Monthly Archives: July 2017

“A Soviet Critic from Within”: a Vasily Grossman Q & A with Marat Grinberg

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Over the last couple of weeks I’ve posted several times on Vasily Grossman’s epic novel Life and Fate. You can read my introductory thoughts on the novel, my thoughts on Grossman’s use of character and lists, and the place of the Holocaust in the novel.

Although I’ve spent a lot of time with this book and even have some expertise with its subject matter, especially its use of the Holocaust, I don’t know much about Soviet writing, and I can’t read Russian. So I was eager to reach out to a friend who is an expert on these things.

Marat Grinberg received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and is Associate Professor of Russian and Humanities at Reed College. He is the author of “I am to Be Read not from Left to Right, but in Jewish: from Right to Left”: The Poetics of Boris Slutsky (2011) and co-editor of Woody on Rye: Jewishness in the Films and Plays of Woody Allen (2013). His most recent essays on literature and cinema have appeared in the LA Review of Books, Commentary, Tablet Magazine, and Cineaste. His latest book is Aleksandr Askol’dov: The Commissar, a study of the great banned Soviet film.

I emailed Marat some questions I had about the novel, and he was kind enough to reply. I hope you enjoy his thoughtful responses as much as I did.

 Dorian Stuber: I’d appreciate some context for understanding Grossman. Where does he fit among other Soviet writers of the time? Would you say he is a Jewish writer?

Marat Grinberg: I would hesitate in calling Grossman a Jewish writer, although that, of course, depends on how one defines this contentious category. Clearly he was a Jew who never denied his Jewishness and was invested in figuring out the place of Jews in history. The Holocaust and post-war Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaigns made this awareness stronger as well as more profound, tragic, and personal. At the same time, if we think of a Jewish writer as someone who engages in dialogue with Jewish textual universe, both sacred and secular, and comments upon it, this would describe Grossman only to a limited extent. First and foremost, he was a Soviet Russian writer, shaped by the Soviet project, which is precisely why his eventual denunciation of it after the war was so stark and unpredictable. A celebrated writer in the 30s and even early 50s and a legendary war journalist, Grossman was always a Soviet critic from within and from the depth of Russian history.

DS: One of the most striking aspects of Life and Fate is the way it links Nazism and Stalinism. Specifically, it suggests these ideologies are linked through their treatment of Jews. Is Grossman arguing that totalitarianism is anti-Semitic?

MG: I don’t think Grossman is arguing in Life and Fate or in other works dealing with the nature of totalitarianism, such as Everything Flows, that totalitarianism is inherently anti-Semitic. What fascinates him about Nazism and Stalinism and what makes them so similar in his eyes is how they both sacralize ideology and deny any value to individual human life. Like Hannah Arendt later in Origins of Totalitarianism, he views anti-Semitism as a convenient tool of totalitarianism, but I also think his understanding of anti-Semitism is limited by how he ties it to totalitarianism. Anti-Semitism is for him essentially a hatred of the other – Sartre’s “Anti-Semite and the Jew” comes to mind – but he overlooks the deeper roots of it in the polemical wars between Judaism and Christianity. The secular humanist that he was, he could never quite decide in Life and Fate whether the Nazi (and others’) hate of the Jew was an aberration or an ingrained part of human psyche and its capacity for evil.

DS: Can you tell English-speaking readers about the connotations of the two terms that give Grossman his title—and that he uses all the time?

My hunch is that fate is not simply a neutral term—not just the name for things that happen to us—but rather a way of referring to some kind of larger structure that makes human life intelligible and that even acts as a kind of judgment or way of making sense of that life.

By contrast, I sense that life is, if not antithetical to fate, then at least in some kind of struggle with it. Life is where value resides for Grossman. But is it possible to think of life without fate?

