded on small societies, free associations, and families that work for the wellness and development of individuals. Therefore, from Grossman, who was not a political philosopher or a scholar of institutions, we can draw an important suggestion for a foundation of human rights different from both the socialist and the hyper-­ individualistic approaches of Western societies.

n otes   1 For a general bibliography of Vasily Grossman (1905–1964), see notes in this volume and the proceedings of the conferences held in Turin in 2006 and 2009 (with extended references), Maddalena and Tosco (eds.) 2007, and Tosco (ed.) 2011b. For a discussion strictly about Grossman’s thoughts on law, see Berti 2016. Berti 2016 includes references to two of my recent publications: Rosboch 2014a and Rosboch 2016.   2 This chapter refers to the 2006 English edition of Life and Fate, translated by Robert Chandler (New York: New York Review of Books). A second 2011 English edition was also translated by Robert Chandler (Grossman 2011).

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  3 See Arendt 1958, Havel 1985, Belohradsky 1981, and Solzhenitsyn 1974. For a detailed re-creation of the totalitarian matrix in the “democratic” systems starting from the eighteenth century, see Talmon 1960 and Voegelin 1981; cf. Maddalena 2015.   4 See Grossi 2015 for a brief synopsis, and Venturi 2014 for reflections on the “ideological” nature of the state and the Party.   5 Cf. also Ellis 1994, 149–217.   6 See also Conquest 2008.  7 Ex multis, Nisbet 1987.   8 Cf. Arendt 1958, in particular VII–IX.   9 Cf. Dell’Asta 2015 and Kershaw-Lewin 2000. 10 Cf. Dell’Asta 2007, 41–67, and in general Zhizhek 1989 and 1997. 11 Cf. Valle 2012, 71–104. 12 See also Malcovati 2011, 95–111. 13 Cf. Sherbakova 2014. 14 See Tosco (ed.) 2011b, 333–60. 15 There are two English translations of this book. I quote the translation entitled Forever Flowing. 16 Cf. Grossman 1997, 191–229. 17 Grossman continues by saying, “All this had happened to tens of thousands of Party members in 1937 – men as good as him or better than him [Krymov] … Why was he so appalled now by the word ‘denunciation’? Just because he himself was in prison as a result of a denunciation? He himself had received political reports from his informers in the ranks. The usual thing. The usual denunciations” (ibid., 636). Cf. Grossman 1997, 68–86; we can notice here a sort of “Psychology of Denunciation,” in which Grossman identifies four types of informers; cf. Ellis 1994, 202–4. 18 Cf. Strada 2007, 36–9, and Vujachich 2011, 389–410. 19 Cf. Maddalena 2011, 279–97; Maddalena 2014, 14–18; and Zaruski 2015. 20 Maddalena 2015, 127–30. 21 Cf. Ellis 2007, 179–82. 22 In general, Cassese 2005. 23 Cf. Carozza 2008, 931–44. 24 Grossman 2006, 288: “What a wonderful power and clarity there is in speaking one’s mind. What a terrible price people paid for a few bold words!” 25 For the complete dialogue, see Grossman 2006, 272–90. 26 Cf. ex multis Böckenförde 2007, 33–54, and Nisbet 1969, 212–84.

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27 Vujachich 2011, 389–402. 28 Cf. Glendon 2006. 29 See the legal and political historiography found in Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville (cf. Matteucci 1984, Jardin 1994, Talmon 1960, and Nisbet 1969); see also Ciatti 2005. For a reference to Grossman’s work, see Mrowczynski-Van Allen 2011. 30 For a more extensive discussion, see Garrard and Garrard 1996 and Garrard and Garrard 2012. 31 Documents concerning this underground organization, whose promoters had been arrested and killed, were found in German archives at the end of the war. 32 Cf. Aucouturier 2007, 147–63; see also Rosboch 2015, 7–33. 33 Cf. Ellis 2010. 34 Along the same critical lines with respect to Western legalism, see Solzhenitsyn 1986; for other important observations concerning totalitarian dictatorship and the impersonality of anonymous power, see Tuccari 2012 and Zaslavsky 1982. 35 Garrard and Garrard 2012, in particular 335–45. 36 Ratzinger and Pera 2007. The expression “polis parallele” (parallel polis), cited by Vaclav Havel, stretches back to Vaclav Benda’s considerations: Benda 1988, 214–22; Havel 1985; see also Nisbet 1969, 75–211, and, more in general, Sandel 1982. 37 Cf. Vujachich 2011, 394–5. 38 In this regard, see the classic reflections of Laski 1948; see also MacIntyre 1981. 39 On the same topic, see also Grossman’s short story “Phosphorus,” which is the autobiographical story of a group of friends (cf. Grossman 2010; Garrard and Garrard 2012, 70–1, 379). 40 Cf. Del Noce 2016.

