FREEDOM FOR MY BOOK

The twentieth century grows smaller in our rearview mirror ever day, but before it disappears entirely we should pay tribute to one of its greatest and least-known novelists: a Russian who I would rank above Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, though I admire both of them greatly.

Google “great writers” and his name doesn’t come up; suggest him to a book group and all you will get are shrugs; bring his name up in a writing workshops and students will blankly stare. And yet the writer I’m talking about, Vasily Grossman, should be remembered for taking on one of the hardest challenges literature ever faced: trying to make sense of the madness and horror that swept over the world in the years 1939-45, and by some miracle of courage and compassion wresting from it art. Many writers have written about the Shoah, and many about the Gulag, but few have managed to write about the twinned evils of both.

Grossman was born in 1905 in the Ukrainian town of Berdichev, then home to one of Europe’s largest Jewish communities. He started publishing novels early, and quickly learned to dance the torturous dance all Soviet writers faced—dealing honestly with the world they were born into, while constantly sensing Stalin peering over their shoulder, who read everything and liked nothing better than to sentence writers who ran afoul of him to death.

When the Germans invaded in 1941, Grossman’s mother was trapped in Berdichev, and killed along with the other 30,000 Jews in town. Partly to assuage his guilt in not helping her escape—and despite being middle-aged, nearsighted, and sickly—Grossman volunteered to become a war correspondent, and spent over a thousand days at the front line.

He was one of the first correspondents—and certainly the first writer of genius—to enter the death camps as the Soviet army marched westward. His report, “The Hell of Treblinka,” was one of the first to probe into the why of an extermination camp’s existence and the how of its operation.

“We walk across the bottomless, unsteady land of Treblinka, and then suddenly we stop. Some yellow hair, wavy, fine and light, growing like grass, is trampled into the earth, and then heavy black plaits on the light-colored sand and then more and more…Everything is true. The last, lunatic hope that everything was only a dream is ruined. And one feels as if one’s heart could stop right now, seized with such sorrow, such grief, that a human being cannot possibly stand it.”

Grossman was an eyewitness to the battle of Stalingrad (Russian soldiers thought his reporting was the most honest of any correspondents), and once the fighting ended he turned the experience into his masterpiece, the novel Life and Fate.

It strayed too far from Soviet orthodoxy to ever be published in Russia; the manuscript—even the typewriter ribbon it was typed on—were confiscated by the KGB, and it was only by a friend smuggling a microfilm copy to the West that it was ever published at all.

(Grossman had sent Khrushchev a futile appeal to allow its publication. “I wrote it, I have not repudiated it, I am not repudiating it…I ask for freedom for my book.”)

Life and Fate, starting with the title’s echo, is often compared to War and Peace, since, like Tolstoy’s masterpiece, the novel evokes the life of a country and historical epoch by concentrating on a series of far-ranging subplots involving members of a single family, the most memorable of whom, a physicist named Viktor Shtrum, is in many ways Grossman himself, faced with agonizing moral choices that nearly kill him.

The literary link between novels is real—Grossman said that War and Peace was the only book he could read while being shelled—but the differences are even more revealing.

Tolstoy wrote about events that happened a generation before he was born; he had never witnessed them in person, nor lost family in the fighting. Then, too, the evil he was describing was the evil of war in general; compared to Hitler/Stalin, Napoleon was Mother Theresa. Grossman, on the other hand, had to write about evil that had struck at his very being.

“There may be no more powerful lament for Eastern European Jewry,” his translator Robert Chandler writes, “then the chapters of Life and Fate that includes the letters Anna Semyonovna, a fictional portrait of Grossman’s mother, writes in the last days of her life and manages to have smuggled out of the Jewish ghetto.”

I would dispute this, but only to say that an even more powerful lament—one that brings fiction to the extreme limit of what it’s capable of describing—occurs later in the novel, when, as they both arrive at an extermination camp in Poland, a middle-aged, childless doctor, Sofya Levinton, “adopts” a small boy named David, and holds his hand as they enter the oven.

“This boy, with his slight, bird-like body, died before her.

‘I’ve become a mother,’ she thought.

That was her last thought.

Her heart, however, still had life in it; it contracted, ached, and felt pity for all you, both living and dead. Sofya felt a wave of nausea. She pressed David, now a doll, to herself. She became dead, a doll.”

It takes real courage to read Grossman—but the rewards are great, if for no other reason than his unflinching refusal to give into despair.

“Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness”—and the kindness and empathy in Grossman is as real as the horror.

(Astonishing/dismaying, the contemporary relevance here—and not just in Russia.)

He angered Stalin after the war—he probably would have been arrested if the dictator hadn’t died first—and much of his best writing (which includes the remarkable short story, “The Road”) wasn’t published in his lifetime; he died in 1964, not yet 60. His last, unfinished novel, Everything Flows, takes on the Ukraine “Terror Famine” in the 1930’s, and the horrors of the Gulag.

The quality I admire most in a novelist is courage—the personal courage to deal with the vicissitudes of a writing career; the moral courage to deal with tragic themes and painful, all-but-impossible to describe subjects. Measured by these…the “vicissitudes” in Grossman’s case threatened to kill him; his subject matter was the worst evil the world has ever seen…a case an be made that he was the bravest writer who ever lived.

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Wetherell on Writing is going on summer vacation, but hopefully it will start up again in the autumn, when our own evil time will have finally hit bottom, and we can start to long road back to sanity. Thank you all for your loyalty and interest. Resist!