MG: I think you’re absolutely right, fate for Grossman “is not simply a neutral term—not just the name for things that happen to us—but rather a way of referring to some kind of larger structure that makes human life intelligible and that even acts as a kind of judgment or way of making sense of that life” and “life is where value lies for Grossman.” In this, he, of course, is following very consciously in the footsteps of Tolstoy. Life and fate is in many respects a paraphrase of war and peace, keeping in mind that the proper translation of Tolstoy’s epic would be War and World. Grossman mimics Tolstoy structurally, thematically and philosophically – Tolstoy also thinks of history as governed by larger structures, grand fate or destiny of a sort. It should be noted that War and Peace was the book that Russian intelligentsia and writers, in particular, turned to during the war. Boris Slutsky would later write a poem about how everyone was incessantly rereading and memorizing War and Peace in those years. So Grossman’s choice is not accidental, but what is also interesting is how he critiques the great novelistic projects of Russian literature, by Tolstoy as well as Dostoevsky and Turgenev, co-opted by the Soviet regime. He locates in them precisely the same obsession with totalizing explanations of human history which he identifies in totalitarianism and which invalidates the individual. Thus, the other key term in his novel, apart from life and fate, is freedom, which very much implies the individual’s ability to make choices and resist evil even when that evil becomes history’s organizing principle. It is through this type of phenomenological freedom that life can be salvaged for Grossman. In terms of Russian history and literature, he locates the potential for it in Chekhov, the least totalizing of Russian writers. Ultimately Grossman wants to have his cake and eat it too: write the 20th century version of War and Peace and question the very foundations of epic novelistic writing.

DS: Viktor Shtrum, one of the main characters, often said to be a stand-in for Grossman, is a particle physicist. Grossman himself trained as an engineer. Do you think Grossman’s background as a scientist affected his writing of the novel? (I’m especially wondering about its structure.) Or does science function in the novel mostly as a way of critiquing the Soviet state’s ability to politicize every aspect of life?

MG: So it’s Tolstoy’s proclivity toward discerning structures in history that mainly impacts Grossman’s systematizing thinking in the novel, but his engineer background might very well have had something to do with it. Overall the link between art and science is at the core of early utopian Soviet vision and the later Stalinist version of it. As a nuclear physicist, Viktor serves the state, which turns against him as a Jew, and exemplifies both the potential and the horror of human progress. Russian literary thinker Lydia Ginzburg defined Tolstoy’s characters, such as Levin in Anna Karenina, for instance, not as auto-biographical, but auto-psychological, in other words their task is to replicate the author’s psychology and his intellectual, moral and spiritual crises. Viktor is very much a character in that mold. His rediscovery of his Jewishness in the context of anti-Semitic assaults and the split he experiences as a result between being a member of Russian intelligentsia and a Jew reconstructs Grossman’s own trajectory in this regard.

DS: Do you think there are qualities to Grossman’s writing—in Life and Fate in particular, but more generally too—that are underrated? Are there aspects of his style or even of his preoccupations that don’t come across well in translation?

MG: In Russian criticism of Grossman there’s a tendency to view him as a great thinker, but not a great writer and because of that, some believe, he does not lose much in translation. The moral courage and breadth of his project in Life and Fate make discussing it as an aesthetic work almost impossible or at least very difficult. Certainly there are parts in it that are much more psychologically nuanced than others and it can be overly sentimental and sociological, which can be explained by his uneasy relationship with the genre of the novel. Hence some prefer his shorter works, such as Everything Flows and “The Hell of Treblinka.” Perhaps it’s the Greek and Roman historians, such as Thucydides and Tacitus, both artful writers intent on figuring out structure within history and how the human variable fits into it, that Grossman resembles most closely.

MG

Thank you, Marat! So interesting to get your expert opinion on these questions.