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Benda, Vaclav. 1988. “Parallel Polis, or an Independent Society in Central and Eastern Europe: An Inquiry.” Social Research 55, no. 1.2: 214–22. Berti, Francesco. 2016. The Two Revolutions and the Nature of Totalitarianism: Vasily Grossman’s Reinterpretation of Bolshevism. In Grossmanovskiy sbornik: Nasledie sovremennogo klassika / Grossman Studies: The Legacy of a Contemporary Classic, edited by M. Calusio, A. Krasnikova, and P. Tosco, 319–36. Milan, Italy: EDUC att. Böckenförde, Ernst-Woflgang. 2007. Diritto e secolarizzazione: Dallo Stato moderno all’Europa unita [Law and Secularization: From the Modern State to a United Europe]. Edited by G. Preterossi. Bari-Roma, Italy: Laterza. Calusio, Maurizia, Anna Krasnikova, and Pietro Tosco. 2016. Grossmanov­ skiy sbornik: Nasledie sovremennogo klassika / Grossman Studies: The Legacy of a Contemporary Classic. Milan, Italy: EDUC att. http://system. educatt.com/libri/ebookRepository/9788893350952.pdf. Carozza, Paolo G. 2008. “Human Dignity and Judicial Interpretation of Human Rights: A Reply.” The European Journal of International Law 19, no. 5: 931–44. Ciatti, Alessandro. 2005. “Alexis de Tocqueville e il diritto dei privati.” Rivista di storia del diritto italiano, 78: 383–98. Conquest, Robert. 1989. Tyrants and Typewriters: Communiques in the Struggle for Truth. London: Hutchinson. – 2008. The Great Terror. New York: Oxford University Press. Dell’Asta, Adriano. 2007. “Dal sogno all’incubo: Nazismo e comunismo in Vasilij Grossman.” In Il romanzo della libertà: Vasilij Grossman tra i classici del XX secolo, edited by G. Maddalena and P. Tosco, 41–67. Soveria Mannelli, Italy: Rubbettino. – 2016. “The Architecture of Life and Fate.” In Grossmanovskiy sbornik: Nasledie sovremennogo klassika / Grossman Studies: The Legacy of a Contemporary Classic, edited by M. Calusio, A. Krasnikova, and P. Tosco, 89–106. Milan, Italy: EDU Catt. Del Noce, Augusto. 2014. The Crisis of Modernity. Edited and translated by C. Lancellotti. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. – 2016. Rousseau. Il male, la religione e la politica: Con le ultime lezioni su Rosmini. Edited by S. Azzaro. Brescia, Italy: La Scuola. Ellis, Frank. 1994. Vasiliy Grossman: The Genesis of Evolution of a Russian Heretic. Providence, ri : Berg. – 2007. “La rivelazione della libertà e gli inizi della saggezza in Vita e destino di Vasilij Grossman.” In Il romanzo della libertà: Vasilij

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Victor Zaslavsky, edited by T. Piffer and V. Zubok, 375–410. Bologna, Italy: Il Mulino. Zaruski, Jürgen. 2016. “World War II and the Problem of Freedom: The Historical Standpoint of Life and Fate.” In Grossmanovskiy sbornik: Nasledie sovremennogo klassika / Grossman Studies: The Legacy of a Contemporary Classic, edited by M. Calusio, A. Krasnikova, and P. Tosco, 283–98. Milan, Italy: EDU Catt. Zaslavsky, Victor. 1982. The Neo-Stalinist State: Class, Ethnicity, and Consensus in Soviet Society. New York: Armonk. Zhizhek, Slavoy. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London and New York: Verso. – 1997. The Abyss of Freedom. Ann Arbor, mi: The University of Michigan Press.

