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The Story of a Life, Volume 6: The Restless Years, by Konstantin Paustovsky (1974)

Cover of the Harvill Press edition of <em>The Restless Years</em>.
Cover of the Harvill Press edition of The Restless Years.

In the final pages of Southern Adventure, the previous volume in his memoir The Story of a Life, Konstantin Paustovsky boards a train from Tiflis (Tbilisi), Georgia to return to Russia having been struck by “the realization that nobody needed me here.” Anyone who’s read the first three volumes will know that Paustovsky must have been haunted by the memory of the two people who did need him: his mother and his sister Galya.

Paustovsky’s mother and sister were the last remnants of his family, a family blown to pieces by war, revolution, and misfortune. Volume One of The Story of a Life opens, in fact, as the author, then a young schoolboy, travels through a Ukranian winter to his father’s burial. The last sight we (and Paustovsky) have of them is in Volume 3, In That Dawn, when he’s forced to abandon them in Kiev as control of the city is wrestled for by the Reds, the Whites, the Germans, and the Ukranians. At the time, Galya had already begun to lose her sight, leaving the two women in a desperate state, with few friends and almost no resources to support themselves aside from the few funds that Paustovsky can send them from time to time.

By the time Paustovsky is reunited with them at the beginning of The Restless Years, Galya is blind and they are reduced to living in a single room in a tenement in Kiev: “two spindly iron bedsteads, an old cupboard, a kitchen table, three wobbly chairs and a mirror on the wall.” Everything in the room is grey — as if covered in dust, but in reality simply worn out of color through years of constant wiping and polishing.

Yet their faith in Paustovsky is undiminished by their years of waiting and need. All that matters to them is that, as a writer, he can change the world. “Tell me please, about the things you write,” his mother asks: “Can they help people, so that they will suffer less?”

It’s hard for any writer to change the world, especially when writing in a time of tremendous political, economic, and social upheaval. But as The Restless Years demonstrates, in Paustovsky’s case, it was not for lack of trying. He arrives back in Moscow in August 1923, almost five years after his last departure. The city is in the midst of one of the early experiments of the Soviet regime, the first cycle of the New Economic Policy and the closest the Communists came to embracing capitalism. Moscow is full of “NEPmen.” These supposed entreneurs were, for the most part, schemers, grifters, and swindlers with little to contribute to actual economic improvement. To Paustovsky, they are like characters in a cheap imitation of a Chekhov play, living “in shabby and spasmodic grandeur, with ramshackle motor-cars, faded beauties and restaurant-gypsy music.”

The city is also overrun by thousands of children orphaned through almost a decade of devastation. These bespriorniki wear bits of old army uniforms, beg for handouts or rummage for scraps in gutters and wastebins, carry their meager belonging in their pockets — “bits of broken combs, knives, cigarettes, crusts of bread, matches, greasy cards, and bits of dirty bandages.” As poor as he and his fellow writers may be, often going a day or two without a meal, Paustovsky finds some comfort in knowing that the bespriorniki are even worse off.

1923 was no more than thirteen or fourteen years later than the schoolboy days that open The Story of a Life, but to Paustovsky it seemed as if he had already lived “so enormously long that the thought of it filled me with terror.” At 30, he feels himself an old man among many of his fellow writers, even though most were no more than five years younger.

That feeling only intensifies when he learns of Lenin’s death. “Men were waiting to be saved from thousands of years of helpless sufferings,” he reflected, and now, “The man who knew what had to be done was gone.” He goes to the train station to travel to Red Square for the funeral but arrives too late. He then tries to walk along the tracks into town but soon collapses out of hunger and exhaustion.

Lenin’s death took from Paustovsky and millions of Russians the spark that fired their spiritual commitment to the revolution. In its place came a grey blanket of bureaucracy and mechanical repression overseen by Stalin. Paustovsky found himself increasingly consumed in self-protection — and most of all, in protecting his intimacy with the Russian language:

I tried to put up a resistance against everything capable of soiling the inner world I carried within me and tried to communicate to others. Most of all I was afraid of becoming contaminated by that exhausted and impotent language which at that time was spreading relentlessly and swiftly.

“The Russian language exists like a collection of great poetry, as unexpectedly rich and pure as the blaze of a starry sky over a forest waste,” he writes. Had it been otherwise, “I should have taken up bookkeeping or something of that sort.”

It was a struggle in which he was, by his own admission, largely unsuccessful in the next few years. “There is nothing worse than a nail driven into the wall and bending,” Paustovsky tells us. “One has no confidence in it.” His poor attempts at fiction in the mid-1920s “resembled in some inexplicable way a mass of nails more or less bent.”

What breaks this impasse is an assignment to travel deep into central Asia. Paustovsky’s imagination had been inspired by reading of an attempt by a Frenchman, Bernardin St. Pierre, to interest the Empress Catherine in his founding a utopian republic on the shore of a vast and desolate inlet off the Caspian Sea known as Kara Bugaz (now Garabogazköl). Catherine had better sense than the Soviets, who launched a grand venture to establish a salt production industry in the regime.

Cover of Kara Bugaz
Cover of Kara Bugaz (The Black Gulf).

If you want an unbiased version of the Kara Bugaz salt factories and Paustovsky’s role in propagandizing it, I highly recommend reading Frank Westerman’s excellent book Engineers of the Soul: The Grandiose Propaganda of Stalin’s Russia. For as much as Paustovsky earned a reputation as one of the few Soviet writers to maintain a relatively high level of personal integrity through decades of pressure to conform to the changing tides of editorial policies, his novel Kara Bugaz (1932) (translated as The Black Gulf) veers too close to socialist realism (i.e., propaganda) for comfort. Even in retrospect, his willful misreading of the reality of the situation is clear:

As I have already said, the work in Berezniki was carried out by deportees. But deportation is one thing and work another. Their condition as deportees in no way affected the selflessness of their work. They were the first, according to the chemical experts, to set up machines and installations which they had never seen before. In the past they had only dreamed about them or else read about them in foreign scientific and technical journals. Indeed, there was much to amaze the layman and strike him as being nothing less than a miracle.

The one good result from Paustovsky’s Kara Bugaz experience was that he quit the writers’ collective he’d joined after returning from Moscow and committed to making it on his own as an independent: not an easy task for any writer and particularly challenging through twenty years of Stalin’s rule.

But it also makes The Restless Years the most problematic book in The Story of a Life. It’s easy to read the first five books as the story of a series of violent storms as seen by a bit of flotsam caught up and tossed about by their winds and waves. Paustovsky was too close to the center of Soviet cultural life not to know the true nature of Stalin’s regime. And he cannot console himself, like his friend Mikahil Prishvin, by losing himself in the wonders of Russian nature and wildlife.

The fact that he kept himself aloof from much machinations of the Soviet system doesn’t mean that he remained pristine. Glimpses slip through now and again in The Restless Years. In describing an incident in which he collapsed from typhus while traveling on assignment in the Caucasus, he mentions in passing:

Famine had started in the Ukraine at the time and thousands of refugees rushed off to the south, to Transcaucasus, to the warm regions where there was enough to eat. They flooded out all the railway stations between Zugdidy and Samtredi. Typhus broke out among them.

There may have been a million or more corpses left in the wake of “Famine had started in the Ukraine.”

Sergei Budantsev
Sergei Budantsev

As with the two volumes before it, The Restless Years is full of wonderful sketches of the many writers Paustovsky encountered in the course of his long career. Perhaps the best are his recollections of Isaac Babel in volumes 4 (Years of Hope) and 5 (Southern Adventure). In one profile in this volume, however, he drops his artifice of blindness to Stalinist repression for a moment. He writes of Sergei Budantsev, who was loved as a conversationalist for his habit of sharing his thoughts for future books, “telling people willingly and in detail” their plan, subject, characters, and plots. “He would thus create a whole cycle of oral chapters and novels, worked out and completed to the last detail” — which then, all too often, he failed to translate onto the written page. Paustovsky ends his sketch with one chilling sentence: “Budantsev was one of the first to die in a Chukota concentration camp.”

The Russian edition of The Restless Years was published in 1964 — after the end of the Khruschev Thaw, but perhaps early enough in Brezhnev’s regime that such a blunt disclosure could still be tolerated. Nonetheless, when he wrote his memoir of Soviet literary politics, The Oak and the Calf, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was critical of what he saw as Paustovsky’s reluctance to call out Stalin’s repression directly, lumping him in with Ilya Ehrenburg, whose record of collaboration with the regime was certainly worse. The two men, he felt, were “writers who had seen the great dark epoch, and yet were forever trying to sidle round it, ignoring the things that mattered most, telling us nothing but trivialities, sealing out eyes with emollients till we no longer saw the truth.”

But Paustovsky may have had a different objective in writing his memoirs than of providing a historical record. He was an impressionist at heart, and if he can be criticized for not speaking out against the arrests, camps, exiles, and execution he knew were going on, he must also be credited for leaving behind one of the most vivid autobiographies ever written, a book of life every bit as much as War and Peace or Anna Karenina. And The Restless Years shows how Paustovsky came to understand how he needed to write.

Ironically, he claims that he came to this realization came to him on his journey to Kara Bugaz:

… I realized very soon that one must never make a special point of looking for material and behaving like an outside observer; instead, one must simply live while travelling or staying anywhere one happens to be, without trying to remember everything. Only then does one remain oneself and impressions are absorbed directly, freely, and without any previous “screening,” without the constant thought of what can and what cannot be utilized for a book, what is important and what is not.

“Memory,” he concludes, “will eventually make the necessary selection.” In saying this, Paustovsky is treating memory as inspiration rather than source. Throughout The Story of a Life, he recreates experiences, conversations, and sensations that no one could be expected to have remembered accurately or objectively. He doesn’t pretend to be authoritative on any point aside from his own memories, and even in recording those memories, he is saying, in effect, not “This is happened to me” but “This is what my life was like.” It may have made him a lesser witness in Solzhenitsyn’s eyes, but it certainly made The Story of a Life a book that seems at times as vivid and immediate as one’s own experiences.

