Vasily Grossman: Stalingrad (1952-54 / 2019)•
Vasily Grossman (1945)Vasily Grossman: Stalingrad (1952-54 / 2019)
[Unity Books, Auckland CBD - 16/11/2022]:
Vasily Grossman. Stalingrad: A Novel. 1952-54. Ed. Robert Chandler & Yury Bit-Yunan. Trans. Robert & Elizabeth Chandler. 2019. Vintage Classics. London: Penguin Random House UK, 2020.
Bounty from my 60th Birthday Booktokens (6/11/22)Birthday Books
It's always a bit of a responsibility to be unleashed on a good bookshop (such as Unity Books) with a handful of booktokens. You look, first, for the books you were already thinking of getting. Inevitably they're not there. So you have to reset and start looking instead at what is there - preferably something expensive which you wouldn't otherwise dream of buying.
The Letters of Thom Gunn. Ed. August Kleinzahler, Michael Nott, & Clive Wilmer. 2021. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022.In this case it was the Thom Gunn letters which caught my eye first. I've never quite been able to align myself with his poetry - the letters might offer me a way in, I thought. I am, however, already a Truman Capote fan, and have Gerald Clarke's warts-and-all biography of the diminutive, witty and waspish writer. His companion volume of letters was therefore an obvious must-have.
Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote. Ed. Gerald Clarke. 2004. Vintage International. New York: Random House, Inc., 2005.One almost has to apologise for having an interest in Russian writing and culture these days. I've been reading their poets and novelists ever since I first started studying the language at school in the mid-1970s, which makes it almost fifty years now - I just can't leave all that behind. There is, in any case, a strong case to be made that Vasily Grossman was in fact Ukrainian: he was born of Jewish parents in Berdichev, Northern Ukraine, in 1905.
Grossman, Vasily. Stalingrad: A Novel. 1952-54. Ed. Robert Chandler & Yury Bit-Yunan. Trans. Robert & Elizabeth Chandler. 2019. Vintage Classics. London: Penguin Random House UK, 2020.So when I saw his novel Stalingrad sitting there on the shelf, and realised it was a new translation of the prequel (originally titled For a Just Cause) to his masterpiece Life and Fate, which I read some years ago, I obviously had to add it to my collection. Whether I need the new, revised translation of Life and Fate which is now available, as well as the new edition of The People Eternal which Robert and Elizabeth Chandler have just translated is more debatable.
Beevor, Antony. Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. London: The Orion Publishing Group Ltd., 2022.Instead, I decided to buy Antony Beevor's latest book, a history of that almost unbelievably grim human tragedy which was the Russian Civil War.
Beevor, Antony. Stalingrad. 1998. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999.The battle of Stalingrad has always been an subject of fascination to Second World War aficionados. There's a larger-than-life quality to the whole story which places it among other earth-shaking events such as Gettysburg, Waterloo - or Thermopylae.
As well as Antony Beevor's classic account of it, the book which made his name, there's also a rather cheesy movie - though with definite moments of effectiveness - starring Jude Law and Ed Harris as rival snipers stalking each other in the ruins of the beleaguered city:
Grossman's novel is not really like that, though. To be honest, it reads like a book at war with itself. The intricate web of family relations and connections he tries to weave together to illuminate the effects of the war on everyday people is constantly interrupted by passages where characters swoon with joy at the latest edict from Stalin, or muse on the wondrous strength and solidity of the Soviet system.
Nor can one really just bleep over such sections and regard them as the necessary curlicues required of anyone trying to publish a novel in the USSR in the Stalinist era. There's a profound imbalance in the narrative caused by this insistence on the infallibility of the Stavka and the Higher Command. If they're so bloody clever, why does the Russian army keep on being encircled and defeated?
Nor is it possible to read Grossman's flashbacks to the first days of the invasion and reconcile the picture it paints of chaotic and frantic disorder with the constant reminders of how correct was the Soviet policy of appeasing Hitler until the last possible minute. Even in context, without the benefit of any other information about the the lack of preparedness of the Russian forces in the face of this all-too-obvious threat, it simply fails to compute.
The only experience I can really compare it to is reading the last forty chapters of Cao Xueqin's classic Chinese novel The Story of the Stone (or The Dream of the Red Chamber). As you can see from the picture above, the first three volumes of the Penguin Classics edition, translated by veteran Sinologist David Hawkes, cover the 80 chapters contained in the earliest manuscripts of the book.