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Contributors

A n n a B o n o l a (PhD, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, Germany) is a full professor of Slavistics at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milan). Her research focuses on theoretical and applied Russian linguistics. In recent years she has dealt with the linguistic analysis of Russian literary texts, in particular the prose of Vasily Grossman. She is the author of more than forty scientific articles and five books, and has edited or co-edited eight books. She is a member of the editorial board of the academic periodicals Vestnik p s t g u (Moscow) and L’Analisi Linguistica e Letteraria (Università Cattolica, Milan), a member of the scientific board of the International research Group GeLiTeC (Contrastive Textual Linguistics), and the co-director of the Vasily Grossman Study Center in Turin (http:// grossmanweb.eu). Maurizia Calusio (PhD, Università degli Studi di Milano) is a professor of Slavistics at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milan, Italy), where she currently teaches courses in Russian literature. She has devoted two monographs to the Russian poets Boris Poplavskij (Il paradiso degli amici, 2009) and Evgenij Boratynskij (La musa imperfetta, 2012). As a translator, she published, among others, works by Osip Mandelshtam (1995; 2017), Fyodor Tyutchev (1993), Nina Berberova (1996, 2004, 2006), and V. Nijinski (2000). She edited the last Italian translation of Arkhipelag Gulag by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Milan, 2001), the letters by Anna Achmatova (Distrugga le mie lettere, per favore, 2005), and a collection of letters to Stalin (Lettere al boia: Scrivere a Stalin, 2011). With Anna Bonola she co-edited two collections of essays devoted to Russian emigration (Dopo la Russia:

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In Francia, 2005) and problems of translation (Il nostro sogno di una cosa, 2015). In 2016 she co-edited a collection of essays on Vasily Grossman titled Grossman Studies: The Legacy of a Contemporary Classic. Currently, she is working on Vasily Grossman’s prose. She is a member of the Scientific Committee and of the Board of the Vasily Grossman Study Center. Frank Ellis taught at unlv and the University of Leeds, England. He is the author of Vasily Grossman: The Genesis and Evolution of a Russian Heretic (1994), From Glasnost’ to the Internet: Russia’s New Infosphere (1999), Political Correctness and the Theoretical Struggle: From Lenin and Mao to Marcuse and Foucault (2004), The Eastern Front through the Eyes of Soviet and Russian Novelists (2011), The Stalingrad Cauldron: Inside the Encirclement and Destruction of the 6th Army (2013), and, most recently, Barbarossa 1941: Reframing Hitler’s Invasion of Stalin’s Soviet Empire (2015). John G ar r a r d (professor emeritus of Russian studies, University of Arizona) and his wife C a ro l G a r r a r d (PhD, University of Virginia) are the authors of The Life & Fate of Vasily Grossman, the first biography of Grossman to make use of previously sealed Soviet archives. The Garrards have donated its international copyright to the Grossman Center in Turin, Italy, and donated their research archive to Harvard University’s Houghton Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The archive’s address is http://nrs.­harvard.edu/urn-3:FHCL. Hough:hou02521. The archive includes Grossman’s nkvd and kgb files, the original manuscript/typescript of Vsyo techot, copies of over two hundred of Grossman’s letters, and other material they gathered in seven years of researching the book. G i u s e p p e G h i n i has been a full professor of Russian literature at the University of Urbino since 2002. He was previously a fellow of the Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin, Madison (1997–98) and a visiting scholar at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University (2003), and is a member of the Associazione Italiana degli Slavisti. He has been a contributor to several academic periodicals, among them Intersezioni, Lingua e stile, In forma di parole, Russica romana, Toronto Slavic Quarterly, and Linguae &. He is the author of four books – Un testo “sapienziale” nella Rus’ kieviana. Il Pouchenie di Vladimir Monomach