 

 

“Yes, Here I Am”: Life and Fate’s Holocaust

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Among other things, Life and Fate is an important contribution to the literature of the Holocaust. The Holocaust touched Grossman personally. I’ve referred now a couple of times in these posts on the novel to his essay “The Hell of Treblinka.” Grossman was with the Red Army when it arrived at the former killing center, which the Germans had largely abandoned in 1943. His investigative journalism, including interviews with many of the local Poles, produced one of the earliest documents we have about the camps. But the Holocaust touched Grossman in a much more personal way. His mother was murdered in their hometown of Berdichev when the Germans invaded the Ukraine in the summer of 1941.

One of the novel’s most famous chapters contains the text of a letter from Anna Semyonovna, Viktor’s mother, to her son. Smuggled out just before the Berdichev ghetto is liquidated, the letter is a clear, careful, and enormously moving description of how quickly life turned upside down for the Jews of Ukraine in the summer of 1941. It is also Grossman’s homage to his mother; she was never able to send him anything comparable. Like his stand-in, Viktor, Grossman was plagued his whole life by guilt that he wasn’t able to get her to safety in Moscow before the German invasion.

The letter shows how fast life was overturned for the Jews of Berchidev. No sooner had the Germans arrived than many of the locals—even former friends and neighbours—feel emboldened to take over their apartments and steal their things. In a matter of days, the Germans announce the construction of a ghetto where all Jews are required to move. The ghetto is horrible—everyone hungry, sick, despairing. But it’s better than that brief period before. Anna concludes: “Now I’m no longer a beast deprived of rights—simply an unfortunate human being. And that’s easier to bear.”

Anna’s letter is filled with similar heartbreaking and pithy claims. “Nowhere is there so much hope as in the ghetto,” she writes. Anna describes herself seeing patients (she is an eye doctor) and saying “Now bathe your eye regularly with the lotion and it will be better in two or three weeks” when the signs are clear they will all be murdered soon:

The Jews who were sent to dig potatoes are digging deep ditches four versts from the town, near the airfield, on the road to Romanovka. Remember that name, Vitya—that’s where you’ll find the mass grave where your mother is buried.

She imagines herself becoming nothing but a faint memory, imagines some of her non-Jewish neighbours saying: “‘And there was a doctor who used to sit there, beneath that old pear-tree—I can’t remember her surname but once I went to her to have my eyes treated. After she finished world she use to bring out a wickerwork chair and sit there with a book.’ Yes, Vitya, that’s how it will be.”

I defy anyone to read this chapter with a dry eye.

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In addition to showing the complicity of the local population in the Nazi murder of Ukrainian Jews and daring to suggest that the crimes of Nazism and Stalinism were no so different, Grossman’s other big crime, as far as the Soviet authorities were concerned, was to assert that Jews suffered inordinately in the German invasion. That might seem obvious to us, but it was a brave, dangerous thing to say in the USSR in the 1950s. As translator Robert Chandler notes in his introduction, this was the time of the slogan “Do not divide the dead!” That is, all victims of fascism were supposed to be the same: all Soviets suffered together. Grossman challenges this orthodoxy in Life and Fate.

Indeed, one of the tragedies of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union is that many Jews there no longer or had never thought of themselves as Jewish. (This was true elsewhere in Europe too.) Viktor and his mother feel this way, as did Grossman himself. In a characteristically fine review of the novel, Adam Kirsch points out how Soviet modernity had transformed Jewish life, taking people out of the shtetls that persisted elsewhere in Eastern Europe (and in the USSR as well), bringing them to cities like Berdichev (prewar population 60,000, half of them Jewish), and allowing them access to all sorts of professions.

This transformation of Jewish life is evident in the novel. After being captured by the Germans outside Stalingrad, Sofya Levinton, an army doctor who is the other main Jewish character in the novel, is eventually deported to a concentration camp. In the cattle-car she studies her fellow prisoners and reflects on how the world of her childhood has changed:

The cattle-wagon was full of workers from different co-operatives, girls at teacher-training college, teachers from a school for trade unionists; there was a radio technician, an engineer who worked at a canned-food factory, a livestock expert, and a girl who worked as a vet. Previously, such professions had been unheard of in the shtetl.

