Life and Fate

"Grossman was a Ukrainian Jew and a war correspondent for the Soviet military paper, the Red Star. He seemed to be a good Stalinist, but while he was writing very conventional socialist realist novels, he was storing up in his head ways of describing Russia that didn’t at all fit the compulsory official mould. And in the 1950s he secretly wrote this book Life and Fate which, most strangely, is a sequel to one of his official novels, For a Just Cause . It has got the same characters in it and continues the story. But it’s as though suddenly a switch has been thrown – it is alive and committed to truth telling. It is about the secret similarities between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, and about the strange interval of freedom during the Second World War in which the Soviet regime had to trust its people because it couldn’t compel their loyalty, and how that narrow window of freedom closed again. It is also just a wonderful epic portrayal of the Battle of Stalingrad. It was used by Antony Beevor in his Stalingrad book and Beevor is partly responsible for Grossman’s rising profile in the West. It is a fabulous piece of military re-creation. It is a wonderful piece of writing about the Holocaust and although it is still quite a creaky conventional piece of Soviet realist writing, it is animated by the most powerful possible truth-telling urge. Once it followed its Jewish characters all the way to the gas chambers you are put where Vasily Grossman wanted you to be, which is, despite everything, immeasurably grateful to the Red Army for destroying that particular evil, even at the cost of cementing the other one. I started weeping uncontrollably on the tube while I was reading those bits of Life and Fate, and that’s a good thing."

"This is a wonderful, rich, melancholic, hopeful book. It’s a bit like Like A Tear in the Ocean : it embeds a piece of history in a well-crafted work of fiction and its characters represent the cornerstones of the period. It does that phenomenally well. He highlights the coexistence of conflicting emotions and choices within the same personalities. The conflict happens because you need to survive. Viktor Shtrum is a good example of this: he spends the majority of the book as a victim of his beliefs. Then comes this magnificent phone call from Stalin, which knocks you for six when you read it. Very quickly thereafter he denounces two innocent scientists because it would be crazy to risk again his new position as favourite scientist to the great leader. It also has the most moving account you’ll ever read of the gas chambers in Poland. Grossman drew on his pathbreaking article about Treblinka. Then, on the next page, he asks what makes life worth living. The book’s conclusion? In miniature versions of the world – in the relationship between two people, for example – the meaning of life is established. ? Yes. I think any large-scale plan to reorganise society is impossible. You just start with what you can reorganise. This is usually restricted to a relatively small number of people. It is conservative in a sense. Although in the way Michael Oakeshott described it. He said: “To be conservative is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.” That’s a useful summary of what I believe is the right approach to organising society. And it’s the approach in books like Life and Fate and Like a Tear in the Ocean . I think it is impossible to reconcile, the desire to improve everyone’s life – and the emphasis here must be on everyone’s for it is possible to do so for some people or groups of people – and the maintenance of personal liberty. Ultimately the overarching ambition can’t succeed other than through the gradual progress of history."

"Yes, Life and Fate . I wanted a book about the Second World War and where that war was really fought, apart from in the Atlantic, was on the Eastern Front between the German and Russian armies. Vasily Grossman was himself involved in the battle of Stalingrad, but he was also a frontline spectator of the rest of the war. He set out to write the equivalent of Tolstoy’s War and Peace . Well, he didn’t quite succeed in doing that, but it is nonetheless an amazing and terrifying account, not simply of the battles, but of the armies fighting them. Not simply the armies, but the regimes. Of course, behind the German army was the Nazi regime, the Holocaust, not just of the Jews but the massacres taking place as the German army advanced, committing mass murder of the civil populations they overran. Not to get rid of the partisans but because they were eliminating the Jews, eliminating Ukrainians and eliminating anyone who was going to get in the way of their conquering these countries. They were joined in that by other nationalities who did their dirty work for them as well. So there is the combination of the nightmare of the mass murders, mass shootings and the nightmare of the front line. On the other side are the Russians, fighting desperately to protect their own country, commanded by a fanatical regime, concerned not simply with defeating the Germans but with preserving a totalitarian regime and eliminating anybody who they think presents a threat to them. So, in the Russian army, a general who is fighting skilfully, courageously, bravely against appalling odds, suddenly finds himself ripped out of the front line because he is regarded as being politically unreliable and either shot or sent to a prison camp. Behind them all are these terrible camps without which the Soviet regime could never have survived. So there is total war at its most terrifying in a way which has very seldom been seen in human history before. A nightmare world in which force, violence and terror permeates not only the front lines but the very societies of the people fighting. It’s a nightmare book and a nightmare experience. Although it’s a damn great thick book and not an easy read, anybody who wants to understand what war at its most extreme can be like has got to read it."

"Life and Fate is a novel that simultaneously attempts a panoramic presentation of the war and the Shoah. Its two main currents are Stalingrad and the Shoah, and against that double backdrop Grossman situates the dilemmas and anxieties of a talented Jewish physicist working on the Soviet nuclear programme. It is “panoramic” both in the best sense, and in the kind of sense that I think some readers get tired of. Think of boys and girls who read War and Peace , some girls skipping the war, some boys skipping the peace scenes – or of Henry James’s comment about [19th century novels as] “loose and baggy monsters.” But it’s the first novel to come out of the 1940s and ‘50s that attempts a comparative indictment of Hitlerism and Stalinism, the two varieties of totalitarianism that Grossman knew too well. I think some of Grossman’s more passionate advocates might do him disservice by miscontextualising his significance as an artist. When he’s called “the Tolstoy of the USSR” – Martin Amis’s expression – I think it confuses both obvious matters of Russian cultural history, and obvious matters of the history of the novel. I think Grossman should be appreciated on his own terms and with some of his longer works’ structural shortcomings. And there are parts of Life and Fate that lack what great novels like Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina or Flaubert’s Madame Bovary naturally gain their momentum from – a tension of desire. But Life and Fate and subsequently Forever Flowing are the whales on which Grossman’s literary reputation rests."

"Yes, the manuscript was confiscated when it had just been written in 1960. The KGB came into his apartment and then went to his secretary’s apartment, and confiscated even the typewriter ribbons and the carbon papers because the novel was regarded as so dangerous. Grossman was the very first person to make the moral equivalence between Nazism and Stalinism. It was that which was so devastating. He quite clearly indicated that Stalin had been responsible for the appalling disasters of the early part of the war and for the repression that came through towards the end of the war. What is interesting about Grossman is that he is one of the few examples where you get both physical courage and moral courage in the same person. That is very rare – normally moral courage and physical courage are two separate things and don’t exist together. He showed physical courage as a slightly middle-aged, totally unfit, Jewish intellectual from Moscow going into the front line with the Red Army and living the same life alongside many of the soldiers. This is where he got his material. He was obviously not one of the Stalinist hacks who came out with preposterous propaganda. The soldiers had read his stuff in the Red Star , the army newspaper, and they knew that he was about the only honest one. And he wouldn’t take any notes. He would just sit down beside them and then write up the notes afterwards, because he knew perfectly well that if he sat down with a pad that would switch them off. And he used to work incredibly long hours into the night writing up all the conversations that he had had. These were the notebooks that we worked on in Moscow and one realised that here was most of the raw material for Life and Fate which I think is probably the most important work of fiction about World War II. But, in fact, it is more than just a fiction because it is based on very close reporting from his time with the soldiers. It is a deliberate act of literary homage to Tolstoy as one can see in the title. It is definitely the War and Peace of the 20th century."