Evanston: LIFE AND FATE
Evanston: LIFE AND FATE
LIFE AND FATE is a title that dares invite comparison with WAR AND PEACE. Impressively the comparison is apt.
LIFE AND FATE, written in the 1950s by Vasily Grossman, who was a front line war correspondent with the Red Army during WWII, but not published even in the West until more than a decade after his death in 1964, has been called the greatest Russian novel of the Twentieth Century. I’m suspicious of “greatest” anything, when great is enough. I don’t know how it can be claimed that Thomas Hardy is a greater novelist than, say, Emile Zola; or Bach, whom I happen to prefer, is greater than Beethoven. In all of the world’s arts it seems to me that only Shakespeare is truly peerless, and the French would probably point to Moliere. Whether LIFE AND FATE is the greatest Russian novel of the Twentieth Century or not, it is great and that is enough.
The Battle of Stalingrad is at the center of the novel, but, as with WAR AND PEACE, much of the story takes place away from the battlefield, often about the members of the extended Shaposhnikov family, headed by a research physicist, Viktor Pavlovich Shtrum. The list of chief characters at the end of the book goes on for eight pages, and in addition to the Shaposhnikovs, includes Viktor’s colleagues, men in a German P.O.W. camp, others in a Russian labor camp, Jews on the way to an extermination camp, Lubyanka Prison, in a Russian tank corp, in a Russian fighter squadron, the German Army Command, at a power station in Stalingrad, and in the surrounded and doomed House 6/1 in Stalingrad. Despite these numbers, the novel is clearly written and well-translated and not difficult to follow.
Grossman, himself a Jew, was the first correspondent from any nation to enter some of the German extermination camps, including Treblinka. His own mother was caught by the German advance into Russia and executed. One of the most moving passages in LIFE AND HOPE is a final letter written to Viktor Shtrum from his mother before she is killed.
That the novel was not published in Grossman’s lifetimes is less surprising than that he ever thought it might be, as apparently around 1960 when Khrushchev was in power he did. One of the themes of the book, perhaps the true theme, is the innate life force toward freedom. Grossman portrays the Russian people, individually and collectively, caught between two totalitarian state grindstones, that of Nazi Germany and that of the Soviet Communist party.
While I was familiar with the Battle of Stalingrad, I did some online research after I finished the book, and found several short You-Tube films of actual war footage, and a 75 minute documentary produced by the Soviet government in 1962. Despite a few minutes of pure propaganda, it is mostly illuminating and factual.
I have been fortunate to come across two great novels in the past month. The other was Mark Helprin’s WINTER’S TALE.
I hope to read both again.
In the past I would put such books aside and return to them five or ten years later. I may no longer have that luxury. Next year wouldn’t be too soon.
Monday, January 5, 2009