Note: As I mentioned in my post on Volume 5, Southern Adventure, Vintage Classics has announced the release of a new translation of The Story of a Life by Guggenheim fellow Douglas Smith in June 2022. As wonderful as I’m sure it will be, this edition will not, include the last three books, so if you’d like to read the full story, you’ll still need to hunt down the Harvill Press translations of Volumes 4, 5, and 6. All six volumes can be found on the Internet Archive.

The Story of a Life, Volume 6: The Restless Years, by Konstantin Paustovsky, translated by Kyril FitzLyon
London: Harvill Press, 1974

Going Under, by Lydia Chukovskaya (1972)

Cover of the first edition of Going Under by Lydia Chukovskaya

Going Under is a story of physical comfort and emotional and psychological suffering. Nina Sergeyevna, a translator, arrives at Litvinovka, a writer’s retreat somewhere outside Leningrad, for a few weeks’ state-approved rest in the middle of winter. She’s provided with three meals a day, the freedom to walk through the neighboring countryside and forest, and, most importantly, time to think and write in her room. This last is most precious of all because, like many Soviet city dwellers, she has to share a communal apartment in which privacy is essential unknown.

Yet she will find nothing to shelter her from the pain of her memories. She’s decided to take advantage of this time to “go under.” Going under means to immerse herself in the past — specifically, into the time of Stalin’s purges and show trials of the late 1930s, when her husband Alyosha was arrested and sentenced to ten years in a labor camp.

Since Alyosha’s arrest, Nina has no contact with him. Like other women whose husbands and sons were sucked into the vortex of the Soviet penal system, she’s stood in line for months outside the prison where he’s supposed to have been taken, to ask of his whereabouts. The answers she was given were vague and always shifting. “There are no foundations for a review of the case.” “When he serves out his sentence, he will write to you himself.” “Maybe he’s alive, maybe dead. How would I know?” Finally, she’s told that he’s been sentenced to a special camp for “ten years without right of correspondence.”

It’s now been over twelve years. There’s been nothing. Many nights, Nina finds herself dreaming of Alyosha in prison, in a labor camp, being interrogated, sometimes even being executed. The uncertainty eats away at her psyche.

She wants to put down her thoughts to restore the sense of closeness with her husband that’s grown weak and thin over the years: “The book was me, the sinking of my heart, my memories, which nobody could see…. In creating it, Alyosha’s voice … would permeate” its reader’s soul. Nina is haunted in particular by the thought of his death. “What was his last moment like? How had they turned a living man into a dead man? … And where was his grave? What was the last thing he had seen as life abandoned him?”

Arriving at the retreat with Nina is Bilibin, a writer of comic stories who’s been rehabilitated as a member of the Writers’ Union after serving a term in the gulag. She is desperate to speak with him: “Until now I had never met anyone who had come from there — from a concentration camp.” Bilibin is flattered by Nina’s attention but wary of her questions. He suffers from angina; his heart is weak from the strain of his years in camp.

Finally, however, he reveals the truth:

He was never taken anywhere, he had never suffered from cattle-trucks or dogs. Everything was over long before that. According to Nikolai Aleksandrovich, “ten years without right of correspondence” simply meant execution by firing squad. To avoid repeating at the windows “executed”, “executed”, and so on that there should be no howling and crying in the queue.

Bilibin also confides that he is working on his own account, a book about the things he has seen in the camps. Nina is thrilled to have an ally, and solicitous of Bilibin’s fragile health, especially after he suffers a mild heart attack. As their time nears its end, Bilibin modestly offers his manuscript to Nina.

At first, she read with great excitement. “Yes, his writing was more powerful than his conversation.” Though Bilibin’s story is set in a mine, Nina recognizes some of the men from the camps he’s told her about. Perhaps it’s an allegory to avoid the censors. As she reads on, however, she realizes that Bilibin has written nothing more than a conventional piece of socialist realism: earnest workers, conscientious supervisors, a happy collective. “You’re a coward. No, you’re worse, you’re a false witness.” “Why did you not have the decency to remain silent,” she asks.

For Lydia Chukovskaya, there were only two legitimate choices for Soviet writers: tell the truth or remain silent. Her greatest scorn was for those who tried to follow a compliant middle way and appease the authorities. Going Under is really Chukovskaya’s own story, one she wrote in 1949 after learning of the fate of her own husband.

Matvei Bronstein, husband of Lydia Chukovskaya, in 1937.
Matvei Bronstein, husband of Lydia Chukovskaya, in 1937.

The daughter of Kornei Chukovsky, a children’s writer who was perhaps the best-known and most beloved literary figure inside the Soviet Union, Chukovskaya had married a Jewish physicist and mathematician, Matvei Bronstein, in the mid-1930s. Bronstein and Lev Gumilyov, Anna Akhmatova’s son, were arrested. Gumilyov was set to a labor camp. Bronstein in all likelihood never made it out of basement of the NKVD’s building in Leningrad.

Chukovskaya and Akhmatova stood in the same lines described by Nina Sergeyevna in Going Under, the lines in the introduction to Akhmatova’s great poem “Requiem”:

In the black years of ezhovshchina I spent seventeen months in the prison lines. One day someone recognized me. Then, a woman with blue lips who stood behind me woke up from the trance into which we all fell and whispered in my ear: “And this, can you describe this?” And I said, “Yes, I can.” And then something like a smile glimmered on what once had been her face.

The two women became close friends and over the subsequent years Chukovskaya took notes of their almost daily conversations, note that were later published as The Akhmatova Journals, only one of whose three volumes has been translated into English.

In the decades after her husband’s arrest, Chukovskaya became one of the most vocal critics within the Soviet system. She supported Pasternak when he fell out of Stalin’s favor. She wrote in support of Andrei Sinyavsky (Abram Tertz) and Yuri Daniel when they were arrested and tried in the 1960s and in support of Joseph Brodsky and Andrei Sakharov when they were persecuted. She was a friend of Solzhenitsyn and let him hide in her flat for a time before he was finally expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974. She was herself expelled from the Writers’ Union soon after.

Lydia Chokovskaya in the 1970s.
Lydia Chokovskaya in the 1970s.

She even had the courage to sue her publishers after they balked at publishing Sofia Petrovna, her short novel about a mother whose son is arrested during the purge. Although the book was accepted for publication in 1962, when it came time to be released in 1963 after Khruschev’s fall from power, the Soviet authorities banned it. Chukovskaya argued that her publishers were in breach of contract. Her publishers alleged that the book was not in the public interest, to which she responded,

Literature must illuminate what happened in 1937 in a profound way and from every angle. But this is beyond the powers of a single work. Only our literature as a whole can do that. And that is why we must not stop printing Solzhenitsyn. On the contrary, many more books about that time need to be printed, including my novel.

Amazingly, the court found in Chukovskaya’s favor and ruled the publisher had to pay her the outstanding share of the royalties. A samizdat copy of Sofia Petrovna was smuggled out and published in Paris as The Deserted House. It was not until 1988 that the book was published in the Soviet Union.

She once told an American reporter that she felt compelled to speak out against injustice in the Soviet system: “If I don’t do it, I can’t write about the things that matter. Until I pull this arrow out of my breast, I can think of nothing else!” Chukovskaya had great faith in the future. When she was expelled from the Writers’ Union, she responded in a public letter,

Always, when performing acts like this, you have forgotten — and you are now forgetting — that you control only the present and to some extent the past. There is still another court with jurisdiction over the past and the future: the history of literature.

What do they do — those you have expelled? Write books. After all, even prisoners have written books, and are writing them. And what will you do? Write resolutions.

Like Sofia Petrovna, Going Under was published in the West decades before it came out in Russia. The Chekhov Publishing Corporation released the book in Russian in the US in 1972 and an English translation by Peter M. Weston came out from Barrie &Jenkins the same year.

Reviewing the book for The New Statesman, Germaine Greer wrote, “Chukovskaya’s calm prose shakes the heart with grief and outrage for one of the greater man-made calamities of our time.” It was, she concluded, “a very important book indeed.” Valentin Terra argued that Going Under was “artistically neater, tighter, and more subtle” than Sofia Petrovna.

Anatole Broyard, the New York Times’ reviewer, however, savaged the book. He snarked that Solzhenitsyn’s enthusiastic blurb for the cover of the US edition “evades literary evaluation, either by accident or design.” Going Under, he wrote, was “dull, stodgy, amateurish and almost wholly bereft of ideas.” He was so sure of himself that he even ventured to say, “while I have not read The Deserted House I am convinced, in my heart, that it cannot have been a good book.”

Fortunately, the “history of literature” that Chukovskaya believed in has proved a better judge than Broyard. Although the book has never been reissued in English, it’s been translated into numerous languages. The book’s page on GoodReads includes positive reviews from readers in Germany, Spain, Finland, Latvia, and Armenia.

Lydia Chukovskaya died in February 1996. She was 89 and had lived to see the fall of the Soviet Union. Her body was buried in the cemetery at the writer’s colony of Peredelkino, not far from the grave of Boris Pasternak.

Going Under, by Lydia Chukovskaya, translated by Peter M. Weston
London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1972

The Story of a Life, Volume 5: Southern Adventure, by Konstantin Paustovsky (1969)

Cover of Harvill Press edition of Southern Adventure by Konstantin Paustovsky

“I lost touch with Russia for almost two years,” Konstantin Paustovsky writes in the introduction to this, the fifth volume of his autobiography. “But I do not regret it,” he continues, and neither will the reader. Southern Adventure is easily the most exotic, the most magical chapter in Paustovsky’s life.

After a trip along the Russian coast of the Black Sea aboard the freighter Pestel (which concludes the previous volume, Years of Hope, Paustovsky awakened one morning “feeling on my face the warm palms of somebody’s hands. They smelt of mimosa.” The Pestel is anchored off Sukhum (now Sukhumi), the main port in what was then the Abkhazian Soviet Republic. The scents from the lush tropical vegetation on shore carried out to the ship …

A postcard of a garden in Sukhum.
A postcard of a garden in Sukhum.

… until they formed a tight ball and the air was compressed into a thick syrup; then they would untwine again into distinct and separate fibres and I would detect the breath of azalias, bay-trees, eucalyptus trees, oleanders, wisterias and many other flowers wonderful in appearance and colour.