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(Bologna: Patron, 1990); La Scrittura e la steppa. Esegesi figurale e cultura russa (Urbino: Quattroventi, 1999; Tradurre l’Onegin (Urbino: Quattroventi, 2003); and Anime russe. Turgenev, Tolstoj, Dostoevskij. L’uomo nell’uomo (Milan: a r e s , 2014) – and more than sixty academic articles. As a journalist, he has contributed more than eight hundred articles to various non-academic periodicals and newspapers. He is married, with three children. He has been a member of the Evaluation Board of Urbino University (Nucleo di Valutazione) since 2007, and president of the Rui Foundation (Fondazione Rui) since 2017. L a z a r L a z a r e v (1924–2010) was born in Kharkov, graduated from the Philological Faculty of Moscow State University (1950), and then became a candidate of philology. Starting in 1955 he worked for the Literary Gazette (Literaturnaya Gazeta), and in 1961 joined the most important Soviet literary journal, Voprosy literatury, first as chief secretary, then as chief editor. Lazarev is the author of books on Vasily Bykov, military prose, and Konstantin Simonov. He wrote two books of memoirs, What I Remember (1990) and Sixth Floor, or Running through Our Date (1999). G i ova n n i M a d da l e n a (PhD, Roma Tre) is an associate professor of history of philosophy at the University of Molise, Italy. He works on American philosophy, especially focusing on Charles S. Peirce and classic pragmatists. A Fulbright Research Scholar (2010) and visiting professor at École Normale Supérieure (2015), he proposed a new paradigm of reasoning in The Philosophy of Gesture (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015). He is a senior fellow of the Institute of American Thought (i u p u i , Indianapolis) and a member of the International Scientific Board of École Normale Supérieure (Paris). He is executive editor of the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy and founder of the Vasily Grossman Study Center. With the Center he organized three International Conferences (Turin 2006, 2009; Moscow 2014) and the exhibit “Life and Fate, the Novel of Freedom and the Battle of Stalingrad,” shown in nine countries. M i c h e l e R o s b o c h (PhD, professor of legal history at Turin University since 2005) is a member of the Board of Administration of Turin University. Since 2006, he has been the president of the Vasily

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Grossman Study Center and director of the Vasily Grossman Digital Documentation Project (http://dc.grossmanweb.eu). He has published some monographs and scientific essays about medieval and modern legal history.

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Index

Akhmatova, Anna Andreevna (Gorenko), 36 Almaz, Nadya, 4 anti-cosmopolitan campaign, 6, 130 Arendt, Hannah, 72n1, 73n13, 75n20, 141 Aslanyan, Anna, 87 Aucouturier, Michel, 70–1, 92n2 Avakkum, Petrov, 148 Babel, Isaak Emmanuilovich, 98 Baklanov, Grigoriy Yakovlevich, 35 Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich, 128 Beevor, Anthony, 9, 12n23 Belinsky, Vissarion Grigoryevich, 125 Benda, Vaclav, 158n36 Berti, Francesco, 119n5, 156n1 Bocharov, Anatoliy, 33–4, 92n2, 96, 97, 102, 105n8 Böckenförde, Ernst-Wolfgang, 151 Böll, Heinrich, 8, 32, 36 Bonola, Anna, 3–13, 41–76 Borshchagovskiy, Aleksandr, 99 Bukharin, Nikolay Ivanovich, 144

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Bulgakov, Michail, 44 Bykov, Vasily Vladimirovich, 35, 131 Calusio, Maurizia, 4, 10, 95–105 Catherine the Great, 84 Chaadayev, Pyotr Yakovlevich, 125 Chandler, Elizabeth, 11n6, 87 Chandler, Robert, 6, 9, 11n1, 11n6, 12n13, 87, 95–7, 104n2, 105n7, 156n2 change, 79–80, 82, 86, 116 Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich, 35–8, 58, 86–7, 98, 104 Chernyshevskiy, Nikolay Gavrilovich, 74n18, 128 Chukovskiy, Korney, 52, 74n16 Chuykov, Vasiliy Ivanovich, 17–19, 22–3, 28, 63 concentration camp, 4, 5, 38, 54–6, 62–3, 68–70, 71, 114, 147, 152 Conquest, Robert, 8, 133 De Tocqueville, Alexis, 158n29 Del Noce, Augusto, 141–2, 146 Dell’Asta, Adriano, 114 de-Stalinization. See Krushchev’s Thaw

