The Road

"I translated Life and Fate a surprisingly long time ago, about 20 years ago. Well, for about 18 months I didn’t get very much done and I got depressed about it, but then I took myself off to a flat by the seaside in Cornwall for four months and just worked all day long and swam a couple of miles every day. I got most of the work done then. It would normally take me 18 months to read half of it in Russian, never mind translate it. Well, that was my reaction when my friend Igor Golomstock first brought a copy of the Russian text along to me and said: ‘Robert, if you want to establish yourself as a translator you should translate this book.’ I just laughed at him and said: ‘I don’t read books that long in Russian, let alone translate them.’ But Igor was very persistent. During the last ten years Grossman has become a great deal better known, but the people drawing attention to him have, by and large, been historians like Antony Beevor, or people whose interest is largely political – Martin Kettle, John Lloyd. So the focus has been very much on Grossman as a historical witness: Grossman and Stalingrad, Grossman and the Shoah. There’s nothing wrong in that and I’m very grateful, but Grossman is a very, very fine writer, irrespective of history, and in The Road above all. The Road is a collection of ‘late stories’ written after the confiscation of Life and Fate and these are wonderful stories. The Soviet writer he was closest to was Andrey Platonov and the stories do have quite a Platonov-like quality to them. There is one about a dog, just called ‘The Dog’, and it’s quite close to reality. There were several mongrel dogs that were sent up into space on the early sputniks and this is a story about the first dog to be sent up into space and to come back alive to earth. Laika died. That was the very first dog. This is the fictionalised successor to Laika and it’s very unexpected. I showed it to a poet friend called Elizabeth Cook and her immediate comment was that it was really shamanistic! It would never have occurred to me but actually it’s a valid comment. The heroes of the story are the female dog and the scientist in charge of the laboratory, a really hard-headed, unsentimental scientist who, to everyone’s amazement, gets quite besotted by this animal, and he has visions of her going out into space and for the first time the cosmos will penetrate the eyes of a living being. And somehow he will look into her eyes when she’s back on earth and will see the cosmos. It’s very warm and tender and funny, and there’s a certain irony to these mystical ideas, but some seriousness to them as well. Quite a lot of them are about animals. There’s another story, the title story, ‘The Road’, which (this is my private fantasy about the story and there’s no evidence for it) is the Stalingrad campaign from the perspective of an Italian mule dragging munitions for an Italian artillery regiment. My fantasy is that Grossman is trying to compensate for the loss of his manuscript, Life and Fate , by recreating the book in miniature. Life and Fate condensed into 15 pages. The mule is very like Andrey Platonov’s peasant heroes. He’s a thoughtful mule, plodding through the endless plains in the autumn mud. The mule gradually grasps the concept of infinity."

"The Road is a very useful retrospective of Grossman’s shorter work, both fiction and non-fiction, which Robert Chandler – now the principal English-language interpreter of Grossman, and a gifted translator – put together with his colleagues. It attempts to create an arc going back to the beginnings of Grossman’s career as a writer, when he was still trying to gain his literary voice, all the way to his late short stories of the late 1950s and early 1960s. It’s very interesting if one wants to get a sense of his gradual transformation from a gifted yet formulaic Soviet writer of the 1930s to an original author, witness and political philosopher. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The collection is organised both chronologically and thematically, and the central part includes the 1943 story I mentioned, “The Old Teacher.” It also contains “The Hell of Treblinka,” his literary treatment of the legacy of the Treblinka death camp, originally published in 1944 – which was arguably the first published prose literary treatment of a concentration camp based on eyewitness accounts and whatever information Grossman could have gathered by himself. That essay is in some ways the cornerstone of his work, and one I have the highest regard for. Yes. It was produced as a brochure and distributed at the 1946 Nuremberg tribunal as part of the evidence presented by the Soviet side. I find this poignant because it was both a documentary work and a highly sophisticated literary work, which attests to the early significance of literary witnessing in disseminating the knowledge about the Shoah."