Literatura: The Road: Short Fiction and Essays by Vasily Grossman, translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler – review
Vasily Grossman with his daughter Katya and mother Ekaterina Savelyevna
Gillian Slovo welcomes a stirring introduction to the Soviet era by one of its greatest writers
In 1961 Vasily Grossman wrote to the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev asking for "freedom for my book". The book in question was Life and Fate, Grossman's breathtaking epic – his Soviet War and Peace – and it had been "arrested" by the KGB. Grossman had fallen foul of a toxic combination of Stalin's postwar anti "cosmopolitan" (for cosmopolitan read Jewish) campaigns, power struggles within the writers' union (Sholokov called the novel "spittle in the face of the Russian people") and the hard fist of Stalinist censorship that, despite the Khrushchev thaw, lived on. Grossman's plea fell on deaf ears. Mikhail Suslov, the Communist party's chief ideologue, said that Life and Fate would not be let out for at least 200 years.
Suslov was wrong: although Grossman did not live to witness it, a smuggled copy of the novel was published in Switzerland in 1980. This magnificent exploration of the wartime struggle of freedom against tyranny, translated into English by Robert Chandler who, along with Antony Beevor, has done so much to keep Grossman's work alive in the English language, stands as equal to anything in the great canon of Russian literature.
Now Robert and Elizabeth Chandler have brought us The Road, a collection of Grossman's short stories and articles. The pieces, with introductions that give context to Grossman's life, range from stories written in the 1930s, through his wartime journalism, to the fiction of his last years, where the recurrence of the phrase "life and fate" echoes the loss of his arrested masterpiece. Taken together, the collection is a treasure trove that lends the reader an insider's understanding of what it was like to live through the Soviet era, at the same time as it introduces us to Grossman's enduring preoccupation with the wonder and terror of humanity.
In one of the later stories, "The Elk", Grossman weaves the commonplace of a man sinking into death with that other commonplace of Soviet life – a sudden, inexplicable disappearance that leaves the dying man having to find solace in the stuffed head of an animal he had killed. In "Mama" Grossman imagines himself into the mind of an orphan girl who, adopted by the notorious Nikolay Yezhov, head of the NVKD during the great terror, is an innocent witness to Yezhov's downfall while still retaining memories of what it was to be loved by him. And in "Living Space" we are the ones who bear witness to the indifference of a group of card-playing neighbours when told of the political rehabilitation of the husband of a neighbour they can barely be bothered to remember.
Almost until the end of his life, Grossman retained, as Robert Chandler calls it, his "revolutionary romanticism", and it is this that gives his writing its sting. When he lights on the word "merry" at a time when the Stalinist slogan "life has become better, life has become merrier" was being used to conceal the increasing numbers killed in the purges, that sense of a ruptured society springs off the page. And when, in one of the early stories, "In the Town of Berdichev", a woman commissar chooses the Red Army over the baby she has learned to love, Grossman helps us understand her choices even as his plain prose leads us to empathise with the peasants who accept first her, and then her baby.
Because he thought he had no moral right to write about that most ferocious of battles until he had witnessed it for himself, Grossman voluntarily spent three months on the right bank in Stalingrad. This is what gave Life and Fate its brilliant authenticity. And in this collection's title story, this same insider's knowledge is used to describe a battlefield through an animal's eyes. In the affecting and surprising end to this story lies the core conviction which makes Grossman's writing endure: that everybody and everything, even a mule, is looking for connection.
Grossman was one of the first to arrive, with the advancing Red Army, in Treblinka, and his article "The Hell of Treblinka" is reproduced here. Despite inaccuracies, corrected by the translators, Grossman's calm description of how the trains were brought in, or of the peculiar swishing sound of driving over a road black from ashes of the dead, is, as he tells us it will be, "infinitely painful to read", just as it was "equally hard to write". Yet still Grossman helps us to understand that "the beast that triumphantly kills the man remains the beast", while "the man being killed by the beast retains to his last breath his strength of spirit, clarity of thought, and passionate love".
This love Vasily Grossman had in abundance, not least for his mother, who fell victim to one of the first Einsatzgruppen massacres in Ukraine. In Life and Fate, he invents a heart-rending letter to a son from a mother who is on the brink of being similarly murdered. And throughout his own life, Grossman continued to write to his dead mother. Two of these unbearably poignant letters are included here, along with the fascinating insight that Grossman's temporary support for Stalin's campaign against the doctors must have been what enabled him to write so clearly about his characters' complicities.
In the conclusion to his letter to Khrushchev, just before he asked for freedom for his book, Grossman wrote: "I still believe that I have written the truth and that I wrote this truth out of love and pity for people, out of faith in people." A wonderful collection, this – an introduction to the man and his times that also tells us much about his love, his pity and his faith.
Ice Road, Gillian Slovo's novel set in Soviet times, is published by Virago.
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