The sensation stirs a childhood fantasy based in stories of the Arabian nights and jungle explorers and Paustovsky resolves to go ashore — not just to go, but to stay. As he quickly learns — in an experience repeated throughout this book — the nascent bureaucracy of this young Soviet republic is ruthless and absolute: there is no official way for him to leave the ship except under close supervision and for a matter of just an hour or two. On the other hand, the harshness of Soviet rules are also softened by the indolence and lackadaisical attitude of most officials in the Caucasus: “The old and the new were jumbled up together in the way things get jumbled up in a basket after a sharp jolt.” Soon, he is walking along the boulevards of Sukhum.

In Sukhum, as with the other ports along the now-Georgian Black Sea coast that Paustovsky visits in the course of the book, “It was difficult to grasp what century we were living in.” While Soviet-organized collectives, workers councils, and goverment functions attempted to institute a new regime, blood feuds still broke out between families and tribes, disputes were more often settled by elders than by courts, and bamboo shoots still sprung up overnight in even the busiest streets in town.

Despite having no money and no job, Paustovsky lucks into a conversation with an official of the Cooperative Union of Abkhazia in Sukhum — the Absouyz — who hires him as a secretary. “I was hellishly lucky in Sukhum,” he writes, and indeed his luck throughout his two years in the Caucasus is one of the magical elements of this volume.

Lake Amtkheli inthe Abkhazia region of Georgia.
Lake Amtkheli in the Abkhazian region of Georgia.

But the most magical element by far is Paustovsky’s evocation of the other worldly beauty of the Caucasian landscape, where coastal strips of palm trees and tropical flowers suddenly transformed into steep Alpine mountains. Early in the book, he and an odd assortment of temporary residents of Sukhum make an expedition to Lake Amkeli, formed by an earthquake just a couple of decades before. The lake seems to Paustovsky something out of a fairy tale book:

The crystal clarity of reflections in the water was so perfect that it was impossible to distinguish the reflection of the shores and mountains from the real shores and mountains.

It was as if there were two Caucasuses around us. One of them rose up to the sky above, and the other went down into the shining abyss beneath our feet. Identical feathery clouds slowly moved in the sky and along the bottom of the abyss.

Every time I threw my line and sinker into the lake I shattered the ideal fusion of this world.

Soon, however, he grows restless and talks his way onto a ship heading further south, to the port of Batum. Here, to the fragrances of Sukhum are added the cacophony of a city closer in spirit to the Middle East than to Russia:

Postcard of the Turkish bazaar in Batum.
Postcard of the Turkish bazaar in Batum.

… in Batum, particularly in the Turkish bazaar, known as Nuri, you were deafened with a whole kaleidoscope of sounds — from the bleating of sheep to the desperate cries of maize sellers: ‘Hot maize!’; from the plaintive moans of a muezzin on the top of a near-by mosque to the squeaking of pipes out of the windows of dukhans and the tearful singing of their tipsy patrons.

As in Odessa, Paustovsky manages to convince the local seamen’s union to underwrite a newspaper and appoint him as its editor. The pay is low, but then so is the cost of living in Batum, particularly when he takes a room in the town’s “coastal shelter,” a refuge for sailors stranded in the port from getting drunk or spending a night in jail for fighting. The coastal shelter, he writes, was “a cross between a doss house, a pub, a police cell for drunks and a brothel.”

One of the men he encounters there is Batum’s lighthouse keeper, Stavraki. Something about the man sets Paustovsky’s senses on edge, and eventually he discovers that this is the notorious former Imperial Russian Naval officer responsible for shooting Lt. Pyotr Schmidt, the leader of the Black Sea fleet uprising of 1905 later made famous in Eisenstein’s movie Potemkin. Normally one to accept his fellow man with understanding, Paustovsky finds it impossible not to revile Stavraki:

That life of his was just a series ofacts of blackest treachery. And these acts of treachery developed out of petty bits of nonsense: out of a desire to wear just one more pip on his shoulder straps and cut a dash in women’s eyes, out of servile fear of all authority

A few months later, Stavraki was arrested by the Cheka, taken to Sevastopol, tried for his anti-revolutionary crimes, and sentenced to the same fate to which he’d sent Lt. Schmidt: death by firing squad.

Konstantin Paustovsky and his second wife, Valeria Navashina, in the late 1930s.
Konstantin Paustovsky and his second wife, Valeria Navashina, in the late 1930s.

After two years enjoying the warmth of the southern Black Sea coast, Paustovsky begins to long to see ice and snow again. He heads into the interior, to the Georgian capital of Tblisi. There, he meets again with Frayerman, a “martyr to the pen,” an inveterate journalist who’d managed to work his way around the rim of the Black Sea, writing for or, when necessary, founding newspapers. In Tbilisi, they start a paper for the railway workers, The Little Train Whistle, and enjoy riding the narrow lines that wind up into the mountains of Georgia.

It’s not a bad life for the time and place, but soon Paustovsky begins to brood about his mother and sister, abandoned long ago in Kiev. Why is he idling away his time in a foreign place when he could be helping them? “I wanted to groan at the painfully obvious, perfectly clear thought which had never before entered my head, groan at the realization of my absolute, unfeigned, genuine and, therefore, hideous loneliness, the realization that nobody needed me here.”

And with this, Paustovsky climbs aboard a train to start the long and tortuous journey back to his native Kiev, bringing his Southern Adventure to a close. Though his idyll in the Caucasus is, by his own admission, a hiatus in his life’s drama, one could not ask for a better way to stir one’s imagination and make one long for a similar time in some exotic locale. It’s a beautiful and memorable excusion.

Note: Vintage Classics recently announced the release of a new translation of The Story of a Life by Guggenheim fellow Douglas Smith, due for publication in June 2022. This edition will not, however, include the last three books, so if you’d like to read the full story, you’ll still need to hunt down the Harvill Press translations of Volumes 4, 5, and 6.

The Story of a Life, Volume 5: Southern Adventure, by Konstantin Paustovsky, translated by Kyril FitzLyon
London: Harvill Press, 1969

THE Ride to Khiva, by F. C. Burnand (1877)

Cover of THE Ride to Khiva, by F. C. Burnand

For a place deep in the heart of Central Asia, Khiva got a lot of traffic from English visitors in the 19th Century. In 1875, Captain Frederick Burnaby braved crossing the lines of a Russo-Turcoman to journey to the city, returning in triumph to tell the story in his best-seller, A Ride to Khiva. In 1899, Robert L. Jefferson, author of Roughing It in Siberia, repeated the feat (“as a sportsman”) and wrote about it in his imaginatively titled A New Ride to Khiva.

Between them, however, came the most daring traveler of all, F. C. Burnand (later Sir Francis), then editor of Punch. As he explained in his definitively titled THE Ride to Khiva, unlike Burnaby, he proposed to travel both to and from Khiva. And to travel not with Burnaby’s spartan 85-pound backpack but with saddlebags loaded with provisions and cooking utensils, a semi-grand piano fitted up with a comfortable bedroom, a store of American beef, and a cellaret full of beer and champagne (Pommery and Greno très sec). And finally, to stay in constant contact with his editors back in London, his own private wire (which at various times in the book is a telegraph, a means of escape, and former soldier named Wire).

Of course, all this kit costs a fortune. Luckily, Burnand manages to assemble a list of subscribers from those interested in his going — those interested in his not coming back.

The list of subscribers to Burnand's expedition to Khiva
The list of subscribers to Burnand’s expedition to Khiva.

“A. S. S.” on the list is, no doubt, Burnand’s poke at one of his perennial antagonists, the novelist Albert Smith, author of The Adventures of Mr. Ledbury and his friend Jack Johnson (1866), of whom the playright Douglas Jerrold once said, “When he signs his initials he only tells two-thirds of the truth.”

Scaring off the wolves with a portrait of Gladstone
Scaring off the wolves (in sheep’s clothing) with a portrait of Gladstone.

Traveling through the backlands of Russia brings its fair share of hazards. Burnand is chased by wolves, attacked by Tartars, thrown in jail more than once. He even spends a night in a pig stye — but comes away with a piglet who proves an invaluable ally. He teaches the Pig alphabet as well as to play numerous card games … perhaps too well:

This evening played two games of Double Dummy with the Pig. He won the last rubber. If he repeats this, I shall watch his play closely. The Sleigh-driver backed the Pig. I begin to suspect collusion.

Though the Pig goes on to rescue Burnand from several near-death experiences, the air of suspicion is never entirely lifted. “There is a twinkle in his eye that I don’t half like,” Burnand confides to his journal. Still, the Pig compares favorably to the mouse he befriends while on one of his stays in Russian jails: “An apt pupil, but possessing neither the solidity nor the gravity of the Pig.”

Despite bragging early on that he’d found a more direct route to Khiva than Burnaby followed, Burnand’s journal suggests otherwise. He reports crossing the river Oxus on page 26, but over the course of the following weeks, manages to cross it at least 20 times more. At least he thinks it’s the Oxus. “I suppose,” he confesses, “judging by the position of the stars, as I’ve lost my maps.” He accidentally wanders into Persia at one point, forcing him to backtrack for hundreds of miles.

Burnand's map of his ride to Khiva
Burnand’s map of his ride to Khiva.

As the map he provides in the book clearly shows, Burnand’s ride to Khiva ultimately involved more digress than progress. If, that is, he ever actually made the trip. The editors close the account with a suspicious note that Burnand reported that, “Khiva is a very charming place, and, from his description, not totally unlike Margate.” Burnand was a long-time resident of Ramsgate and perhaps Margate seemed journey enough for the busy editor.

THE Ride to Khiva originally appeared as a serial in Punch. There appear to be just three used copies available for sale, but fortunately you can find it in electronic formats for free on the Internet Archive.

The Ride to Khiva, by F. C. Burnand
London: Bradbury, Agnew & Co., 1877

Quiet Street, by Michael Ossorgin [Mikhail Osorgin] (1930)

Cover of first US edition of "Quiet Street"
I’ve been saving Mikhail Osorgin’s novel, Quiet Street, for a quiet break. There is something about a good, thick Russian book — things like Anna Karenina, Life and Fate, or Konstantin Paustovsky’s autobiography — that demand you set aside distractions and carve out hours to let it take over your life, and I could tell that Quiet Street was one of these. Full of characters, full of emotions, full of life, abuzz with bullets as well as bees.