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170 Index

Dodin, Lev, 9 Donnelly, Elizabeth, 11n5 Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhaylovich, 38, 117, 125 Duranty, Walter, 133 Ehrenburg, Ilya Grigoryevich, 6, 11n6, 11n9, 20, 97, 109 Ellis, Frank, 7–10, 123–39, 143 Engels, Friedrich, 123, 136 Etkind, Efim, 32 Ezhov, Nikolay Ivanovich, 5 Finkielkraut, Alain, 8 forgiveness, 87–92 freedom, 10, 41, 50, 54, 56, 62, 71, 147; as autonomy, 109, 151–2; as connection with truth, 71, 110–12; as life, 114–15; as philosophical concept, 152–5; as political concept, 152–5; and property, 126–7; as religious sense, 112–13, 115–19; of speech, 109–10, 127 Frolova, Olga Eva, 92n2 Garrard, Carol and John, 3, 5, 9–10, 16–29, 32, 97, 101, 105n4 Geller, Mikhail, 8 gestures: as kindness, 111–12; as literature, 107 Ghini, Giuseppe, 10, 79–92 Giussani, Luigi, 8, 113 Glucksmann, Andrè, 8 Gogol, Nikolay Vasilyevich, 124–5 Goncharov, Ivan Aleksandrovich, 124 Gorbachev, Mikhail Sergeyevich, 12n16, 74n18, 123, 137, 139n6 Gorkiy, Maksim (Aleksey Maksimovich Petrov), 4, 98

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Graham, Daniel, 80 Great Terror (1937), 101–3, 118 Grossi, Paolo, 141, 151–2, 157n4 Grossman, Vasily Semyonovich: death, 26; “In the Line of the Main Drive,” 20; influenced by Chekhov, 35–8, 98; influenced by Tolstoy, 32–5; letter to father from Stalingrad, 16; at Mamaev Kurgan, 26–7; paradoxical “freedom” at Battle of Stalingrad, 17, 20, 22, 24; portrayal of Stalingrad battle in Life and Fate, 18–19, 21, 24–5; reception of work, 7–9, 31–2, 95–9, 133–8; removal as correspondent from Stalingrad, 24 Guber, Fyodor Borisovich, 92, 96, 98, 99, 118 Guber, Olga Mikhailovna, 5 Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri), 84 Gurtev, Leonid, 20–1 Havel, Vaclav, 158n36 Henry VIII, 126 Heraclitus, 79, 80, 92n2, 116 Herriot, Edouard, 133 Hitler, Adolf, 24, 32, 75n20, 108, 135 Holodomor. See Ukraine famine human association, 152–6 human rights, 147–52, 156 ideology, 45–6, 56, 58, 64, 71, 108, 114, 144–6; as language, 46, 52, 64, 74n18 individualism, 114, 151–2, 153, 156 justice, 146–7

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Index 171

Kautsky, Karl, 135 Kazintsev, Aleksandr Ivanovich, 34 Khrushchev, Nikita, 6–7, 13n27, 25–6, 29n8, 95 Khrushchev’s Thaw, 10, 13n27, 95, 102 Kibalchich, Nikolay Ivanovich, 128 Klemperer, Victor, 72n2, 75n21 Korotkova-Grossman, Yekaterina Vasilyevna, 4 kulaks, dehumanization of, 130–1; as “enemies of the people,” 45–6 Kunyayev, Stanislav, 34 Laski, Harold Joseph, 158n38 Laughton, Charles, 84 Lavrov, Pyotr Lavrovich, 128 Lazarev, Lazar, 10, 26, 29n9, 30–9, 97 Lem, Stanislaw, 84 Lenin, Vladimir Ilich (Ulyanov), 7, 8, 27, 52–3, 73n10, 74n18, 123, 125–38, 148; democratic centralism, 129; eristic method, 129; Party organization and Party literature, 129; Party truth, 129; and revolutionary groups, 128; revolutionary principles, 129; What Is to Be Done?, 129 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 8 Lipkin, Semyon Israilevich, 29n7, 36, 83, 98, 105n6 “literature of lieutenants,” 35 Maddalena, Giovanni, 3–15, 107– 19, 156n1 Malia, Martin, 132 Markish, Simon Peretsovich, 4, 32, 95, 97, 102, 105n6 Marx, Karl, 123, 135–8 Matsuk, Anna Petrovna, 4

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Mikhailov, Timofey Mikhailovich, 128 Mrowczynski-Van Allen, Artur, 158n29 Mukovnikova, Olga, 11n6 Nechayev, Sergey Gennadjevich, 128 Nekrasov, Nikolay Aleksyevich, 38, 88–9 Nekrasov, Viktor Platonovich, 35, 83, 98–9 Nemzer, Andrey Semyonovich, 96 nesvoboda (lack of freedom), 124, 126, 128, 138 Newspeak (novoyaz), 45, 52, 54, 73n9, 73n15, 74n18, 74–5n19, 75n20 Nisbet, Robert, 141, 143 Nivat, Georges, 92n2 Nouwen, Henri Jozef Machiel, 84–6, 91 novoyaz. See Newspeak Ortenberg, David, 16, 19–20, 24 Orwell, George, 45, 52, 72n2, 73n9, 73n15, 75n20 partiynost (Party-mindedness), 17, 42–3, 47 Pasternak, Boris Leonidovich, 7, 44, 97, 131 Paulus, Friedrich, 5, 19, 22, 24 Pecheux, Laurent, 84 Pennac, Daniel, 8 perlocutionary force, 43–5, 47 Perovskaya, Sofya Lvovna, 128 Peter the Great, 125 Pipes, Richard, 126 Plato, 79 Platonov, Andrey Platonovich, 3, 11n1, 30–2, 83, 104, 130–1