There can be no doubt about the authenticity of these chapters. Although a certain amount of family interference seems to have gone on with the contents of this Proustian family saga - judging, that is, by the marginal gloss included with some of these early texts - a single creative hand was clearly at work, creating in the process one of the most vivid and absorbing pieces of fiction in world literature.
The last forty chapters, translated by Hawkes's son-in-law John Minford for the Penguin edition, are another story altogether. They're attributed on the title-page to the editor of the 120-chapter edition of the novel, Gao E, but it seems doubtful that he was in fact their author. He may well have woven together some original writings by Cao Xueqin himself, along with passages by other writers, into something resembling a continuous narrative, adding in the process his own linking sections.
The result is intensely frustrating to read, because although some of the most striking events in the whole work are contained in this last part, it does not really fulfil in detail any of the auguries of doom to the Jia family which echo through the first 80 chapters. It certainly cannot be the continuation Cao Xueqin himself was planning to write, although some of his writing is probably in it.
Curiosity and a desire for completeness force me to read through them again every time I revisit the novel, but I can never feel satisfied by these last forty chapters: they seem thin, forced, and contrived when you constrast them with the fluid grace of the authentic part of Cao's masterpiece.
Similarly, readers of Grossman's Life and Fate cannot, now, really avoid reading this initial part of his fictional edifice if they want to know the backstories of the numerous characters who recur in the later novel. But there's nothing smooth or frictionless about the transition.
I suppose that it's an inevitable reflex to compare any attempt to write a major historical novel in Russia with War and Peace. There's considerable evidence, in fact, that Grossman was - at least initially - encouraged by the authorities to see his work as a Soviet version of Tolstoy's masterpiece.
Impressive though Life and Fate may be overall, the existence of this flawed predecessor makes the experience of reading it even less like following the epic sweep of Tolstoy.
'There is salmons in both,' as Shakespeare's Fluellen triumphantly concludes his equation of Henry of Monmouth with Alexander of Macedon:
There is a river in Macedon; and there is also moreover a river at Monmouth ... If you mark Alexander's life well, Harry of Monmouth's life is come after it indifferent well; for there is figures in all things.Something similar might be said of the comparison between Tolstoy and Grossman. One is a genius on the level of Homer or - for that matter - Shakespeare himself; the other a very talented writer and journalist caught up in the turmoil of his exceptionally interesting times.
- Henry V, Act 4, Scene vii
Another victim (or, if you prefer, beneficiary) of the War and Peace comparison is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. But actually, he might serve as a better analogue for Vasily Grossman.
Quite apart from the canon of his major works, Ivan Denisovich, Cancer Ward, The First Circle, and (of course) The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn also wrote his own massive historical novel. His was set in the First World War, and in particular the period leading up to the Russian Revolution. Grossman, by contrast, concentrates on the Great Patriotic War - what we would call the Second World War.
The first section, or 'knot', of Solzhenitsyn's colossal enterprise, August 1914, was translated in part in 1972, but the other three sections are still not completely available in English. That task is now, finally, being undertaken by Marian Schwartz and the University of Notre Dame Press, but it's hard to predict how long it will actually take. Here's the situation as it stands at present:
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Red Wheel (1969-1991)
- August 1914, Node I (1971 / 1984)
- August 1914. 1971. Trans. Michael Glenny. 1972. London: The Bodley Head, 1973.
- The Red Wheel. Knot 1: August 1914. 1983. Trans. H. T. Willetts. New York: The Noonday Press, 1989.
- November 1916, Node II (1985)
- Lenin in Zürich: Chapters. 1975. Trans. H. T. Willetts. 1976. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.
- The Red Wheel. Knot 2: November 1916. 1984. Trans. H. T. Willetts. 1999. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.
- March 1917, Node III, Book One (1989)
- The Red Wheel. Node III, Book 1: March 1917. 1989. Trans. Marian Schwartz. South Bend, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017.
- March 1917, Node III, Book Two
- The Red Wheel. Node III, Book 2: March 1917. 1989. Trans. Marian Schwartz. South Bend, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019.
- March 1917, Node III, Book Three
- The Red Wheel. Node III, Book 3: March 1917. 1989. Trans. Marian Schwartz. South Bend, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2021.