As you can see from this example, the lists I discussed last time are present in the Holocaust sections of the book as well. Grossman uses them to show the enormous scope of Jewish persecution, as well as to remind readers that the Nazi-sponsored genocide affected Jews from across Europe and from all walks of life. In a powerful scene, Grossman depicts a meeting between (the fictional) SS Obersturmbannführer Liss and Adolf Eichmann, who reveals to him the plans for the Final Solution:

‘Can you give me some idea—just a rough estimate—of the number of Jews we’re talking about?’ …

Eichmann answered his question.

‘What?’ Liss gasped in astonishment. ‘Millions?’

Eichmann shrugged his shoulders.”

Riding in a limousine on the way to the meeting, Liss dreams of his future. Grossman interrupts his reverie with a kind of documentary overview of the coming destruction that is clearly not from Liss’s point of view:

Smolevichi [today in Belarus] is full of quiet little houses with gardens; grass grows on the pavements. In the slums of Berchidev there are dirty hens running around in the dust, their yellow legs marked with red and violet ink. In Kiev—on Vassilievskaya Avenue and in the Podol—there are tall buildings with dirty windows, staircases whose steps have been worn down by millions of children’s shoes and old men’s slippers.

In yards all over Odessa stand tall plane trees with peeling bark. Brightly-coloured clothes and linen are drying on the line. Pans of cherry jam are steaming on cookers. New-born babies with swarthy skin—skin that has yet to see the sun—are screaming in cradles.

On the six floors of a gaunt, narrow-shouldered building in Warsaw live seamstresses, book-binders, private tutors, cabaret-singers, students and watchmakers…

In Stalindorf [a Jewish agricultural colony in the Ukraine, established in 1924] people light fires in their huts in the evening. The wind blows from Perekop [on the isthmus between Ukraine and Crimea], smelling of salt and warm dust. Cows shake their heavy heads and moo…

In Budapest and Fastov [Ukraine], in Vienna, Melitopol [Ukraine] and Amsterdam, in detached houses with sparkling windows, in hovels swathed in factory smoke, lived people belonging to the Jewish nation.

The barbed wire of the camps, the clay of the anti-tank ditches and the walls of the gas ovens brought together millions of people of different ages, professions and languages, people with different material concerns and different spiritual belies. All of them—fanatical believers and fanatical atheists, workers and scroungers, doctors and tradesmen, sages and idiots, thieves, contemplatives, saints and idealists—were to be exterminated.

This passage is a good example of Grossman’s tendency to intersperse the narrative with little mini-essays or pieces of reportage (I gather Tolstoy does something similar with his writings on history in War & Peace). It’s also a clear statement of Jewish identity, really extraordinary given the ideological dreams and political realities of Soviet life.

Eventually, it becomes clear that Sofya not Victor is the novel’s main stand-in for the Jewish people. She is just as vivid, sympathetic, and moving a character as Viktor’s mother, Anna. Shortly after the passage I cited earlier about all the professions represented in the cattle-car, Sofya begins to think of herself as a member of a communal Jewish identity, addressing the others on the transport as Brider yidn (Fellow Jews). (Compare Anna: “But now, during these terrible days, my heart has become filled with a maternal tenderness towards the Jewish people. I never knew this love before.”)

Many pages later, when Sofya and the others are forced into the gas chamber, we’re given a passage that moves from individual Jewish bodies to the collective body of the Jewish people, from corporeal to historical continuity:

When a man has no clothes on, he draws closer to himself. ‘God, the hairs on my chest are thicker and wirier than ever—and what a lot of grey!’ ‘How ugly my fingernails look!’ There’s only one thing a naked man can say as he looks at himself: ‘Yes, here I am. This is me!’ He recognizes himself and identifies his ‘I’, an ‘I’ that remains always the same. A little boy crosses his skinny arms over his bony chest, looks at his frog-like body and says, ‘This is me’; fifty years later he looks at a plump, flabby chest, at the blue, knotted veins on his legs and says, ‘This is me’.