Quiet Street is the story of the Russian Revolution as told through the flotsam that was swept up in its currents. No one in this book is in charge. Even the opportunistic ex-soldier who works his way up to a position of influence with the Bolsheviks ultimately finds himself merely a tool, valued only for his skill and efficiency in shooting the victims sent to him in the basement of the Lubyanka by those signing the letters.

We all know this story. Anyone who is good, innocent, or just plain unlucky will end up dead, broken, scarred, in prison, or exiled. Such knowledge is enough to put some readers off even reading a Russian book. Titles like Life and Fate appear to promise great, grey monoliths of suffering, appealing only to masochists. I confess to feeling some dread at picking up Quiet Street, but only because I knew it would involve getting to know and care about characters and then watch them suffer and be abused.

Like Stolnikov, the handsome young university student who rushes to enlist in the first patriotic frenzy after the outbreak of war in 1914. A good officer, considerate of his men, he steps out of a dugout and is blasted by a stray artillery shell that strikes his trench. His arms and limbs are amputated at a field station, he is evacuated to a Moscow hospital where he soon becomes universally referred to as “The Trunk.” The staff trains him to carry out a few trivial tasks with the aid of a stick held in his mouth. “The doctors said: ‘A miracle. Just look at him. There’s nature for you!'”

For Osorgin, though, nature is a force more powerful and elusive than any man-made constructs encountered in this book. The comings and goings of the swallows, the nightly journeys of the mice living under the floorboards of the house on Sivtsev Vrazhek in Moscow that provides the epicenter of Quiet Street are just as important as those of any of its human inhabitants. “It’s possible that the world of humans, with all its happenings and all its personal joys and sorrows, is overestimated, and that it all leads to very little in reality,” Stolnikov cautions a young woman who visits him.

Man’s small place in the world is a central theme in Quiet Street. As the Bolsheviks spar with the White Russians and others, Osorgin recognizes the real victor: “In the summer of 1919 Moscow was conquered by rats.” The rats harbor lice, and the lice introduces typhus, and soon characters are being comandeered into burial brigades at mass graves outside Moscow. The owner of the house in Sivtsev Vrazhek, an ornithologist, gives the swallows and other small birds he studies a greater place in his scheme of things:

“It is all the same to the swallows what people are quarreling about, who is fighting against whom and who comes out on top. One to-day, another to-morrow, and so all over again…. Now the swallows have laws of their own,a nd their laws are eternal. And these laws are of much greater importance than any of our making. We still know very little about them; so much yet remains to be discovered.”

Of all nature’s forces, none is greater than death. Osorgin’s death is not blind but subtle in its logic, capable of patience and restraint when required. As the ornithologist’s wife lays in her deathbed,

Death stood at the bedside and listened to the old lady’s moan, then withdrew to a corner. It had been keeping watch for over a month at the bedside of Tanyusha’s grandmother, shielding her from all the attractions of life and preparing her for admission into the void. When the night nurse fell asleep Death would hand the old lady her drink, cover her up with the blanket and wink at her fondly. And, not recognizing Death, the old lady would say to it in her weak little voice, “Thank you, dear one; thank you so much!”

And when the old lady went to sleep Death would yield to an impulse to play impish tricks: fling off the blanket, pinch the old lady in her side and stop up her mouth with the palm of its bony hand to impeded her breathing. And it would laugh quietly, chuckling and displaying its black teeth.

Death is everywhere in the book, in the form of old age, war, revolution, famine, disease, and the arbitrary exercise of power. Yet some of Osorgin’s characters manage to maintain a remarkable obliviousness to its presence:

It needed the deeply ingrained mentality of the civilian and the profound ignorance of the research student to enable Vassya to go on standing there quite calmly, without even noticing the bullets whizzing past. Nobody stopped him; and it did not enter his head that he was being shot at from the whole length of the street.

The one fate Osorgin spared his characters was exile. That he saved for himself. The gist of his story can be found in Lesley Chamberlain’s book, Lenin’s Private War: The Voyage of the Philosophy Steamer and the Exile of the Intelligentsia. Cosmopolitan (he worked as a correspondent in Italy for years), progressive (he converted to Judaism when he married his second wife, Rachel, daughter of the Zionist Ahad Ha’am, more interested in art and nature than politics, Osorgin was just the sort of minor member of the intelligentsia Lenin found most irritating.

Ignored in the chaos following the October Revolution, Osorgin then found refuge in running a cooperative used bookstore with Nikolai Berdyaev and like-minded intellectuals. The bookstore provided both practical and moral support to its community, offering much-needed cash for their books and a refuge of rationality in the midst of the madness swirling outside. The ornithologist takes advantages of such a bookstore to get money for food and wood in the winter of 1920. Soon, however, Lenin found time to return to his favorite irritants. Osorgin was arrested and found himself in the same Lubyanka basement his characters refer to as “The Ship of Death.” He was exiled rather than shot, ending up in Kazan before being returned to Moscow for medical reasons. Within weeks of his return, his name appeared on a list of 160-some intellectuals that was presented for Lenin’s approval, and loaded on a steamer headed for Germany and permanent exile. He and his wife eventually settled outside Paris, publishing two novels that were translated into English, Quiet Street and My Sister’s Story (1931), before his death in 1942.

Chamberlain writes that Quiet Street is undermined by Osorgin’s nostalgia for pre-Revolutionary Russia, but I think this is a misreading. I doubt that Osorgin considered any particular regime superior to another. For him, all man’s constructions were like the house on Sivtsev Vrashek, more vulnerable to destruction by rust, worms, mold, and weather than by war or conspiracy. Osorgin was greatly influenced by the writings of the Stoics, particularly the Meditations , and it’s hard to believe that in writing Quiet Street he didn’t keep in mind Marcus Aurelius’s injunction: “Soon you will have forgotten the world, and soon the world will have forgotten you.”

Quiet Street, by Michael Ossorgin [Mikhail Osorgin]
New York: The Dial Press, 1930

The People Immortal, by Vasily Grossman

One of my earliest posts on this site was devoted to Vasily Grossman’s epic of the Russian experience in World War Two, Life and Fate. At the time, it was out of print in English translation and had been for over a decade.

Since then, Life and Fate has been reissued as a New York Review Books Classic and Grossman’s work has found a substantial audience. His wartime reporting has been collected as A Writer at War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army, 1941-1945, and about a year ago, his last work, An Armenian Sketchbook, previously unavailable in English, was translated by Robert Chandler and released as another NYRB Classic.

A year or so before I started this site, I came across a copy of Grossman’s first book published in English: The People Immortal in a Charing Cross bookstore that’s since become a pseudo-French bakery. It was in the bargain shelf, priced at one pound.

Out of curiosity last week, I decided to see what it was going for, given Grossman’s recent fame, and found a grand total of one copy for sale, priced at over 100 pounds. Which motivated me to dig it out and give it a read. Now, if by the end of this post you decide you can’t live without a copy, my recommendation is to opt for the U.S. edition, which was published by Julian Messner in 1945 under the title of No Beautiful Nights (there are three copies currently available).

In the English translation, credited to Elizabeth Donnelly in the U.S. edition, The People Immortal appears to be an abridgement of the Russian original, with a shorter text and four fewer chapters. How much has been lost, I cannot tell for certain, but given that Grossman shifts between characters and scenes, much as he did on a much grander scale in Life and Fate, it would have been easy to drop a chapter here and there without affecting the principal narrative.

The People Immortal takes place over the space of about ten days in August 1941, and follows a number of Russian soldiers and civilians as they retreat in the face of the German invasion. When first published in 1942, the book was something of a best-seller and was widely acclaimed. Grossman was nominated for the Stalin Prize for literature that year, but Stalin vetoed the selection and gave the prize to Ilya Ehrenburg instead. At the time, it must have been quite effective as propaganda, as Grossman displays throughout the book a profound confidence in the superiority of the Russian character, which he sees as more significant in the long run than the Germans’ military advantage.

As a work of fiction viewed from a distance of seven decades, it’s an uncomfortable mix of fine descriptive writing and simple Russian boosterism. I say boosterism simply because Grossman’s book lacks the fire and brimstone of the most strident Soviet propaganda. The Germans are referred to as “Germans,” for example, when a hardcore Soviet writer would call them “Hitlerites.” That’s not to say that he doesn’t engage in an occasional bout of character assassination: “German creative thought has been rendered sterile in all fields–the Fascists are powerless to create, to write books, music, verse,” remarks his chief protagonist, Commissar Bogarev, at one point.

Grossman’s approach to propaganda is less to denigrate the Germans than to highlight the most positive aspects of the Russian character. Thus, we get the stoic and indomitable leader (Bogarev), the salt-of-earth Russian mother, the happy-go-lucky soldier who breaks into song to rally his comrades when the going gets rough. Indeed, much of this will be familiar to anyone who’s ever seen the Hollywood equivalent from World War Two:

Casualties among the men were heavy. Red Army man Ryabokon fought to his last round of ammunition; Political Instructor Yeretic, after downing scores of the enemy, blew himself up just before he died; Red Army man Glushkov, surrounded by the Germans, went on firing till his last breath; machine-gunners Glagoyev and Kardakhin, faint with loss of blood, fought as long as their weakening fingers could press the trigger, as long as their dimming eyes could see the target through the sultry haze of battle.

On the other hand, The People Immortal is redeemed somewhat by Grossman’s frequent use of nature as a means to set the war in perspective. Even greater than the strength of the Russian people is the resilience of the Russian land. As one soldier lies in a field, waiting for the command to rise and attach a German outpost, he notices the life going on around him:

Running across the dry ground is a crack like a fine streak of lightning. The column of ants winds along a bridge in strict order, one after the other, while those of the other side of the crack patiently wait their turn. A lady-bird–a plump little old woman in a bright red dress–is hurrying along, looking for the crossing. A gust of wind, and the grasses sway and bow, each in its own way, some humbly and quickly prostrating themselves to earth, others stubbornly, angrily, quivering, their ears spread out–food for sparrows.

