Life and fate

THIS WORK is so impressive that we need first to put it in perspective. The translator, although apologetic about its old-fashioned style, calls Life and Fate "the true War and Peace of this century." The noun-and-noun title, the occasional references to Tolstoy, the subject matter (the battle of Stalingrad)--all indicate that the author also had such a comparison in mind. But on that exalted level, Life and Fate doesn't have a fair chance.

Nor is Life and Fate quite what Le Monde called it, "the great russian novel of the twentieth century," a distinction probably reserved for Bely's Petersburg--or possibly Nabokov's The Gift. Is it the great Soviet novel? We're getting very close, but probably Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita takes this honor.

Olga Carlisle (a Solzhenitsyn expert) offered a less ambitious estimate in U.S.A. Today: "Life and Fate takes its place beside The First Circle and Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago as a masterful evocation of the fate of Russia as it is expressed through the lives of its people." This is a solid comparison, particularly since Life and Fate, completed in 1960 and only recently smuggled to the West, was written in the same decade as these other important works. In my opinion, it is the best of the three.

The propaganda line of Soviet critics in lectures or conversations with Americans is that we ignore good writers acceptable to the regime and only pay attention to dissident writers of less worth. The truth has always been that the best Soviet writers get in trouble with the regime sooner or later, and that almost every figure in their own literary histories has been reviled and then rehabilitated (perhaps Yevtushenko's tightrope act offers an exception). Nearly every dissident novel acclaimed in the United States has been by an author initially brought to our attention by publication in the Soviet Union, but whose later works were repudiated by the same Soviet critics who had first welcomed him.

Vasily Grossman was the most thoroughly accepted of all those authors. In fact, Life and Fate was originally intended as a sequel to For a Just Cause, a novel republished several times in the Soviet Union. Before that, Grossman was best known as a war reporter; he was also the first journalist to describe a Nazi concentration camp (Treblinka). On a trip to the Soviet Union two years ago, I picked up, at a used-book store, an officially published English translation of his dispatches from the Stalingrad front; they were vivid and remarkable--something between Edward R. Murrow's broadcasts from London during the blitz and Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry. So Grossman was certainly acceptable to the authorities. But when Life and Fate was submitted for publication, it was deemed anti-Soviet and the manuscript was confiscated. Grossman cooperated, was not imprisoned, and, in fact, saw official publication of one or two short later works before the died, in 1964. In those last years he also wrote another dissident novel, Forever Flowing, translated some time ago.

Life and Fate does indeed seem anti-Soviet; at the very least, it documents the excesses of the Stalin years with devastating effectiveness, and it is hard to imagine that Grossman actually expected the authorities to publish it. The most damning argument in the book is that Stalinism is much like Nazism, a totalitarian government heedless of its people. True, this argument is placed in the mouth of a "negative character" (the Gestapo officer Liss), but the novel supports the argument. In fact, when Liss interrogates the old Bolshevik Mostovskoy, not just his job but his methods remind us of Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor--the man who utters unspeakable truths. Liss says that the Nazis learned much from the Russians about handling people, and that the Russians will soon be learning lessons in return: "You may think you hate us, but what you really hate is yourselves--yourselves in us. . . . It's paradoxical: through losing the war we shall win the war--and continue our development in a different form." The most obvious confirmation in the novel is that an anti-Semitic campaign is soon under way in Moscow. Nearly as obvious are the parallel scenes in a Nazi concentration camp and a Russian labor camp. We are familiar with this argument--Nabokov's fantastic Bend Sinister is organized around the identical methods of Communist and Nazi states--but we have not seen it presented before from inside the Soviet Union.

T he siege of Stalingrad and the eventual Russian victory were high points of Soviet history and probably of Grossman's life as well. They are indeed the subject of an epic. They are indeed the subject of an epic. But Stalin's new round of purges and intensification of state socialism are clearly seen here as betrayals of the Russian spirit. By the end of the novel, one of Stalingrad's defenders is being methodically beaten in the Lubyanka prison, while the brilliant tank commander who led his corps to victory is under suspicion.