But Sofya Levinton noticed something else. I was as though the body of a whole people, previously covered over by layers of rags, was laid bare in these naked bodies of all ages: the skinny little boy with the big nose over whom an old woman had shaken her head and said, ‘Poor little Hassid!’; the fourteen-year old girl who was admired even here by hundreds of eyes; the feeble and deformed old men and women who aroused everyone’s pitying respect; men with strong backs covered in hair; women with large breasts and prominently veined legs. It was as though she felt, not just about herself, but about her whole people: ‘Yes, here I am.’ This was the naked body of a people: young and old, robust and feeble, with bright curly hair and with pale grey hair.

The scholar Marat Grinberg—more from him next time!—has observed that Sofya here references the hineni (Here I am!) of Abraham’s response to God in the story of the Akedah, that is, the binding of Isaac. It’s amazing to see the secular, atheist, Communist Grossman, who grew up without a traditional Jewish education, cite this central moment from what might be the most powerful and puzzling story in all of Torah. It’s even harder to know how to understand this choice. Is Grossman suggesting, via the biblical allusion, that even in the hell of the camps God will somehow look out for, even validate Jewish suffering? What could that possibly mean? These people are about to be murdered—unlike in “The Hell of Treblinka,” where Grossman also imagines a scene in the gas chamber but pulls away at the last moment, as if to say the moment of the death is beyond representation, here he actually depicts the death of Sofya and the rest:

Her heart, however, still had life in it: it contracted, ached and felt pity for all of you, both living and dead; Sofya Osipovna felt a wave of nausea. She pressed David [a little boy she cares for on the journey to death], now a doll, to herself; she became dead, a doll.

Is the “you” in this powerful passage meant to refer to Jews? To all human beings, even those who are on the other side of the doors, peeping through the porthole window? To us as readers?

Or is the reference to the hinenei supposed to be ironic? Is Grossman saying, despairingly, contemptuously: This is what has happened to the faith in the 20th century? I don’t think so. I think Grossman is wrestling with the relation between individual human life, which he values so much, as I’ve shown over and over in these posts, and group identity, which he wasn’t allowed to value except through the idea of Soviet or communist identity.

Although there’s a lot more to say about the role of the Holocaust in Grossman’s self-understanding and in the novel, I’ll finish by simply pointing out a few of the moving characters Grossman offers us.

There’s Rebekkah Bukhman, who strangles her baby when it begins crying in the hiding place from which she and her family are nonetheless wrenched during a house-to-house search in a ghetto. There’s Naum Rozenberg, an accountant forced to become a Brenner, one who burned the bodies of those shot by the SS Einsatzgruppen; Rozenberg has miraculously survived the liquidation of his unit only to be recaptured by the Germans and deported to Treblinka; he spends the train ride in a fugue state, calculating exactly how many bodies he was forced to burn. There’s an unnamed man, distinguished only by his raised collar, who suddenly shrugs his shoulders as the column of new arrivals is marched to the crematorium and “with a sudden nimble jump, as though he had spread his wings… punche[s] an SS guard in the face and knock[s] him to the ground.”

Grossman is too honest to simply ennoble the victims. Take a look at this passage, describing a husband and wife who are separated on the ramp and then by the so-called selection process. He is sent to work; she is sent to death. The passage starts out conventionally enough, just skirting piousness, but then takes a swerve that leaves false emotion far behind:

How can one convey the feelings of a man pressing his wife’s hand for the last time> How can one describe that last, quick look at a beloved face? Yes, and how can a man live with the merciless memory of how, during the silence of parting, he blinked for a moment to hide the crude joy he felt at having managed to save his life? How can he ever bury the memory if his wife handing him a packet containing her wedding ring, a rusk and some sugar-lumps? How can he continue to exist, seeing the glow in the sky flaring up with renewed strength? Now the hands he had kissed must be burning, now the eyes that had admired him, now the hair whose smell he could recognize in the darkness, now his children, his wife, his mother.