It may also be that The People Immortal is redeemed by its brevity. Grossman puts his cast into a quandary–being trapped behind German lines, rescues them with a bout of ingenuity and heroism, and brings the story to a quick end. Another hundred pages and it might have become, as someone once described his next novel, For a Just Cause, which has not been translated into English yet, “a Socialist Realist dog.”

In the end, though, like that book, The People Immortal is of interest today only as an early and largely unsuccessful prototype of Life and Fate. Only a Grossman completist should consider hunting down a copy.

The People Immortal, by Vassili [Vasily] Grossman, translated by Elizabeth Donnelly
London/New York/Melbourne: Hutchinson & Co. Ltd., 1943

The Red Monarch, by Yuri Krotkov

krotkov - red monarch pb

In his 2002 book, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, Martin Amis wrote, “it has always been possible to joke about the Soviet Union, just as it has never been possible to joke about Nazi Germany.” When Penguin released the paperback edition of Yuri Krotkov’s 1979 novel, The Red Monarch: Scenes from the Life of Stalin, the cover featured a pencil sketch of Stalin topped by a big red clown’s nose, clearly demonstrating that the Soviet dictator had already reached the point where he could be treated with ridicule.

Krotkov’s purpose in writing The Red Monarch was not comic, though the book is full of moments of gallows humor, schadenfreude and even a few authentic jokes. Born within days of the October Revolution, Krotkov grew up surrounded by the image and impact of Stalin. “I never met Stalin and I never talked to him,” he writes in his introduction, “But for thirty-five years I lived with this man, day and night, voluntarily and involuntarily, thinking about him and knowing that my destiny depended on him and his personal reasoning.”

In The Red Monarch, combines historical fact and personal imagination to create a series of set pieces, each depicting an incident involving someone confronting Stalin at the height of his powers. The first date from the middle of the Second World War; the last deal with his death and its aftermath.

The famines, the first waves of the Great Terror, the show trials and the worst days of the German invasion are all behind him at this stage. Everyone who deals with Stalin–including men like Beria and Vlasek, who control much of the terror system and know the worst that it has carried out–come into his presence a bit like a lowly feeder into the cage of a great lion with violent instincts and hair-trigger reactions.

Krotkov does a marvelous job of conveying the ambient sense of terror that could turn a conversation about something as mundane as a pair of slippers into a veiled threat of being sent off to a firing squad or the gulag:

“And what is that on your feet, Comrade Shaposhnikov?”
“Night shoes … my wife brought them from Leningrad … as a gift.”
“Ah, that’s what they are … slippers.”
“No, Josif Vissarionovich, they are not slippers,” Shaposhnikov corrected Stalin, “they are night shoes. Slippers usually have no backs, but these …”
“No, Comrade Shaposhnikov, they are slippers, slippers.” Stalin repeated stubbornly, “and do not argue with me.”
“So they are slippers …”
“If I say they are slippers, Comrade Shaposhnikov, that means they are slippers. Right?”

But it is not enough to prove that night shoes can only be slippers. Stalin must draw out the most insidious intent from them:

“When she gave me these night shoes …”
“Slippers, slippers!”
“… she said, ‘Wear these in good health, so you will be comfortable when you are on guard, and so there will be no unnecessary noise when you walk up to Comrade Stalin at night to cover him or fix his pillow.”
“Thank your wife, Comrade Shaposhnikov, for her double consideration, for you and for me. How was it that Seraphima put it: ‘So that there will be no unnecessary noise when you walk up to him at night….’ Interesting. What had your wife in mind, Comrade Shaposhnikov?”
“Felt absorbs noise. That is, in these … slippers, it is possible to come up to a person and he will not hear you.”
“Will not?”
Stalin’s mustache twitched slightly and his right eye suddenly squinted. But Shaposhnikov did not notice this.
“You said, Comrade Shaposhnikov, that it is possible to come up to a person so that he will not even suspect it. Is that not so?”
“That is so,” Shaposhnikov answered.
“In other words, in these slippers it’s possible, in your view, to come up to a person from behind and kill him during his sleep. And, in your view, it’s quite easy to do. Right?”

Krotkov’s Stalin is almost feline in his pleasure in toying with his victims as they lay before him, paralyzed with terror. In a number of the episodes, he lets the victim go, confident that he can repeat the torture at a moment’s notice.

Krotkov, a writer with KGB links who defected to the West while in the UK on a tour in 1963, grew up in Georgia and had many Georgian friends, including the actor Mikhail Gelovani, who played Stalin in numerous films such as The Fall of Berlin. This gave him an advantage in depicting Stalin, and the book includes several pieces focusing on Stalin’s relationships with Georgian colleagues and friends–which were even more complicated than those with Russians. Even Gelovani features in a chapter titled, “The Two Stalins,” in which Stalin repeatedly teases the actor: should he be praised for the accuracy of his portrayal? Or attacked for caricaturing Stalin?

I’ve read a fair number of books about Stalin and the Soviet era, such as Orlando Figes’ Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, but The Red Monarch impresses me as the most succinct summation of the bizarre web of intrigue and fear that Stalin was able to create around him. It’s sharp as a razor, and like a razor, not to be picked up without due care and respect. I recommend it, as well as The Nobel Prize, Krotkov’s similar mediation of the experiences of Boris Pasternak following the international acclaim of Doctor Zhivago.

The Red Monarch: Scenes from the Life of Stalin, by Yuri Krotkov
New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979

Happy Moscow, by Andrey Platonov

Excerpt

A dark man with a burning torch was running down the street on a bleak night in late autumn. The little girl saw him through a window of her home as she woke from a bleak dream. Then she heard a powerful shot from a rifle and a poor, sad cry–the man running with the torch had probably been killed. Soon afterwards came the sound of distant, repeated shots and of uproar from the nearby prison. The little girl went back to sleep and everything she saw during the following days got forgotten: she was too small, and the memory and mind of early childhood became overgrown for ever in her body by subsequent life. But until her last years the nameless running man would appear unexpectedly and sadly inside her–in the pale light of memory–and perish once again in the dark of the past, in the heart of a grown-up child. Amid hunger or sleep at a moment of love or some youthful joy–suddenly, the sad cry of the dead man was there again in the distance, deep in her body, and the young woman would immediately change her life: if she was dancing, she would stop dancing; if she was working, she would work more surely, with more concentration; if she was alone, she would cover her face with her hands. On that rainy night in late autumn the October Revolution had begun–in the city where Moscow Ivanovna Chestnova was living.

Editor’s Comments

Cover of Harvill Press edition of 'Happy Moscow'When I read the above opening passage of Happy Moscow, standing in an Oxford bookstore, I knew I had to buy the book and immediately go find a quiet place to sit and read it through to the end. Although quite different in subject and mood, Happy Moscow reminded me of Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things: a dream-like book, where the characters are drawn along by some kind of irresistible force, taking actions that would seem irrational out of this context but that we and they go along with, caught up as if in a trance.

Happy Moscow is an unfinished novel first published in Russian in 1991. From what I could tell, “unfinished” in this case means “without finishing touches” rather than “without an ending.” The title refers to the woman, Moscow Chestnova, so named when tragedy leaves her orphaned and nearly amnesic, but it also refers ironically to the city, in which much of the novel takes place. I gather that this double entendre is typical of Platonov, and one of the reasons that some Russians believe his writing to be untranslatable. That should not be taken, though, to suggest that Platonov’s prose is at all difficult. On the contrary, as you can see from the excerpt above, this is simple, limpid prose–at least on the surface.

There is no real plot to speak of–just as in a dream. Moscow becomes a Soviet heroine as a daring experimental parachutist, but after an injury, turns her back on the state and spends the rest of the book wandering through a series of relationships with people who have also decided to become outcasts and marginal characters. Stalin is said to have written “Scum” in the margins of one of Platonov’s works, and you can see how the writer’s subtle rejection of Soviet idealism must have irritated him. In Happy Moscow, Platonov celebrates not the new and clean and heroic, but the second-hand and cast-off:

And there were people trading things which had lost all reason for their existence–house-coats that had belonged to enormous women, priest’s cassocks, ornamented basins for baptising children, the frock-coats of deceased gentlemen, charms on waistcoat chains, and so on–but which still circulated among people as symbols of a strict evaluation of quality. There were also many items of clothing worn by people who had died recently–there truly was such a thing as death–as well as clothes that had been got ready for children who had been conceived but whose mothers must have changed their minds about giving birth and had abortions instead, and now they were selling the tiny wept-over garments of an unborn child together with a rattle they had bought in advance.

I dog-eared the page on which this passage appears when I first read the book, but now that I type it out I can see how many chinks Platonov points out in the fine facade of the Soviet state in just two sentences: the remnants from the Tsarist days that still circulate “as symbols of a strict evaluation of quality”; the notion of women changing their minds about giving birth–bringing a child into the bright future of Stalinism–and having abortions instead; that fact that even in this best of all possible worlds “there truly was such a thing as death”. It seems hard to believe that publication of Happy Moscow wouldn’t have earned Platonov and his editors a trip to the gulag.

A reviewer once wrote that, “”In Platonov’s prose, it is impossible to find a single inelegant sentence”, and another that, “Rarely does literature come this close to music.” Happy Moscow is rich with examples of such writing. Yet he also embraces the crude, the dirty, the obscene. One character, a surgeon, gets wrapped up in a search for the place in the body where the soul resides and becomes convinced that it lies in the intestines. Grabbing a handful of the excrement from a corpse, he exclaims, “This really is the very best, ordinary soul. There’s no other soul anywhere.”

Platonov’s star is finally on the rise, some fifty-plus years after his death. Harvill, which published Happy Moscow, also has two other Platonov works–Soul and Return–in print. Northwestern University Press released Mirra Ginsburg’s translation of The Foundation Pit in its European Classics series, and New York Review Books has released its own volumes of Soul and The Fierce and Beautiful World. NYRB has also announced the release of a new translation of The Foundation Pit in April 2009.

