Vasily Grossman: a Mensch at the front line

First, as far as those reading in translation were concerned, came Life and Fate, a masterpiece on a Tolstoyan scale and with that genius's nuance in characterisation, about the end of the Stalingrad conflict and what came afterwards. I found it frustrating to begin with: who were all these people who kept popping up without immediate explanation, their back-histories revealed across the course of the novel, if at all? Reading the small print, as it were, one found out that this wasn't a self-contained epic at all, but the second instalment of what one might call a 'dilogy'; the first, For a Just Cause, hadn't then been translated since its Soviet publication in 1952. I wrote a bit about this in a blog entry partly on Life and Fate back in 2018. In brief, there was much dismissal of For a Just Cause's quality; since Grossman had written it while Stalin was still alive, it was deemed to be seriously compromised by censorship and the need to give a postive picture.

When, at last, Stalingrad, as Grossman had wanted to call For a Just Cause, appeared in a translation by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler in 2019, so many myths about it were dispelled; it's only now that I've been able to read it. Yes, the post-Stalin Grossman would have been harsher on the leader's 'not one step back' policy which resulted in thousands of soldiers being executed by their own; he might have exposed the extermination of the kulaks and the truth behind the forced collectivization of previous years; he might have been harsher on the bickering generals. But the characters we mostly meet again in Life and Fate are so finely drawn, the sense of shame in the retreat and the awareness that Stalingrad was the last of Russia, and soldiers might choose being there over the quieter life on the steppe across the Volga, the general heroic assertion of defending it 'for a just cause', to a death which might seem pointless in the smaller scheme of things, all justifiably strong and vivid.

The choices the Chandlers made over co-ordinating no less than five versions seem entirely admirable. Their decisions strike me as analogous with what any opera company decides to do with Prokofiev's most wide-ranging masterpiece, War and Peace, which preoccupied him from 1941 up to his death. In both cases revisions made the most of apparent compromise: Grossman was 'advised' not to make one of his leading figures, the physicist Viktor Shtrum, top of his league - he was Jewish, like Grossman, and that wouldn't do in the still virulently anti-Semitic atmosphere of Stalin's last years - but in creating a purely Russian figure to whom Shtrum is subordinate, Chepyzhin, he merely added another rich creation. 

Asked to give some sense of the coal production which helped power reinforcements, Grossman also added a dozen chapters focusing on the work of Colonel Novikov's brother Ivan in the Donbass. And these are fascinatingly well observed - one would no longer wish them away than one would Prokofiev's 13th scene, his last addition to War and Peace, sketching the council at Fili and giving Kutuzov a crucial and deeply moving aria. One of Stalingrad's most vivd and shocking chapters, in which we see Tolya Shaposhnikov so full of hope and budding heroism, was added to the fifth version; once read, never forgotten. Picking up Stalingrad after reading Victor Serge's The Case of Comrade Tulayev made me realise what these two authors, who knew each other (somewhat to Grossman's cost), have in common and where they differ. Both are lyrical about nature, and especially about the night sky, but while the terror of Serge's novel is limited to earth, Grossman's sky is ruined by hurtling death stars - the bombers - and constant noise.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing of all about Stalingrad is that it's not only a great feat of the imagination in the case of the various characters, but carries over experiences Grossman himself had undergone as a reporter constantly heading out to various front lines, and to Stalingrad itself in its darkerst hours, only a few years earlier. How different from Tolstoy's War and Peace, created entirely from a phenomenal effort to recreate events at the other end of the 19th century. 

Which of course doesn't make Grossman's work better, only more authentic (not always a commendation in similar cases). That's why it was so enriching to read alongside the novel Anthony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova's A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941-1945. While this was published before either had read Stalingrad/For a Just Cause - which they serve poorly by referring only to Life and Fate - the selected notebook entries show us how much Grossman carried over, often transferring his own thoughts and witnessing to characters in the novel. It also gives us much more about the early days of the war, on the Eastern Front, recreated in the backstory of Colonel Novikov in the novel. Grossman actually arrived in Stalingrad after the attack had begun, but in this entry, perhaps, lie the seeds of a novel about it:

Stalingrad is burned down. I would have to write too much if I wanted to describe it. Stalingrad is burned down. Stalingrad is in ashes. It is dead.  People are in basements. Everything is burned out. The hot walls of the buildings are like the bodies of people who have died in the terrible heat and haven't gone cold yet.

Both in the journals and the novel, too, he describes the buildings without windows as 'blind'. He would eventually see how the city still lived through its defence. And what he hadn't experienced for himself he would get his interviewees to describe. His fellow correspondents were amazed, for instance, according to his boss General David Ortenburg, 'how Grossman had made the divisional commander , General Gurtiev, a silent and reserved Siberian, talk to him for six hours without a break, telling him all that he wanted to know, at one of the hardest moments [of the battle]'.