Yet he doesn’t blame the victims, either. That passage is like a punch to the gut because it acknowledges how the drive to live trumps every decent human emotion, even as it suggests how terrible it is that a person in that situation can, indeed must, become so callous. At the same time, though, the questions posed by the narrator aren’t just rhetorical. Grossman doesn’t let us forget that those of us who weren’t there struggle to understand. (Which isn’t the same as saying we can’t.) In an earlier passage, describing how the Nazis relied on their victims’ unwillingness to countenance what was happening to them “(A man cannot believe that he is about to be destroyed”), the narrator explains:

It is important to consider what a man must have suffered and endured in order to feel glad at the thought of his impending execution. It is especially important to consider this if one is inclined to moralize, to reproach the victims for their lack of resistance in conditions of which one has little conceptions.

In the vast and powerful literature of the Holocaust, few writers can convey more forcefully than Grossman the desire for life, which is as much physiological as metaphysical. In the gas chamber, the victims aren’t even animals—the way they squeeze into the room isn’t the way people move, not even the way “the lowest form of animal life moved”:

It was a movement without sense or purpose, with no trace of a living will being it. The stream of people flowed into the chamber; the people going in pushed the people already inside, the latter pushed their neighbours, and all these countless shoves and pushes with elbows, shoulders and stomachs gave rise to a form of movement identical in every respect to the streaming of molecules.

Yet even as, perversely, the air the victims desperately drive into their lungs only drives life out they remain human. The boy David, the one Sofya looks after, stands for them all. In the last minute, thinking of his summer with relatives in Ukraine, brutally interrupted by the Nazi invasion, David can’t let go of this life:

This world, where a chicken could run without its head, where there was milk in the morning and frogs he could get to dance by their front feet—this world still preoccupied him.

Next time, look for one last post on Life and Fate, a conversation with someone who really understands this book.

“Melting Snow in Saucepans”: Grossman’s Lists

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Grossman likes lists.

His lists are strictly accumulative. They aren’t for qualifications, hesitations, or refinements. They are always about saying more: a fitting rhetorical technique for this epic work.

Sometimes the lists in Life and Fate are as minimal as can be. One of the most straightforward is in a discussion of Russian literature. Viktor’s colleague Sokolov extols Chekhov’s virtues, especially “the mass of different people” he brought “into the consciousness of society”:

Just think! Doctors, engineers, lawyers, teachers, lecturers, landlords, shopkeepers, industrialists, nannies, lackeys, students, civil servants of every rank, cattle-dealers, tram-conductors, marriage-brokers, sextons, bishops, peasants, workers, cobblers, artists’ models, horticulturalists, zoologists, innkeepers, gamekeepers, prostitutes, fishermen, lieutenants, corporals, artists, cooks, writers, janitors, nuns, soldiers, midwives, prisoners on the Sakhalin Islands…

This is the zero-degree literary list: pure inventory. It could be a shopping list. But for me it’s still thrilling. Grossman doesn’t offer quite this many kinds of people in Life and Fate but not for lack of interest. (Grossman, who was a war reporter during the period he writes about in this novel—today we would say he was embedded with the troops—was famously good at getting people to open up, probably because he really was interested in what they had to say.). The difference is that his Russia is more impoverished than Chekhov’s. Maybe not materially, though that’s difficult to say, but perhaps spiritually. That’s not really the word I want: what I mean is that the war has reduced life’s possibilities. Of course, it’s made some things possible that weren’t before (movement and mixing of people, the rise and fall of various characters’ fortunes, etc) but in terms of professions or occupations or walks of life, most people have been subsumed by the war effort.

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At any rate, I think Grossman uses his lists in two ways.