Find a copy

Happy Moscow, by Andrey Platonov, translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler with Angela Livingstone, Nadya Bourova, and Eric Naiman
London: The Harvill Press, 1999

The Time of the Assassins, by Godfrey Blunden

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'The Time of the Assassins'I first read Godfrey Blunden’s The Time of the Assassins back in the late 1970s, after coming across a copy of the Bantam Modern Classics paperback reissue. The tag line on the cover read, “The nightmare novel of the terrorist war between the NKVD and the Nazi SS.” I was intrigued to find this unfamiliar author and title, and this subject, packaged as a “modern classic”, along with such established titles as All the King’s Men, Darkness at Noon, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Anthony West reviewed the book for the New Yorker when it was first published in 1952, and I will quote him at length to tell what the book’s about:

Godfrey Blunden is a newspaperman, and his novel about the Nazi occupation of the Russian city of Kharkov, The Time of the Assassins, is more a matter of reporting than of invention. But while it has no great aesthetic appeal and cannot be given much credit for literary grace, it makes its points in a blunt way and tells its horrid and fascinating story effectively. Mr. Blunden was in Russia during the war, and he was one of the correspondents who entered Kharkov soon after it was first retaken from the Germans. From the things he saw and heard among the ruins, and the things he learned later, he has constructed a convincing account of what happened in the town. In a sense it is stale news and of very little interest; Kharkov was lost to the Germans as they pressed eastward across the steppes toward Stalingrad, recovered after a year or so, lost again in a week, and finally retaken and held. A story of the events, and of the atrocities, during this swaying to and fro would be sad but boring because it is the story of too many towns and one already knows it too well. But Mr. Blunden is not reporting at that level; he is concerned with states of feeling and with what the time meant to people whose lives were altogether changed by the events that poured over them.

Kharkhov (Kharkhiv) under German occupation, 1942
… The Germans took Kharkov is a rush, so unexpectedly and so rapidly that all public records fell into their hands. Among them were lists of members of the Communist Party. While the city was still welcoming the Germans as liberators who had brought an end to the years of terror and purges that had begun in the early thirties, the Gestapo began hanging their way through the lists. Within a few days there was not a street, square, or public building in Kharkov that was not decorated with the supreme emblems of cruelty — hanged men and women….

The long-drawn-out process of disillusion began as the Ukrainian welcome to the foreign liberators was choked into stunned silence. At first the S.S. confined themselves to wiping out the Communists, and since the Party itself had ruled by terror, the German butchery seemed like the first step to setting up a rational state. But then came the massacres of prisoners of war, and then the massacres of the Jews, and then massacres of Slavs to make room for German colonists…. The unbelievable had happened; the liberators had brought with them a way of life worse than anything a sane man could imagine. The only hope was the return of the men who had made government an affair of secret denunciations, terror, and cold remoteness. It is human nature to reject despair. Mr. Blunden’s teacher and her friends believed that what they were going through might mean an end to government by terror — that it was impossible to live through it without learning how important kindness and gentleness and the humanitarian values were. When the Germans were driven out, something better would come.

But kindness and gentleness proved to be disloyalty to the only force that could drive the Germans out…. The Party came back, hardened, more tenacious, more uncompromising than ever, and among the first people it killed was the teacher.

The closing passage of The Time of the Assassins vividly depicts this grim denouement. After years of Soviet-managed famines and Stalinist purges, after battle, conquest, and a year of ruthless German occupation and exterminations, the few surviving innocents are smashed before they even have the chance to catch their breath:

In these cold battlefields and devastated cities there are no grotesqueries. The dead lie as in sleep, quietly no-sleeping, may lie there for as long as there is frost, the snow sweeping over them like a soft lace shroud, the flesh waxed and pink as with health. Nor does high explosive make that much difference or, as with this old woman, the rifle butt. Lying there on the floor her face broken, she is yet human, real, still clutching the old string bag with which, evidently, she attempted to fight her aggressors. And the children about her skirts! The children in the corners of the room! In the other rooms! Difficult even to see where they had been shot, lying there in sleeping attitudes, little bundles of ice-starched clothes, bullet-tinctured somewhere, frozen, perfect small angular faces, thin drumstick legs. There in the old schoolhouse, in the ruin of broken-in windows, torn-up floor, over-turned stove, in the confusion of rags and refuse, they are not in themselves horrifying; when the life-ending is less pathetic than the life-in-living, death may seem even pretty and peaceful. This is what Maryusa is thinking as she walks through the streets, a pace ahead of her captor: there are no lives any longer, therefore no responsibility; all that for which she has fought so stubbornly is now disposed of. She is not thinking of punishment; there being none to punish the doer, that is, none above the human authority by which this action was condoned. In her mind there if only peacefulness. It is not bad that the children are dead. The struggle was carried on, but now it is ended. Already in the basement room of the NKVD she awaits her own prompt demise with the same expectancy.

… Later (we remember) there were some in Moscow who thought the liquidation of the Kharkiv [Blunden uses the Ukrainian name for the city] schoolteachers precipitate. But the matter was soon forgotten, for not much over a week later (it seems so long ago now as to be hardly worth mentioning), the Germans were back in Kharkiv.

Cover of Bantam Modern Classics edition of 'The Time of the Assassins'If history is a broom, sweeping back and forth through time, then The Time of the Assassins is history told from the dust’s perspective. The truly nightmarish aspect of the experience of the survivors of Kharkov is that the purpose of the Soviets’ purge after retaking the city was rendered moot in the space of a week or so. There was no safe situation: side with either the Soviets or the Germans and you risked being killed as the other’s enemy. Attempt to remain neutral and focus on surviving, and you risked being wiped out by either side’s blind adherence to its ideology. It would not be too hard to see some parallels between the Kharkov of The Time of the Assassins and Baghdad and other Iraqi cities today, where there is danger in taking sides with the Shiites or Sunnis or Americans and danger in not taking sides. One wonders if retaining hope in such a situation isn’t just as insane as the monomanias of the various factions.

Lionel Trilling wrote the introduction to the Bantam Modern Classics edition, and I will let him provide the critical assessment of The Time of the Assassins:

I have no knowledge of what literary model Godfrey Blunden had in mind for his remarkable novel, The Time of the Assassins. But if I had to guess by whom he had regulated his tone and attitude, I should think it was not a novelist at all. My own reference as I read Mr. Blunden’s book was to certain historians, to Thucydides and to Tacitus, and, in a lesser degree, to Josephus. Like them, Mr. Blunden tells a story to which the only possible response might seem to be despair. Like them he maintains the power and fortitude of his mind, and of ours, before the terrors of actuality.

This is, I believe, a very considerable achievement, possibly a great one. It is first to be thought of as a literary achievement. Nothing could be more difficult than to present human extremity without, on the one hand, falsifying or mitigating the facts, or, on the other hand, assailing and subduing our minds with the details of horror. It is also a moral achievement, of the intelligence put at the service of the emotions.

… Yet if what Mr. Blunden tells us is more terrible than what we read of in the old historians, still Thucydides’ account of the Melian massacre, or of the plague at Athens, or of the death of the Athenian army in the Sicilian quarry, or, again, Tacitus’ record of the tyranny, torture, and treachery of the Roman civil wars, or Josephus’ narrative of the war against the Jews, are the ancient analogue of what the modern world has experienced in more extravagant form. And in the attitude of the historians, in their determination to maintain the power and integrity of the mind before the decay of the very fabric of society and the human soul, we have the tradition in which Mr. Blunden has put himself.

… The narrowness of the circumstances in which Mr. Blunden’s characters must exist, the limitation of their power of choice, is, as I have suggested, a disadvantage to the novelistic imagination. It is a measure of Mr. Blunden’s quality, of his literary power, his intelligence, and his moral commitment, that he overcomes this disadvantage. He overcomes it by realizing the power of the historical imagination. Like Thucydides, he derives his information in part from personal observation — he was for many years a correspondent in Russia and in that capacity was with the Red Army at Stalingrad and when it made its first reinvestment of Kharkov — and in part from careful inquiry. His commitment is to fact and to essential truth, which he serves no less by his imagination than by his experience and research. There is no page of his work that does not compel our admiring interest.

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The Time of the Assassins, by Godfrey Blunden
Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1952
London: Jonathan Cape, 1953

The Story of a Life, Konstantin Paustovsky

Cover of A Story of a Life by Konstantin Paustovsky

· Excerpt
· Editor’s Comments
· Other Comments
· Locate a Copy

Excerpt


Lenin began to speak. I could not hear well. I was squeezed tight in the crown. Someone’s rifle butt was pressing into my side. The soldier standing right behind me laid his heavy hand on my shoulder and squeezed it from time to time, convulsively tightening his fingers….

He spoke slowly about the meaning of the Brest-Litovsk peace, about the treachery of the Left Social Revolutionaries, about the alliance of the workers with the peasants, and about bread, about how necessary it was to stop the endless meetings and noise in Moscow, waiting for no one knew what, and to start to work the land as quickly as possible and to trust the government and the party….

The heavy hand was now lying quietly on my shoulder, as if resting. I felt in its weight something like a friendly caress. This was the hand the solider would use to stroke the shaved heads of his children when he got back to his village.

I wanted to look at the soldier. I glanced around. It turned out to be a tall civil guardsman with a blond unshaven face, very broad and very pale, without a single wrinkle in it. He smiled at me in embarrassment, and said:

“The President!”

“What president?” I asked, not understanding.

“The President of the People’s Commissars, himself. He made promises about peace and the land. Did you hear him?”

“I heard.”

“Now, that’s something. My hands are itching for the land. And I’ve straggled clean away from my family.”

“Quiet, you!” another soldier said to us, a frail little man in a cap.

“All right, I’ll be quiet,” the civil guardsman whispered and he started quickly to unbutton his faded shirt.

“Wait, wait, I want to show you something,” he muttered as he fumbled inside his shirt until he pulled out, at last, a little linen bag turned black with sweat, and slipped a much-creased photography out of it. He blew on it, and handed it to me. A single electric lamp was flickering high up under the ceiling. I couldn’t see a thing.

Then he cupped his hands together, and lit a match. It burned down to his fingers, but he did not blow it out. I looked at the photograph simply in order not to offend the man. I was sure it would be the usual peasant family photograph, such as I had often seen next to the icon in peasant huts.