- March 1917, Node III, Book Four
- April 1917, Node IV, Book One (1991)
- April 1917, Node IV, Book Two
Why has it taken so long? Partially because of its immense length - and, let's face it, rather turgid style - but also because Solzhenitsyn's reputation is not quite what it was. While it would be impossible to deny his historical status as one of the most important writers of the late twentieth century, a great many of his more reactionary views are no longer palatable in this age of resurgent Russian nationalism.
Solzhenitsyn was never really the liberal his Western admirers assumed him to be, and a fair amount of distinctly authoritarian thinking has leaked over into The Red Wheel, his most extensive meditation on the nature of history in our times. Which is not to say that it's not worth reading. On the contrary, in fact. But it's hard to imagine it ever being regarded as indispensible and epoch-making, like his masterpiece The Gulag Archipelago.
Don't get me wrong. It's great to see Grossman's literary legacy rehabilitated and brought back to light after all these years. Billing the novel pictured above as the third part of a trilogy about the German invasion of Russia, while technically true, does, however, promise a bit more than the book itself can actually deliver.
The People Immortal is certainly interesting. And it's useful to have it available again in this new English translation. As you can see from the bibliography below, The Russian Foreign Languages Publishing House did produce a version of it in 1943, during the war, which was reprinted in both Britain and America - but it's no Life and Fate, still less an Everything Flows.
Perhaps a better place to go to appreciate the true nature of Grossman's legacy is A Writer at War (2005), a selection of his articles, letters and diary entries from 1941-1945 compiled by Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova, which includes his crucial report on 'The Hell of Treblinka', one of the very first eye-witness accounts of the Nazi concentration camps ever to appear.
Books I own are marked in bold:
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Fiction:
- Glückauf (1936)
- Kolchugin's Youth (1937-40)
- Kolchugin's Youth: A Novel. 1937-40. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds (London: Hutchinson's International Authors Ltd., 1946)
- The People Immortal (1943)
- The People Eternal [aka No Beautiful Nights]. Trans. Elizabeth Donnelly (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1943)
- The People Immortal. 1942. Ed. Julia Volohova. Trans. Robert & Elizabeth Chandler. Introduction and Afterword by Robert Chandler & Julia Volohova. MacLehose Press. London: Quercus Editions Limited, 2022.
- For a Just Cause [aka Stalingrad] (1952)
- Stalingrad: A Novel. 1952-54. Ed. Robert Chandler & Yury Bit-Yunan. Trans. Robert & Elizabeth Chandler. 2019. Vintage Classics. London: Penguin Random House UK, 2020.
- Life and Fate. 1960 (1980)
- Life and Fate. 1980. Trans. Robert Chandler. 1985. London: The Harvill Press, 1995.
- Life and Fate. 1980. Trans. Robert Chandler. 1985. Rev. ed. 2006. Introduction by Linda Grant. Vintage. London: Random House, 2011.
- Forever Flowing (1972)
- Forever Flowing. 1970. Trans. Thomas P. Whitney. London: Collins Harvill, 1986.
- Everything Flows. 1955-64. Trans. Robert & Elizabeth Chandler, with Anna Aslanyan. Commentary and Notes by Robert Chandler with Yury Bit-Yunan. Afterword by Fyodor Guber. New York: New York Review Books, 2009.
- [with Ilya Ehrenburg] The Black Book: The Ruthless Murder of Jews by German-Fascist Invaders Throughout the Temporarily-Occupied Regions of the Soviet Union and in the Death Camps of Poland during the War 1941–1945 (1948)
- [with Ilya Ehrenburg] The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry. 1944 & 1946. Ed. Irina Ehrenburg. Trans. David Patterson. London: Routledge, 2003.
- The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays. Trans. Robert & Elizabeth Chandler with Olga Mukovnikova. Ed. Robert Chandler with Yury Bit-Yunan. Afterword by Fyodor Guber (2010)
- The Road: Stories, Journalism and Essays. Trans. Robert & Elizabeth Chandler, with Olga Mukovnikova. Introduction by Robert Chandler. New York: New York Review Books, 2010.
- A Writer at War: a Soviet Journalist with the Red Army, 1941-1945. Ed. Antony Beevor. Trans. Luba Vinogradova (2013)
- A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941-1945. Ed. Antony Beevor. Trans. Luba Vinogradova. The Harvill Press. London: Random House, 2005.
- A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941-1945. Ed. Antony Beevor. Trans. Luba Vinogradova. Pimlico. London: Random House, 2006.
- An Armenian Sketchbook. 1962. Trans. Robert Chandler (2013)
Non-fiction:
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- category - Russian Literature: Prose
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