Movingly, too, A Writer at War it takes us beyond to Grossman's journey back east with the Red Army, the appalling revelations of what had happened to his mother and other Jews in his birth town of Berdichev, the horrors of Treblinka, the depredations of the Soviet army once it left home soil and moved in on Berlin (pictured below, Grossman on the left at the Brandenburg Gate). 

One of the most striking things about Stalingrad is that Shtrum opens the last letter from his mother but we learn nothing of the contents. The complete letter forms a full chapter only in Life and Fate. I wept again when I read that Grossman wrote two more letters to his mother in 1950 and 1961, the 20th anniversary of her death; they are translated in full on pages 259-61 of A Writer at War, a vital epilogue to the fates of both the fictional and the real mothers.

His essay on Treblinka is shattering, ruthless in its detail and its furious turns of the screw, and he acknowledges its awfulness:

It is infinitely hard even to read this. The reader must believe me, it is hard to write it. Someone might ask: 'Why write about all this, why remember that?' It is the writer's duty to tell this terrible truth, and it is the civilian duty of the reader to learn it. Everyone who would turn away, who would shut his eyes and walk past would insult the memory of the dead. Everyone who does not know the truth about this would never be able to understand with what sort of enemy, with what sort of monster, our Red Army started on its own mortal combat.

Next task: to get hold of a translation of The Black Book in which this essay features, thorough documentation of the fate of Russian and other Jews in the Holocaust, which he co-authored with Ilya Ehrenburg (it should be available to all for a more affordable price). The story of its suppression in the Soviet Union and of the hostility towards the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee makes for a further chilling chaper. Even if Grossman were a lesser writer - and all this makes clear he is one of the very greatest - the record and reportage alone should be essential reading for everyone.

Sicily '48

In Leonardo Sciascia's 1958 quartet of novellas/short stories Sicilian Uncles, the year could be 1848 or 1948. We make for ourselves the connection between a boy witnessing the advent of the Americans in Sicily, a dogged adherent of Stalin whose delusions are followed through to the Beloved Leader and Teacher's death in 1953, another boy living through the upheavals that led to Garibaldi's arrival and a poor villager going straight from the mines to fight in Spain in the name of fascism, to whom enlightenment comes as a sort of bittersweet apotheosis for the entire book.

I don't know why I didn't read Sciascia for so long. The name somehow smacked to me of a florid Italian philosopher; the style is anything but. Sciascia's writing is crisp, often ironical and so compressed that he usually leaves you wanting more. 'Forty-Eight', its title taken from a Sicilian phrase which since the events of that momentous 19th century year has become synonymous with 'to cause or profit from confusion', could have been the ideal novel-length equal of  Lampedusa's The Leopard; indeed, as it stands at 60 or so pages, it is absolutely perfect in its own right. As in The Leopard (the book, not the often inept film), most of the fighting like that outside the Duomo in Palermo pictured below takes place 'offstage'.

You just want to go on reading about the capricious, casually corrupt and chameleonic Baron Garziano as viewed through the eyes of the son of the estate gardener, about his cronies in the church and the liberals who spend their time between a local bar and prison. The essential message is that everything just goes on as normal after each upheaval, and 'normal' in Sicily isn't good, it's just a case of plus ça change (do the Italians have a similar phrase, I wonder?)

The American Aunt of the first story undergoes an alarming transformation from the magical, mythical figure over the seas to an all-controlling manipulator when she comes to Sicily. The first few pages are a magnificently etched picture of the moment in the Second World War when the Americans arrive; it's so vivid that you know Sciascia is describing from experience. Presumably he also knew a communist who held on to his rosy view of Stalin. But so vivid is the first-person narration in 'Forty-Eight' that you forget the author wasn't alive at that time.

As for Antimony, the name given by the sulphur miners of Sciascia's native Racalmuto to the substance (pictured above) which burns the protagonist's father, the description of fighting in the Spanish Civil War also feels like autobiography, but can't be. As ordinary men whose philosophy has been forged in horror, the narrator and his maverick companion Ventura, who simply yearns to join up with the Americans, do most of the summary reflection for the four stories. Our hero has already understood the nature of Sicilian faith in his village, in contrast to the death-justifying God created by the Falangists:

...in our faith, it's only the good things that count. God doesn't come into the sufferings; it's destiny which brings them. We have a good Sunday, there's soup and meat, and my mother says we must thank God. They bring my father home, burned by antimony, and my mother says it's a vile destiny that's burned him...I'd like to have my mother here, and show her that, here in Spain, God and destiny have one and the same face.