The mother always sat in front — a dry, wrinkled old woman with knotty fingers. Whatever she was like in life — gentle and uncomplaining or shrewish and foolish — the picture always showed her with a face of stone and with tight-pressed lips. In the flash of the camera’s lens she always became the inexorable mother, the embodiment of the stern necessity of carrying on the race. And around her there always sat and stood her wooden children and her bulging-eyed grandchildren.

You had to look at these pictures for a long time to see and to recognize in their strained figures the people whom you knew well — the old woman’s consumptive, silent son-in-law — the village shoemaker, his wife, a big-bosomed, shrewish woman in an embroidered blouse and with shoes with tops which flapped against the base calfs of her legs, a young fellow with a forelock and with that strange emptiness in the eyes which you find in hooligans, and another fellow, dark and laughing, in whom you eventually recognized the mechanic known throughout the whole region. And the grandchildren — frightened kids with the eyes of little martyrs. These were children who had never known a caress or an affectionate greeting. Or maybe the son-in-law who was the shoemaker sometimes took pity on them quietly and gave them his old boot lasts to play with.

Editor’s Comments


I first came across The Story of a Life in a garage sale. I thought the title rather pretentious, particularly when paired up with Paustovsky’s grim portrait on the cover. “Oh boy,” I thought: a great thick Russian book about how to live is to suffer. But then I noticed a quote by Isaac Bashevis Singer just beyond Paustovsky’s hands: “A work of astonishing beauty … a masterpiece.” I flipped it over and was moved to buy it by the following quote from Orville Prescott of the New York Time: “The Story of a Life is one of the most surprisingly wonderful books it has ever been my pleasure to read.”

Why had I never heard of this book if it was so terrific? After years of scouring the shelves of countless bookstores, I rarely ran into something truly new and unknown. I decided to make it the book I’d take on my next long airplane ride.

Unfortunately, when I’d found my seat, stowed my bag, and buckled my seat, I opened up my copy only to be confronted by: “The Death of My Father.” Less than ten pages into the book, and there I was standing beside Paustovsky at his father’s funeral: “The river went on roaring, the birds whistled a little, and the coffin, now smeared with dirt and clay, slowly settled down into the grave. At this time I was seventeen years old.”

Great. Only 650 pages of this to go.

I kept on reading through the chicken with gunk on it, but soon surrendered to the in-flight movie. The problem wasn’t that The Story of a Life was too grim, however. On the contrary. There is so much life in these pages that I knew I needed to find somewhere I could get away from all distractions and immerse myself in them. Luckily, we had a vacation in Sicily coming up. I’d rented a house out in the countryside, and each day for the week we spent there, I’d rise before the rest of the family, go out to the terrace, plop down in a lounge chair, and read for two or three hours straight, soaking up the sunshine and Paustovsky’s luminous prose.

Konstantin Paustovsky was born in Moscow in 1892. The earliest scene in The Story of a Life takes place in 1901, and the American edition, comprising three of six parts of the original Russian version, follows Paustovsky from then to his arrival in a besieged Odessa in 1920, in the midst of the Russian Civil War. He witnesses Tsar Nicholas and all the ceremony and obsequy that accompanied him. He joins an ambulance team and experiences the horrendous casualties and conditions of the Eastern Front; he finds himself in Moscow at the time of the October revolution; he hides out in Kiev as the Germans, the White Russians, the Ukrainians, the Poles, and the Bolsheviks in turn fight for ownership of the city. He sees a village die in the space of a few days from smallpox, survives starvation, abandonment, and the loss of much of his family. For the simple merit of providing a first-hand account of one of the most tumultuous times of the 20th century The Story of a Life would at least be a notable book.

The remarkable thing about how Paustovsky tells his story, however, is that with all the events that history would record around him, his attention is inevitably drawn from the great to the small. Lenin speaks to the restless soldiers, but Paustovsky turns away to focus on the guardsman next to him, to examine the photo and imagine the people it shows. The guardsman soon tells him of the beautiful woman sitting next to him in the photo, his bride-to-be, who later died giving birth to his child. He finds himself in a backwater provincial town when, late one night, the news arrives of the abdication of the Tsar, and he shows how the fops and eccentrics he’d met in the days before gather, first confused, then inspired, transformed, eager to act, not yet ground down by the brutal disappointments to come. And wherever he goes, whatever happens, he tells us about the color of the leaves, the smell of the grass, the warmth of the sun, the sharp cold of the water, and the people around him.

And such people they are. Hundreds come and go in the course of the book, but for each one Paustovsky manages to provide some brief yet memorable sketch:

… [A] frequent visitor to Uncle Kolya’s was Staff Captain Ivanov, a very clean man with white hands, a meticulously pointed light beard, and a delicate voice. In typical bachelor fashion, Ivanov became a member of the family at Uncle Kolya’s. It was hard for him to spend an evening without dropping in to sit and talk. He blushed each time he took off his overcoat and unbelted his sword in the vestibule, and said that he had dropped in for a word or to get Uncle Kolya’s advice on some matter. Then of course he would sit there until the middle of the night.

As he travels, he comes across vestiges of a very ancient Russia that would soon disappear. There are the “old men of Mogilev”, a fabled cult of ascetic beggars who gathered each year from the corners of Russia to speak to each other in a secret tongue and pass on the sacred prayers and ways of seeking alms. A group of them wander into the funeral of a peasant boy:

They were all dressed in identical brown robes with wooden staffs, shining with age, in their hands. Their gray heads were raised. The beggars were looking up at the altar where there was a picture of the God Jehovah in a gray beard. He looked amazingly like these beggars. He had the same, sunken, threatening eyes in the same dry, dark face.

Or the handful of elderly monks he finds in the forests of the Ukraine, disoriented and frightened in the new secular world of the revolution:

“We really don’t know any longer,” the monk told me, “whether we should ring it or not. It’s dangerous. It seems there is some insult in it for those who are in power now. So we just ring it gently. A crow sometimes sits of the bell and he doesn’t even fly away when we ring it so softly.”

There are lovely young girls he falls for with full youthful passion. He watches his first true love, Lelya, a nurse on his ambulance team, become infected with smallpox and die in a few days, along with a whole village the team has been ordered to isolate and quarantine until the last victim is dead.

Cover of UK edition of 'The Story of a Life'Paustovsky was a member of the Writer’s Union during years when it was probably impossible to work without cutting some bargain, committing some betrayal large or small, and ever so rarely we witness a tip of the hat to the prevailing dogma: “It was only in 1920 that I realized that there was no way other than the one chosen by my people. Then at once my heart felt easier.” Usually, these outbursts of Party faith are brief, awkward, and out of step with the rest of the story. The worst, a caricature of a kulak woman — fat, greedy, hoarding a great trunk of silver on a crowded train of refugees — is pure stereotype. It’s as if Paustovsky kept reminding himself to drop in a good Soviet screed every hundred pages or so, just to keep his insurance premiums paid.

The Story of a Life is, with Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches, perhaps the sunniest Russian book ever written. Paustovsky seems to have possessed an almost inexhaustible stock of optimism. Sitting in a lonely room on a dark winter’s night, nearly penniless, a teenager whose family has fallen apart and scattered far from him, he notes, “I began to notice that the more unattractive reality looked, the more strongly I could feel all the good that was hidden in it.”

Russian literature produced two of the world’s greatest autobiographies in the middle of the 20th century: Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope and Konstantin Paustovsky’s The Story of a Life. Hopehas been in print continuously since it was first published in English in 1970. The Story of a Life went out of print a few years after its first English publication in 1964, enjoyed a reissue in 1982 as part of a Vintage series of modern European classics, then vanished again.

The Story of a Life was published in six volumes in the Soviet Union. Five were published in the U.K. between 1964 and 1969 and the sixth, Restless Years, in 1974. In the U.S., the first three were collected in The Story of a Life, published in 1964, and the fourth as Years of Hope in 1968. The complete work cries out to be reissued.

Other Comments

· Jose Yglesias, Nation, 11 May 1964

Paustovsky is an old-fashioned writer by current American standards; he means to communicate and to do good; whether he is describing a landscape or discussing the revolution…. The Story of a Life seems to be the perfect book with which to make his acquaintance; in it he speaks directly and at length, an old man for whom youthful experiences have not lost their wonder, able now to speak truthfully and without vanity about hurtful, wonderful, and confusing days…. It’s a long, crowded treasure of a book and Joseph Barnes’ translation is particularly fine, for he maintains a single tone faultlessly throughout.

· Peter Viereck, Saturday Review, 16 May 1964

Paustovsky’s The Story of a Life is a literary masterpiece…. This is not the cracker-barrel blandness of some professional sage, as so often in America’s ghost-written memoirs, but a wisdom of tragic insight and of hard-earned integrity.

· Naomi Bliven, The New Yorker, January 2, 1965

The book is copious, as the urgencies of its author’s intentions require: an older man, a survivor, and a witness, he writes against time, to tell the young what the past was like, and to bring to life a host of human beings — cocky schoolboys, earnest schoolgirls, blind beggars — not because they were good or great but because they were. His work is nothing like an elegy, nor is it as routine as a backward glance at the good or bad old days. It is, rather, a series of sketches, stories, novellas, in which vanished people (including the author’s young self) are present again — as they once walked in a park, or smiled, or wept — and made anew in man’s most endurable medium, language.

· Thomas Merton, The Commonweal

The Story of a Life is one of the very finest autobiographies of our time. It has all the warmth and richness of the most authentic humanism … an unforgettable account of life in one of the most crucial periods and places in world history.

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The Story of a Life, by Konstantin Paustovsky, translated by Joseph Barnes
New York: Random House, 1964

Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman

Excerpt

David watched the door close: gently, smoothly, as though drawn by a magnet, the steel door drew closer to its steel frame. Finally they became one.

High up, behind a rectangular metal grating in the wall, David saw something stir. It looked like a grey rat, but he realized it was a fan beginning to turn. He sensed a faint, rather sweet smell.

The shuffling quietened down; all you could hear were occasional screams, groans and barely audible words. Speech was no longer of any use to people, nor was action; action is directed towards the future and there no longer was any future. When David moved his head and neck, it didn’t make Sofya Levinson want to turn and see what he was looking at.

