Michael's Reviews > Life and Fate

I have to use the “M” word for this panoramic portrayal of the Soviet experience of World War 2—masterpiece. I was moved and uplifted, enlightened and devastated, and ultimately made into a better person wit more empathy and understanding of the human condition.

This is an insider’s view, as is made clear by the wonderful background provided by the translator, Robert Chandler. Grossman was a Ukrainian Jew who studied chemistry in his youth, became a novelist with the support of Gorky, and with the advent of war became a renowned war correspondent who covered Stalingrad and the fall of Berlin and who pieced together for the first time in print the hidden story of the operations of a German death camp, Treblinka. This book was completed in 1960, but the manuscript was seized and suppressed by the KGB. Fortunately, a copy was smuggled out a decade later (through the efforts of Sakharov and Voinovitch) and reached print in the West in the early 80s.

The novel is very ambitious in portraying seminal events from a range of perspectives, from peasants to scientists, from partisans to generals, with brief forays into viewpoint of German soldiers as well. What helps with integration across its broad scope is that most of the stories are confined to the Winter of 1942-43 during which the Battle of Stalingrad became the turning point in the war. Also, in the tradition of “War and Peace” (which I haven’t read), the narrative places various members of one large extended family at the core of most of the scenarios used to bring to life a nation and a society at war: the elderly Shaposhnikova matriarch, stuck in Ukraine at the onset of war, ends up confined by the Germans in a Jewish ghetto that is later massacred; her son Viktor, a Jewish theoretical physicist who is driven by pure science and tested in his integrity by politics; his wife’s ex-husband, who is placed in a Soviet work camp among Trotsky-style Bolsheviks purged in 1937; his sister-in-law who is torn between her ex-husband and her fiancé, the first a party true-believer who serves as a political officer in Stalingrad and is later falsely accused and imprisoned in Moscow as a traitor, and the latter a colonel of a tank brigade who leads the Soviet counterstrike at Stalingrad; Viktor’s sister, a Moscow physician caught while traveling, bravely experiences a trip by cattle car to meet her fate in a gas chamber.

There is a pervasive tender compassion for all, but not for the true enemies, the totalitarian states of Hitler and Stalin, which Grossman shows to be mirrored twins in so many ways. Grossman’s compassion comes from wanting to give voice to the dead, such as his own mother, who was killed with about 30,000 other Jews in Bedichev in Ukraine and to whom the book is dedicated. Like others writers who have borne witness to the Holocaust, he is concerned with how it affects our conception of what it means to be human and the nature of good and evil. How so many held on forlornly to hope and passively obeyed. How millions could ignore what was happening and let people be led like lambs to the slaughter. And how others rebelled and resisted, in small ways or at great risk to themselves. Grossman breaks through from the narrative to speak of these things, but mostly he brings these themes to life through his characters, and in both approaches uses transcendent language full of sublime or horrific beauty.

Reading this book takes a special commitment, not just of the investment of time it takes to read such a massive tome, but also in emotional trust that it will not just wrench you pitilessly and leave you like a rag in despair. Grossman somehow achieves the miracle of infusing hope at every turn in a way that transcends death. For example, there is a point where a poet in a work camp expounds on how simple human kindness, such as sharing a scrap of bread with an enemy, is a core of humanity that persists despite all brutality and despair. In this quote, Viktor’s mother speaks eloquently of resilient hope in a letter to him from a doomed Jewish ghetto:

The more sorrow there is in man, the less hope he has of survival—the better, the kinder, the more generous he becomes.
The poorest people, the tailors and tinsmiths, the ones without hope, are so much nobler, more generous and more intelligent than the people who’ve somehow managed to lay by a few provisions. The young schoolmistresses; Spilberg, the eccentric old teacher and chess-player; the timid women who work in the library; Reyvich, the engineer, who’s more helpless than a child, yet dreams of arming the ghetto with hand-made grenades—what wonderful, impractical, dear, sad, good people they all are! …
People carry on, Vitra, as though their whole life lies ahead of them. It’s impossible to say if that is wise or foolish—it’s just the way people are.

The woman doctor in her last moments is here uplifted by communion with a boy she helped on the cattle-car to the gas chamber:
Her eyes—which have read Homer, Izvestia, Huckleberry Finn and Mayne Reid, that had looked at good people and bad people, that had seen the geese in the green meadows of Kursk, the stars above the observatory at Pulkovo, the glitter of surgical steel, the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, tomatoes and turnips in the bins at market, the blue water of Issyk-Kul—her eyes were no longer of any use to her. If someone had blinded her, she would have felt no sense of loss.
…Sofya Levinton felt the boy’s body subside in her arms. …This boy, with his slight, bird-like body, has left 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 of you, both living and dead; Sofya Osipovna felt a wave of nausea. She pressed David, now a doll, to herself; she became dead, a doll.

The political commissar in the besieged tractor factory at Stalingrad is suddenly uplifted by music in a pause in the fighting:
Somehow the music seemed to have helped him understand time. Time is a transparent medium. People and cities rise out of it, move through it and disappear back into it. It is time that brings them and time that takes them away. …
Such is time: everything passes, it alone remains; everything remains, it alone passes. And how swiftly and noiselessly it passes. Only yesterday you were sure of yourself, strong and cheerful, a son of the time. But now another time has come—and you don’t even know it.
In yesterday’s fighting, time has been torn to shreds; now it emerged again from the plywood fiddle belonging to Rubunchik the barber. This fiddle told some that their time had come and others that their time had passed.
‘I’m finished,’ Krymov said to himself. ‘Finished!’ …
Suddenly, Krymov remembered one summer night: the large, dark eyes of a Cossack girl and her hot whisper … Yes, in spite of everything, life was good.
The fiddler stopped and a quiet murmur became audible: the sound of the water flowing by under the wooden duckboards. It seemed to Krymov that his soul was indeed a well that had been dry and empty; but now it was gently filling with water.

I end this excessively long review with samples of the many kernels of truth that help make the journey of this book worthwhile:
Having established man’s readiness to obey when confronted with limitless violence, we must go on to draw one further conclusion that is of importance for an understanding of man and his future.
Does human nature overcome a true change in the cauldron of totalitarian violence? Does man lose his innate yearning for freedom? The fate of both man and the totalitarian State depends on the answer to this question. If human nature does change, then the eternal and world-wide triumph of the dictatorial State is assured; if his yearning for freedom remains constant, then the totalitarian State is doomed.

From examples over history of individual and group defiance of these destructive forces, Grossman finds that:
All these bear witness to the indestructability of man’s yearning for freedom. The yearning was suppressed but it continues to exist. Man’s fate may make him a slave, but his nature remains unchanged.
Man’s innate yearning for freedom can be suppressed but never destroyed. Totalitarianism cannot renounce violence. If it does, it perishes. eternal, ceaseless violence, overt or covert, is the basis of totalitarianism. Man does not renounce freedom voluntarily. This conclusion holds out hope for our time, hope for our future.

In the words of a poet in a Soviet work camp, I find sustenance in Grossman’s vision of the eternal in individual consciousness:
When a person dies, they cross over from the realm of freedom to the realm of slavery. …
What constitutes the freedom, the soul of an individual life, is its uniqueness. The reflection of the universe in someone’s consciousness is the foundation of his or her power, but life only becomes happiness, is only endowed with freedom and meaning when someone exists as a whole world that has never been repeated in all eternity. Only then can they experience the joy of freedom and kindness, finding in others what they have already found in themselves.