Bitter experience and injury send him home, where the villagers don't want to hear what he's had to say. But there is a kind of transcendence:

The war had condemned my body. But when a man has understood that he is an image of dignity, you can even reduce him to a stump, lacerate him all over, and he will still be the greatest thing God has created. When fresh troops arrive on a front and have been thrown into battle, the generals and journalists say, 'They've had their baptism of fire'  - one of the many solemn and stupid phrases thrown out about the bestiality of war: but from the war in Spain, and the fire of the war there, I really do feel I have had a baptism: a sign of liberation in my heart; a sign of consciousness and of justice.

Of course justice cannot thrive in Sicily, or it couldn't when Sciascia was writing (born in 1912, he died in 1989, before any kind of true dawn); I wonder how far the campaign to resist paying protection money, its stickers all over shops in Palermo, has got. I wrote about it here, but no harm in displaying the 'addiopizzo' sticker again.

Sciascia's short thrillers tend to be about cases which can't be solved, even when you have the evidence, because of the Mafia's tentacles reaching to the highest echelons of the government in Rome (as we now know from the true history of 'Il Divo' Andreotti), despite big businessmen and local worthies' insistence that no such thing exists.

In The Day of the Owl, written shortly after Sicilian Uncles, the honest, just Captain Bellodi from Emilia Romagna is determined to do the right thing in Sicily. He knows how it works when he talks to a group under suspicion:

Now let's say that nine out of ten contractors accept or ask for protection. It would be a poor sort of association - and you know what association I refer to - if it were to limit itself to the functions and pay of night watchmen. The protection offered by the association is on a much vaster scale. It obtains private contracts for you, I mean for the firms which toe the line and accept protection. It gives you valuable tips if you want to submit a tender for public works, it supports you when the final inspection comes up, it saves trouble with your workmen...Obviously, if nine companies out of ten have accepted protection thus forming a kind of union, the tenth which refuses is the black sheep. It can't do much harm, of course, but its very existence is a challenge and a bad example. So, by fair means or foul, it must be forced to come into the fold or be wiped out once and for all.

He knows, too, the approach of the big cheese:

One fine day, a person 'worthy of respect', as you would say, comes to have a little talk...what he says might mean anything and nothing, allusive, blurred as the back of a piece of embroidery, a tangle of knots and threads with the pattern on the other side...

Nor is The Day of the Owl a merely schematic exposure of how things work, or don't, in Sicily. There's a brilliant piece of characterisation when the informer of the piece - no major spoiler here, since Sciascia anticipates it almost from the moment the personage is introduced - is shot on his doorstep:

The man had left this life with one final denunciation, the most accurate and explosive one he had ever made...It was not the importance of the denunciation which made such an impression on the captain, but the agony, the despair which had provoked it. Those 'regards' made him feel brotherly compassion and anguished distress, the compassion and distress of one who under appearances classified, defined and rejected, suddenly discovers the naked human heart. By his death, by his last farewell, the informer had come into a closer, more human relationship; this might be unpleasant, vexatious; but in the feelings and thoughts of the man who shared them they brought a response of sympathy, of spiritual sympathy. 

Suddenly this state of mind gave way to rage. The captain felt a wave of resentment at the narrow limits in which the law compelled him to act...

Bellodi thinks that one through too, and dismisses it. The standard Sciascian paradigm is one of unearthing, then being forced to shovel the earth back over the discovery.

How Sciascia would enjoy, albeit grimly, targeting the plans of the present government. Within a week we've had auguries of tyranny: worst, the rewriting of the European Human Rights Act to suit the 'British constitution' (opting out would make us pariahs alongside Belarus. Well, exactly). We'll see what that entails, but an act so laboured over, not least by Churchill, should not be open to negotiation - and a healthy response, from the cause-fighting 38 Degrees, is pictured below.

We've had threats of a petty vendetta with the BBC. We've had the delightful Theresa May - the only MP to insist on being driven up to No. 10 Downing Street on the first day in her limo and the one who first raised the spectre of the rights rewrite, now taken over by her even lovelier arch-enemy Michael Gove - saying that the immigrants, thousands of whom have drowned on perilous boat journeys from Africa to Europe (first point of entry, dead or alive, usually Sicily or one of the islands off it) should be sent back home and that we won't join the European agreement to take some in; and on a small scale, the ridiculous move to reinstate fox-hunting.

Fortunately there's a healthy opposition to most of the measures threatened, and the new SNP members are already making themselves felt (Scotland and Northern Ireland too, it seems, have the constitutional right to block the scrapping of the Human Rights Act as it stands, and many Tory backbenchers are against it, too). It's still a democracy, even if sometimes one wonders.

