It’s kind of hard not to bring up War and Peace when you’re talking about an epic length Russian novel that deals with the experiences of a wide range of characters living in a nation contending with an invading army. But in this case we’re talking about a different century, a different writer, and a very different war. The centerpiece of Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate is the battle of Stalingrad, and the events in the novel all take place in the Soviet Union during the fall of 1942. The State, capital S, isn’t a factor in Tolstoy’s novel, but it’s inescapable in Life and Fate. You might wonder: Would the oppressive bureaucracy, the surveillance, the paranoia of living in a totalitarian state abate somewhat while a country is fighting for its survival? The answer according to Grossman is: Yes, but not much. Different characters at various points make the statement “People don’t get arrested for nothing.” This statement indicates that the speaker has no idea why a particular person has been arrested, and suggests that there might not be a reason that could ever make sense to the speaker—or to the person arrested.
Stalingrad was the Nazi regime’s high water mark. To reach it, German armies had swept eastward a thousand miles in a little more than a year through the grainfields of the Ukraine to the banks of the Volga River. Just a little further east were the oil fields Hitler needed to fuel his war. After the Germans occupied the center of Stalingrad their advance slowed to a block-by-block attempt to drive the Russians out of the city and across the Volga. As the novel opens, their advance has stalled completely and the two armies are each dug into the foundations of ruined buildings in their respective parts of the city, hurling tons of metal at each other day and night. In proper Tolstoy style, Grossman presents the experiences of a representative sampling of the participants, from everyday artillerymen, to tank commanders, to the commanding officers, both Russian and German. The higher-ups are mostly real people, such as German Field Marshall Friedrich Paulus; the rank and file are mostly fictional. The most precariously positioned participants are the Russian men (and one woman) in the platoon holding “House 6/1,” which is exposed to the German fire and stands directly in the way of their advance. I think the appropriate military term is “strategic redoubt.” There really was such a house, which is today commemorated as Pavlov’s House. As the soldiers in House 6/1 survive from day to day, practically embedded in its ruins, they establish a kind of grim camaraderie. They treat the one woman in their midst, who was sent in as a radio operator (until the radio failed) with a charged courtesy. The commanding officer, one Grekov, finds himself in that rarest of all situations for a Soviet Russian: beyond the control of all political monitors. (It was interesting to note that every unit in the Soviet army had its political officer, its commissar, who acted as a liaison with higher ups, as a troubleshooter, but also as an enforcer of political orthodoxy.) Grekov isn’t exactly insubordinate, but he’s walking a fine line as the bullets fly all around him, and he fails to comport himself in the correct style when a superior makes the perilous journey through no man’s land to assess the situation in House 6/1.
But the war and the people actually engaged in it make up only about half of Life and Fate. Most of the remainder tells us about various members of the Shaposhnikov family. The figures at the center are two grown daughters, Lyudmilla and Yevgenia. These sisters live in different towns and meet only towards the end of the book. Mostly we read about their respective families, including their current and former husbands. It’s a very distributed group and the fact that they are all related to each other somehow seems largely a kind of pretext. I don’t think you would ever read about such a fragmented family in a nineteenth century novel. In essence we are reading about a dozen or so different individuals and their respective struggles to get news, get in touch with children and spouses, find places to live and food to eat, and just come to terms with the world they find themselves in. The “List of Chief Characters” at the back of the book runs to eight pages and I had frequent occasion to consult this list in order to understand who, for example, Yevgenia is thinking about when she thinks about Tolya (he is her son from her first marriage). Without this list I don’t think I could really have made sense of Life and Fate, at least not without making my own list as I went along.
Grossman is particularly interested in the affairs of Lyudmilla’s husband, Viktor Strum, who is a nuclear physicist and whose life and experience most closely match the author’s own. Viktor is the head of a government nuclear physics laboratory and early on he makes a rather important breakthrough. Naturally enough, he expects his professional status to be considerably enhanced by his discovery—there is even some talk of a Stalin Prize. But Viktor’s supportive superior is soon replaced by a party functionary, and Viktor finds that some of the people working under him are being let go and that some of the bureaucrats consider his work to be “too theoretical.” Viktor defends Einstein’s work in a conversation with one of these bureaucrats and of course that’s the real root of his problem: one Jew defending another. Viktor hears of a meeting where he is denounced by various bureaucrats and by some of his trusted colleagues, who dare not risk their own careers by defending Viktor. He stops coming to work and awaits his fate. If he’s lucky, he might be allowed to teach high school in a remote town. If he’s unlucky, his might be the short brutal life of a miner in Siberia. In fact, the resolution of Viktor’s crisis is entirely unexpected (at least by me) and rather fantastic. I have to admit that I identified with Viktor a bit. Out in corporate America, I also once assumed that the quality of my work shielded me to some degree from political machinations. My fate, unlike Viktor’s, was entirely predictable.
Much of what transpires in Life and Fate most certainly did happen. When Grossman describes the experiences of a group of neighbors from a Jewish neighborhood in the Ukraine, the historical record leaves little doubt that the events, in general outline, went exactly as he describes them. Details about particular individuals and moment-by-moment events are of course conjured from the author’s imagination, but they cannot be very different from what actual people saw, felt, and did. Grossman tells us about winners and losers—the terms are relative, because even the winners must live in cold apartments, queue up for groceries, and know that their every word is written down by someone somewhere. The losers are the various victims of the war and the Soviet regime—sometimes of both.
The more conventionally novelistic sections describe the relationships and experiences of various Russian men and woman struggling to make sense of the chaos around them. If this particular woman, trying to obtain a residence permit to live in the city of Kuybyshev and sharing a large apartment with half a dozen strangers did not actually exist, someone very much like her certainly did. If this particular man, commanding a tank battalion on the southern outskirts of Stalingrad and awaiting his chance to join in the offensive to surround the Nazi army, did not exist, someone like him did.
I don’t think there’s any better way to put yourself in a different time and place than a novel like Life and Fate. A less documentary novel, such as War and Peace, is less tightly coupled to its time and place such that most of its events and characters could be transposed to a different country at a different time. A film could deliver a lot more information to your brain in a lot less time than a novel, but it could not originate from within the time and place it depicts, nor could it fully reveal what things felt like to the people in the story. A factual history could give you all sorts of information, but, again, only piecemeal glimpses, gleaned from letters and oral accounts, of what things were like for the participants.
Despite the awful circumstances, Life and Fate is not a grim book. Grossman is a compassionate writer, with great empathy for the lives he describes. A passage near the end of the book captures this empathy quite well:
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 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 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 …
