Life and Fate and Stalingrad Which to Read First
In 1932, Vasily Grossman's commencement novel was refused publication for its "counterrevolutionary tendencies". The immature author wrote to Maxim Gorky to enlist his back up:
"I wrote what I saw while working for three years [in the mines]. I wrote the truth. [. . .] I fail to sympathize what'south counterrevolutionary about my book – is information technology that at that place's drinking in the Donbass, that there are frequent brawls at that place, that work in a coalmine is very hard or that people, coalminers . . . don't grin 24 hours a day?"
Gorky replied that Grossman'due south simplistic "naturalism" depicted "the truth of the past, [. . .] a very bad and tormenting truth".
Soviet truth was aspirational. The writer's role was to usher in the Marxist-Leninist utopia. That was also the twelvemonth the Union of Soviet Writers was established and the term "socialist realism" coined to depict the compulsory house style. Grossman took the hint. He rewrote his outset novel and got information technology published.
In the 1940s Grossman, now famous, was appointed to give The Great Patriotic War the Tolstoyan treatment. The outcome was Stalingrad, now appearing in its first English language translation.
The novel has been reconstituted at bully labour by editors Robert Chandler and Yuri Bit-Yunan, every bit no definitive Russian edition exists. The 1952 publication, simply before Joseph Stalin's decease, was followed by editions in 1954 and 1956. Each edition is significantly dissimilar to the others, and different again to 11 typescripts in the Russian state's literary annal in Moscow. The 3rd typescript seems closest to what Grossman wanted to publish, before successive rounds of editorial revisions. The notes to this translated edition allow us see which version, or versions, each chapter was based on, and it is plain to encounter how much fine fabric had been excised for ideological reasons.
One scene fifty-fifty seems to reprise Grossman'southward youthful substitution with Gorky; Marusya chides her sister, Zhenya, for not appreciating that collective labour is "a source of constant moral uplift. The workers make jokes, their confidence never flags." She recounts the moment a new gun was wheeled out of the workshop: "I felt such love of my country that I could accept gone on working [. . .] for another six days." Zhenya counters that such language rings simulated – information technology turns people into figures on posters. Marusya retorts that in that location are two truths: "There is the truth of the reality forced on united states past the accursed past. And there'south the truth of the reality which will defeat the past."
Stalingrad is stylistically and intellectually anomalous, as though these sparring sisters had penned it together. The exchange quoted above reads like Grossman's apology for his compromises on the page.
When the editors demanded proletarian heroism, Grossman produced chapters prepare in a coal mine, where a model worker feels a transcendent sense of fellowship with his co-workers for exceeding their production quotas. The activeness here is finely observed and paced and imposes itself, equally all skilful fiction does, as a vision of reality. Nevertheless Grossman – who nearly died after his three years down such mines – had privately written of workers "shackled" by quotas and obligations: "I'grand convinced you lot wouldn't discover even 10 workers in xl,000 or 50,000 going to work at 6am willingly and freely."
The state of war in the east was a tale of brutality on both sides. The frantic Soviet retreat had much to do with unwillingness to resist. More than than three million Soviet soldiers were captured in the first year of the war. Later a decade of famine and forced collectivisation, many civilians welcomed the Germans. Battalions of Soviet citizens fought alongside the Germans. At Stalingrad, Stalin's decree of "Not 1 Stride Back" was enforced by the NKVD, which formed a second line backside the front to shoot those who retreated. About 13,500 men were officially shot for cowardice. The unofficial numbers tin only be guessed. The slave-labourers of the Gulag were put in uniform and sent to their deaths past the hundreds of thousands. These "punishment battalions" were known as smertniki – the walking dead.
Bombast and didacticism
At that place are fine descriptions in Stalingrad of combat, of the rug-bombing of the inhabited city, of the evacuation of civilians across the Volga under fire and of the counterattack to defend the city. The great writing alternates with passages of bombast and didacticism. Grossman does not capture the brutality inflicted on Soviet soldiers, or the brutality of which they were capable. His censors even struck references to petty thievery, swearing, rotten food, bedbugs – at one stage they removed mention of unwashed hands. Even moments of humour or farce were slashed for undermining the heroic tone.
Yet Grossman struggled with ingenuity and tenacity for the partial truth Stalingrad contains. He pushed boundaries at great personal risk, and was sometimes successful. At that place is much in Stalingrad that is categorically not the official line. Grossman wished for those who had perished anonymously to be remembered, and he emphasises the bravery and suffering of ordinary people rather than strategic genius of their supreme leader. He likewise wished his novel to speak to the ordinary soldier who had fought and survived. There are passages on Nazism, including Hitler's contempt for the lives of his soldiers, which are coded attacks on Stalinism. Punishment battalions and the existence of dissatisfaction with the regime are referenced. There are allusions to taboo subjects such as the Holocaust. One of the main characters is recognisably Jewish, at a time when Jews were being purged from Soviet public life and executed.
Stalingrad was being publicly denounced soon after it appeared. Grossman would probably have ended up shot had Stalin not died only months later.
Stalingrad is a magnificent only mutilated achievement. Any simple response to information technology is spring to be wrong. Anything that can be asserted about information technology needs to be contradicted. Equally presently equally it is examined equally a narrative, we are forced to delve into the story of its tortured limerick.
Grossman'southward afterwards novel Life and Fate would selection upward chronologically where Stalingrad left off and features many of the aforementioned characters. Superficially, Life and Fate is Stalingrad's sequel. On a deeper level, the later novel is a rewriting of Stalingrad without regard for the conscience, revisiting the same landscape simply with the vocation for truth that Grossman had expressed years before when he wrote his account of the Treblinka extermination camp:
"It is infinitely painful to read this. The reader must believe me when I say that it is every bit hard to write it. [. . .] It is the writer's duty to tell the terrible truth, and information technology is the reader's civic duty to learn this truth. To turn abroad, to close ane's eyes and walk by is to insult the memory of those who perished."
Philip Ó Ceallaigh is a Bucharest-based author and translator
Source: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/stalingrad-review-a-magnificent-but-mutilated-achievement-1.3909554
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