A Warsaw childhood

Our friend Jasia Reichardt, whose acquaintance we are so proud to have made through her partner Nick Wadley and his Cole Porter Choral Society, has written a unique and haunting book about growing up in the years 1939-1946. She counterpoints her own lucid, unsentimental prose with letters from her mother, Maryla Chaykin, and grandmother, Łucja Weinles, to her aunt, Franciszka Themerson, most of them taking a roundabout route from the Warsaw ghetto to London before Jasia’s mother and father were transported to the death camps. Jasia’s escape from the same fate, playing the part of a Catholic orphan, is the story of 14 out of the '15 journeys’, most of them short, around various hospitals and convents in the Warsaw region, until she is reunited with Franciszka and her husband Stefan in London after the war

The first journey, to the Warsaw ghetto, marks the departure from a normal life which Jasia describes in objective, simple but often piercing sentences, beginning with a detailed tour of the apartment. It feels so real, this ‘quiet and pleasant’ childhood in a civilized household where father works on his architectural designs, mother gives piano lessons and illustrates children’s books – inspiring her daughter to draw so well from an early age -  and grandfather’s oil paintings hang on the walls (Maryla’s drawings for Living Letters and Płomyk punctuate the text).

Visits to the Themersons’ modern flat open up a new world, full of everyday wonders illustrated by these influential avant-garde artists and film-makers: ‘no mermaids, no angels or witches, no Aladdins, just what we can see, use and touch’. The Themersons leave for Paris in 1938, the war begins the following year; in 1940, Jews are prohibited from leaving home without a permit between 9 and 5, from walking certain streets, entering certain squares, sitting on public benches, riding in taxis, making public calls from telephone booths…the list is preposterous and chilling. Maryla writes to her Franka, ‘Do you walk about town at 8 in the evening? Are cinemas and parks open to everyone? It will be a pleasure to even read about it.’ In October Jasia moves with her mother and grandmother to a three-room flat in the ghetto, shared with seven other friends and relatives.

Maryla’s and Łucja’s letters are matter of fact, repetitive, coded. Jasia has taken the brave decision to include them all, reasoning that:

Each letter, whatever its content, is primarily proof that the writer is, or was at the time of writing, still alive. The letters have their own texture and pattern. The entire correspondence resembles a chain-stitch that goes back over itself, progressing slowly. With every stitch there is a small change, a new item of information, a nuance of mood that casts increasingly dark shadows.

Through all this we learn that Jasia continues to have a childhood, to play, to roller-skate, to exercise as far as possible, to grow tomatoes on the balcony. But the mood of ‘growing despair’ can be detected in the change from the habitual stoicism of phrases like ‘we are in good health and have enough for our modest needs’ to increasingly plaintive lines such as these: ‘until recently we had a lot of help…We didn’t lack anything. The last three months however we’ve lived almost entirely thanks to your help’ This is August 1941; Franciszka has continued to risk sending food parcels from London despite warnings against doing so from the ‘Trading with the Enemy' Branch of the Treasury and Board of Trade, one of the many topsyturvydoms of war.

Eventually the inevitable happens. Telegraphic messages trickle out of the ghetto until the last card of 28 May 1942. Nine-year-old Jasia, in the premature growing-up of her many journeys, intuits that her grandmother and great-uncle are going to commit suicide, that her parents are dead. Somehow Jasia’s prose conveys the business of shutting out these thoughts, getting on with life. That Maryla and Łucja disappear from the narrative of the girl’s subsequent life is more devastating than their presence could be. The prose remains 'unencumbered by emotional baggage', as one close to Jasia describes it. Yet we know throughout that her mother, whose letters she only came to face after Franciszka left them to her on her deathbed in 1988, is the heart and soul of this most singular memoir.

Nick, Jasia’s partner, published the latest book of his remarkable drawings earlier this year, Man + Doctor. It stems from his extended confinements to hospital beds between 2004 and 2010 and, in his words, ‘record man’s many and various attempts to avoid the scalpel, and his eventual confrontations with and recoveries from surgery (colon cancer, lumbar discs, and the heart)'.

Black humour punctuates a different sort of dark journey, from diagnosis to admission and operation (I particularly like ‘anaesthetic’, with a blue bird perched on a windowsill from which the patient is precariously hanging). Most of the medical professionals involved take on a comic-sinister aspect, or so I imagine.

I asked Nick to choose an image, and he wrote: 'I think one that stays in my mind as poignantly "true" is the man in the blue gown, just at the moment he loses his identity and becomes a patient with a number, and signs the consent form, and disappears into the grande machine of hospital life'. Posy Simmonds described this at the book launch as 'the abattoir look'.

For the rest, see for yourselves. I should only add that both books are beautifully produced by Dalkey Archive Press, with artistic care taken over the selected illustrations that punctuate Jasia’s narrative.

Stop press, 3/10: A photo of Nick and Jasia taken at their home last Sunday. The painting behind them is by Franciszka Themerson.