The first is to indicate scope, specifically how big, overwhelming, or extensive something is. The Chekhov example is of this kind, but mostly when Grossman uses lists in this first sense he’s doing so to convey the enormity of Soviet history.

Here are 3 examples. The first comes from a scene with Major Yershov, a captured officer interned in a German concentration camp. Yershov is remembering what his father told him about what happened when he and the rest of the family (Yershov himself was at military academy) were deported to the Northern Urals in 1930 after having been denounced as kulaks:

[Yershov’s father] described their fifty-day journey, in winter, in a cattle-wagon with a leaking roof; day after day, the dead had travelled on alongside the living. They had continued the journey on foot, the women carrying their children in their arms. Yershov’s mother had been delirious with fever. They had been taken to the middle of the forest where there wasn’t a single hut or dug-out; in the depths of winter they had begun a new life, building camp-fires, making beds out of spruce-branches, melting snow in saucepans, burying their dead…

The parallelism of the final sentence’s list is ambivalent: its ordering and symmetrical properties threaten to domesticate the terror of the historical reality, as if what were being described were a camping trip; yet those same shaping or aestheticizing tendencies are undermined by the sly way Grossman includes “burying the dead” alongside the more mundane chores, as a way to highlight, even amplify, the horror of what the deportees experienced: death was as ordinary as cooking and cleaning.

A second example suggests that lists sometimes serve as an elegant way to give important historical background, by using representative examples of a large-scale event, without resorting to clumsy info-dump. Here’s Viktor thinking back to the purges of 1937:

The daily roll-call of people arrested during the night; people phoning each other up with the news, ‘Anna Andreevna’s husband has fallen ill tonight’; people answering the phone on behalf of a neighbour who had been arrested and saying, ‘He’s gone on a journey, we don’t know when he’ll be back.’ And the stories about the circumstances of those arrests: ‘they came for him just as he was giving his little boy a bath’; ‘they came for him at work… at the theatre… in the middle of the night’; ‘the search lasted forty-eight hours, they turned everything upside down, they even took up the floorboards’; ‘they hardly looked at anything at all, they just leafed through a few books for show.’

Particular examples stand in for general trends. The pathos of those examples (the man giving his child a bath, the books that are desultorily paged through) is also important in highlighting our sense of outrage. But what are we to do with that outrage? It’s unclear Grossman knows, other than to pursue the vitally important task of recording and remembering. Notice how these sentences aren’t really sentences: the list takes the form of evidence, of examples, offered as if only for their own sake.

The third example is similarly fragmented. The apparatchnik Krymov, now imprisoned as a traitor to the cause, thinks back, in stream of consciousness fashion, to some of the things he saw in Stalingrad:

A dead soldier, a note in his gas-mask that he’d written before the attack: ‘I died for the Soviet way of life, leaving behind a wife and six children…’ A member of a tank-crew who had burned to death—he had been quite black, with tufts of hair still clinging to his young head… A people’s army, many millions strong, marching through bogs and forests, firing artillery and machine guns…

The lack of predication to complete this list of extended noun phrases is similar to what we see in the previous example, but here the ambiguity is even stronger. I’m not sure whether this is a criticism of the propaganda and cant of the regime, using its own language of cliché (“many millions strong,” etc) or a hymn to individual sacrifice in the fight against fascism.

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The second way Grossman uses lists is less ambivalent than the first. In fact, the second is a reaction against the first. And we already see it peering out at us from the last example. Against the memorializing function of the lists depicting the scope of history is the second we also find lists that adduce the significance of ordinary individual human lives. I’ll conclude with three examples of this second tendency.