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172 Index

Potyomkin village, 132–3 propaganda, 45, 49, 52–4, 127, 130 Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergyevich, 38, 104, 124 Putin, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 8 Rad, Elza, 84 Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio), 117 Rembrandt (Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn), 84–6, 91–2 repentance, 87–91 Revolution, French, 129 Revolution, Russian, 4, 125, 127 Rodimtsev, Aleksander Ilich, 19 Rosboch, Michele, 10, 141–58 Roskin, Aleksander Iosifovich, 36 Russo-phobia, 34 Samizdat, 4, 7, 96–7 Sarnov, Benedikt, 57, 72n2, 73n10, 73n12, 105n6 Schelling, Friedrich, 114 Shalamov, Varlam Tikhonovich, 141 Sholokhov, Mikhail Aleksandrovich, 34 Simonov, Konstantin Mikhailovich, 24, 33 Sistine Madonna, 117–19 socialist realism, 95, 101, 103 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isayevich, 7, 73n7, 127, 131, 139n2, 141, 158n34 Soviet discourse, 48–9, 52 Soviet Thaw. See Khrushchev’s Thaw Spada, Leonello, 84 Stalin, Iosif Vissarionovich (Dzhugashvili), 6, 7, 24–5, 28n6,

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30, 42–4, 47–9, 51–3, 65, 74n18, 95–6, 98, 99, 101, 102, 108, 123, 125, 127–8, 131, 133–8, 143–5 Stalingrad, battle of, 5–7, 9, 16–28, 35; penal battalions in, 20, 21; as portrayed by Grossman, 18–28, 35; weapons, 19, 23 Stalin’s purges. See Great Terror stillness, 79–83 Stoicism, 111, 116 Stolypin, Arkady, 131–2 Strada, Vittorio, 153 “superflous men,” 101 Suslov, Mikhail Andreyevich, 25–6, 28–9n7, 31 Syomin, Vitaliy Nikolayevich, 38–9 Talmon, Jacob Leib, 157n3 Tamizdat, 4, 96 Tarkovskiy, Andrey Arsenyevich, 84, 86 Third Rome (doctrine of), 124 Todorov, Tzvetan, 8, 12n23, 32 Tolstoy, Lev Nikolaevich, 32–5, 37, 38, 90, 104, 146–7 Tosco, Pietro, 108, 156n1 totalitarian communication, 41, 43, 48, 52, 56, 64–5. See also Newspeak; perlocutionary force totalitarian state, 47, 52, 107, 132, 142–7 Trotskiy, Lev Davidovich, 51, 144 truth and literature, 38–9, 107 Turgenev, Ivan Sergeyevich, 124 Tvardovskiy, Alexsandr Trifonovich, 32, 35 Ukraine famine (Holodomor), 4, 7, 12n14, 118, 129–31

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Index 173

Ursulyak, Sergey Vladimirovich, 9 Venturi, Franco, 157n4 Venturi, Gigliola, 87 Vinogradova, Luba, 9, 12n23 Vodolazov, Grigoriy Grigoryevich, 7–8, 133–8, 139n5 Voegelin, Eric, 157n3 Voynovich, Vladimir Nikolayevich, 9 Whitney, Thomas P., 11n13

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Zabolotskaya, Yekaterina Vasilievna, 25, 89 Zamyatin, Yevgeniy Ivanovich, 72n2, 73n6, 75n19 Zaslavsky, Victor, 158n34 Zhelyabov, Andrey Ivanovich, 128 Zhukov, Georgiy Konstantinovich, 17, 22–3 Zionism, 34 Zoshchenko, Mikhail Mikhaylovich, 75n19 Zveteremich, Pietro, 87

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