Her eyes–which had read Homer, Izvestia, Huckleberry Finn and Mayne Reid, that had looked at good people and bad people, that had seen the geese in the green meadows of Kursk, the stars above the observatory at Pulkovo, the glitter of surgical steel, the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, tomatoes and turnips in the bins at market, the blue water of Issyk-Kul–her eyes were no longer of any use to her. If someone had blinded her, she would have felt no sense of loss.

She was still breathing, but breathing was hard work and she was running out of strength. The bells ringing in her head became deafening; she wanted to concentrate on one last thought, but was unable to articulate this thought. She stood there–mute, blind, her eyes still open.

The boy’s movements filled her with pity. Her feelings towards him were so simple that she no longer needed words and eyes. The half-dead boy was still breathing, but the air he took in only drove life away. He could see people settling onto the ground; he could see mouths that were toothless and mouths with white teeth and gold teeth; he could see a thing stream of blood flowing from a nostril. He could see eyes peering through the glass; Roze’s inquisitive eyes had momentarily met David’s. He still needed his voice–he would have asked Aunt Sonya about those wolf-like eyes. He still even needed thought. He had taken only a few steps in the world. He had seen the prints of children’s bare heels on hot, dusty earth, his mother lived in Moscow, the moon looked down and people’s eyes looked up at it from below, a teapot without its head, where there was milk in the morning and frogs he could get to dance by holding their front feet–this world still preoccupied him.

All this time David was being clasped by strong warm hands. He didn’t feel his eyes go dark, his heart become empty, his mind grow dull and blind. He had been killed; he longer existed.

Sofya Levinton felt the boy’s body subside in her hands. Once again she had falled behind him. In mine-shafts where the air becomes poisoned, it is always the little creatures, the bird and mice, that die first. This boy, with his slight, bird-like body, had left before her.

“I’ve become a mother,” she thought.

That was her last thought.

Her heart, though, still had life in it; it still beat, still ached, still felt pity for the dead and the living. Sofya Levinton felt a wave of nausea. She was hugging David to her life a doll. Now she too was dead, she too was a doll.

Comments

If War and Peace had never been written, it might have been easier for Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate to win an audience. To compare Life with War is so obvious and instinctive it’s almost an autonomic reflex. They’re both big, thick novels about Russia at war with enormous casts of characters, real and fictional.

The comparison does Life and Fate a disservice on two counts. First, any reader put off by the bulk or subject of War and Peace would hardly think twice of giving Life and Fate a try. And second, although Life is a superb novel, it is not quite on the level of what is arguably one of the pinnacles of the novel as an art form.

Still, the comparison is inescapable. Like War and Peace, Life and Fate is a tapestry, with numerous narrative threads, many of them dealing with members of an extended family: Alexandra Shaposhnikova, her three daughters–Lyudmila, Yevgenia, and Marusya–and her son Dmitry. There is Viktor Shtrum, Lyudmila’s second husband, is an ambitious physicist who encounters an early version the post-war campaign against Jewish intellecturals but is saved by Stalin’s deus ex machina intervention. Yevgenia struggles with the deprivations of home front life, falls in love with a maverick Army officer who leads a crucial tank assault at Stalingrad, and puts herself at risk by sending a parcel to her ex-husband, a commissar fallen from favor, in Lyubyanka Prison. Dmitry’s son Seryozha fights in the ruins of Stalingrad, part of a small group of soldiers isolated and holding out in house 6/1.

But the cast ranges far wider than just the Shaposhnikovs. Stalin, General Paulus, the German commander at Stalingrad, and Adolf Eichmann all make appearances. Robert Chandler’s excellent English translation provides a seven-page list of characters at the end of the book. The categories alone give an indication of the scope and diversity of Life and Fate:

  • The Shaposhnikov Family and Their Circle
  • Viktor’s colleagues
  • Viktor’s circle in Kazan
  • In the German concentration camp
  • In the Russian labour camp
  • On the journey to the gas chamber
  • In the Lubyanka prison
  • In Kuibyshev
  • At Stalingrad power station
  • Getmanov’s circle in Ufa
  • Members of a Fighter Squadron of the Russian Air Force
  • Novikov’s Tank corps
  • Officers of the Soviet Army in Stalingrad
  • Soldiers in House 6/1
  • In the Kalmyk Steppe
  • Officers of the German Army in Stalingrad

Despite this scale, the action in this novel is on a small, intimate level. A young girl fantasizes about her lover. The tank commander, Novikov, removed from his post for diverting ever so slightly from the official plan, waits in a room to be questioned and probably beaten. Viktor Shtrum bickers with his wife and agonises over minor incidents of office politics. Lyudmila fights to make her way by tram to see her wounded son. Krymov, the commissar, listens to his interrogator chat on the phone about cottage cheese and a dinner invitation “as though the creature sitting next to the investigator were not a man, but some quadruped.”

Grossman’s capacity for getting inside the minds of his characters is not limited to the Russians:

… The brain of the forty-year-old accountant, Naum Rozenberg, was still engaged in its usual work. He was walking down the road and counting: 110 the day before yesterday, 61 today, 612 during the five days before–altogether that made 783 … A pity he hadn’t kept separate totals for men, women and children … Women burn more easily. An experienced brenner arranges the bodies so that the bony old men who make a lot of ash are lying next to the women. Any minute now they’d be ordered to turn off the road; these people–the people they’d been digging up from pits and dragging out with great hooks on the end of ropes–had received the same order only a year ago. An experienced brenner could look at a mound and immediately estimate how many bodies there were inside–50, 100, 200, 600, 1000 … Scharfuhrer Elf insisted that the bodies should be referred to as items–100 items, 200 items–but Rozenberg called them people: a man who had been killed, a child who had been put to death, an old man who had been put to death. He used these words only to himself–otherwise the Scharfuhrer would have emptied nine grams of metal into him….

One of the most moving of these small stories is that of Anna Semyonova, Viktor’s mother, who, like Grossman’s own mother, is trapped in the town of Berdichev with thousands of other Jews when the Germans sweep through the Ukraine. Grossman’s mother was shot and buried in a mass grave outside the town. After months of captivity in a ghetto, Anna is packed onto a cattle car and transported to Auschwitz. Along the way, she befriends an orphaned boy, David, and, in the excerpt above, they are herded into the chambers and gassed.

Before leaving the ghetto, however, she composes a letter to Viktor, knowing she will never see him again:

They say that children are our own future, but how can one say that of these children? They aren’t going to become musicians, cobblers or tailors. Last night I saw very clearly how this whole noisy world of bearded, anxious fathers and querulous grandmothers who bak honey-cakes and goose-necks–this whole world of marriage customs, proverbial sayings and Sabbaths will disappear forever under the earth. After the war life will begin to stir once again, but we won’t be here, we will have vanished–just as the Aztecs once vanished.

This letter is easily one of the finest works in the literature of the Holocaust. The filmmaker Frederic Wiseman was so affected by this chapter that he adapted it into a play, “Last Letter,” which he filmed in 2003.

Life and Fate also reflects Grossman’s own development, his disillusionment with the Soviet state and his acceptance of his Jewish roots. Born in Berdichev in 1905, Grossman was raised as a secular Russian. Educated as a chemist, he started writing while still attending Moscow State University. After working for a few years in the Donbass mining region, he switched professions.

By the time Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Grossman was a member of the Writer’s Union and a popular journalist. He spent much of the war as a frontline reporter for the Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda, including during the battle for Stalingrad, which forms the centerpiece of Life and Fate. He also witnessed the liberation of Treblinka and other concentration camps, and wrote some of the earliest coverage of the extermination of the Jews to be published anywhere.

The strength of Life and Fate’s depiction of combat, destruction, and its effects on soldiers and civilians stems directly from his wartime reporting, which has been collected and published in A Writer at War. The collection was edited by Luba Vinogradova and Anthony Beevor, who openly acknowledges his debt to Grossman for much of the descriptive power of his own account of the battle, Stalingrad.

During the war, Grossman wrote a great deal of propagandist material proclaiming the victory of the liberating Soviet state over the fascist Germans. In the novel The People Immortal, a realistic account of the demoralisation and panic of Soviet troops before the onslaught of the Wermacht in 1941 turns into a socialist fantasy in which a heroic commissar organises a successful counter-attack that routs the enemy. The Germans, “accustomed to victory for seven hundred days, could not and would not understand that on this seven hundred and first day defeat had come to them.” The soldiers celebrate not only their victory, but also the courage and leadership of their commissar: “The Commissar was in front, the Commissar was with us!”

In fact, Grossman’s loss of idealism began before that, starting with the mistaken arrest of his wife, Olga Guber, during the purges of 1937-1938. In Life and Fate, the war is portrayed as a contest between two equally ruthless states, two forms of totalitarianism differing only in ideology and technique. What heroism there was to be found was only as isolated, individual acts.

In the latter stages of the war, Grossman, Ilya Ehrenburg, and others compiled documentation of the Nazi persecution of the Jews–and instances of Jewish resistance–in The Black Book. The Soviet authorities refused to publish it, however, and Grossman watched Stalin turn to persecuting Jews himself in the late 1940s.

Grossman condensed many of these experiences into Life and Fate, which he worked on through much of the 1950s. The purges, the persecution of Jewish scientists and engineers, the Holocaust, the battles, Stalin’s manipulation of all aspects of Soviet life all come to play in the novel. It developed into a very unfavorable and unapologetic account of the state’s power and corruption. It was all too realistic to pass as socialist realism. When Grossman submitted the novel for publication, a Politburo member told him it was unpublishable and would remain so for the next 200 years. As Vladimir Voinovich later pointed out, the most telling part of that remark was the certainty that the book’s merit would easily survive that long.

Grossman died without seeing Life and Fate in print–believing, in fact, that every copy in existence had been confiscated. Fortunately, his friend, the poet Semyon Lipkin, was able to photograph the manuscript, and passed a copy to Andrei Sakharov, who in turn provided it to Voinovich, who smuggled it to Switzerland in 1980.

Although the book was highly praised when first released, its bulk and grim subject put most potential readers off, and it soon passed out of print. Harvill Press reissued it in 1985 and 2003, and New York Review Books announced it would be released as part of its Classics series in May 2006.

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Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman, translated by Robert Chandler
New York: Harper and Row, 1980