The first is the odd digression imagining “the machine of future ages and millennia.” The narrator wonders whether there is anything such a machine won’t be able to do. “Is there a limit to its perfection? Can it be compared to man [sic]? Will it surpass him?” The enigmatic answer:

Childhood memories …. tears of happiness … the bitterness of parting …love of freedom … feelings of pity for a sick puppy … nervousness … a mother’s tenderness … thoughts of death … sadness … friendship … love of the weak … sudden hope … a fortunate guess … melancholy … unreasoning joy … sudden embarrassment …

We might think the narrator is telling us this because he thinks these are things the machine will never experience. But it turns out the machine will be able to recreate these emotions. And yet the human still wins, because to mimic even one person—“ to reproduce the peculiarities of mind and soul of an average, inconspicuous human being”—the machine would need to be so sophisticated it would be bigger than the earth itself.

The next sentence—“Fascism annihilated tens of millions of people”—suggests Grossman’s real target isn’t AI, but rather the dehumanizing ideologies of his time; his aim is to champion the value of humanity.

When Grossman gets going, when he sets out to name his highest values, it sometimes seems he can only list them. Perhaps it is hard enough—and important enough—simply to name the things politics wants to destroy. I’m reminded of a long section in his essay “The Hell of Trebinka” where he simply lists, at length, half a page or so, the possessions the Jewish arrivals at the extermination camp would have left behind them on the ramp.

The way humanity inheres in people’s relationship to ordinary, domestic objects appears in the second example. Katya Vengrova is a radio-operator sent to a bunker under daily fire from the Germans. She is rightly frightened the enemy will appear through the hole in the ceiling at any moment:

To calm herself down, she tried to picture the list of tenants on the door of her house: ‘Tikhimirov – 1 ring; Dzyga – 2 rings; Cheremushkin – 3 rings; Feinberg – 4 rings; Vengrova – 5 rings; Andryushenko – 6 rings; Pegov – 1 long ring.” She tried to imagine the Feinbergs’ big saucepan standing on the kerosene stove with its plywood cover, Anastasya’s washing tub with its cover made of sacking, the Tikhimirovs’ chipped enamel basin hanging from its piece of string … Now she would make her bed; where the springs were particularly sharp, she would spread out an old torn coat, a scrap of quilt and her mother’s brown shawl.

To the destructiveness of the historical forces of fascism Grossman opposes saucepans, washing tubs, and enamel basins—and the people who are made human by their use of these tools.

Finally, one last example, here are some soldiers drinking vodka and chewing on old bread to celebrate their victory at Stalingrad:

Their heads grew hazy, but somehow the haziness left them clear-headed. The taste of bread, the crunch of onion, the weapons piled beside the mud wall, the Volga, this victory over a powerful enemy, a victory won by the same hands that had stroked the hair of their children, fondled their women, broken bread and rolled tobacco in scraps of newspaper—they experienced all this with extraordinary clarity.

Here Grossman rescues a grammatically clear sentence from what threatens to be another floating list of valued but disparate and not necessarily logically connected objects. Like the example of the man imprisoned in the Lubyanka, this final passage is also hard for me to get a handle on. It’s never easy to avoid kitsch when singing hymns to the idea of humanity, yet Grossman almost always manages to avoid such unearned piety. (It’s one of the things that make this book so impressive.) But here I’m less convinced—this is pretty kitschy stuff (what with the mighty Volga, fondled women, broken bread, etc), and could probably have passed muster as Soviet propaganda.

And yet even though this example is less satisfying than the others, it still shows, even if more problematically, Grossman’s humanism, which is always more powerful the more modestly it’s expressed, as in Katya’s memory of the humble apartment building she grew up in (and, not incidentally, the suggestion of a “multicultural,” for lack of a better term, idea of Soviet life—notice the Jewish family, the Feinbergs, living among the Slavic or “ethnically Russian” ones). This example is problematic because it shows how humanism can be taken up and distorted by political ideologies that don’t care about, in fact actively threaten, the human.

But at their best, Grossman’s lists are a prime technique for generating the warmth, fellow feeling, and menschy-ness that are such central to the novel’s appeal.

Next time, a post on Life and Fate as a Holocaust novel, and then one last post, a special Q & A with a Grossman expert. Stay tuned!