DYING LIKE SAINTS (via Robert Schwartz):

Life and death in the Red Army: a review of A WRITER AT WAR: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941–1945, Anthony Beevor and Lucy Vinogradova, translators and editors (Omer Bartov, Times of London)

Life and Fate is finally being recognized as one of the greatest masterpieces of the twentieth century. But it had to be smuggled to Switzerland and only gradually came to be known by an international readership. It was finally published in Russia after the fall of Communism. An extraordinary combination of a sprawling nineteenth-century Russian novel and a Soviet social-realist depiction of simple men’s discovery of their capacity for heroism and sacrifice, the book was based on Grossman’s own experience at the front as a correspondent for the Red Army’s official paper, Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star). Thanks to Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova, the notebooks on which Grossman based much of his novel, written during his time at the front – where he spent most of the war years – are now available in an excellent English translation.

Grossman died in 1964, at the age of fifty-nine. He never saw his masterpiece in print and had over the years been transformed from a patriotic Soviet man into a deeply disillusioned one, though he never lost his love for the Soviet Union and the Russian people. But it is not only Grossman the man whose experience in the war has been rescued from oblivion by this publication: it is the experience of millions of Russian men and women, and innumerable other nationalities in the former Soviet Union, whose current resentment, contempt, fear or hate of the Russians does not in any way diminish the astonishing collective effort to drive out the Nazi invaders and put an end to their war of destruction.

One would have wanted to know more about these notebooks. We are told that Beevor “came across” them while writing his impressive book Stalingrad, but we are not given any information on where they were kept and how they were found. Nor does the book contain only Grossman’s diary entries, since these are combined with some of his articles, especially for Krasnaya Zvezda, some of his letters, and some other extraordinary writings, not least of which is his devastating account of the Nazi extermination camp in Treblinka, an essay that was subsequently quoted at the Nuremberg International Tribunal in 1945. What makes these notebooks so valuable, however, is their evident sincerity, Grossman’s critical yet empathetic gaze, and the manner in which his admiration of Soviet patriotism and his growing anger at the incompetence of so many commanders and the readiness of the regime to squander the lives of its sons combine to provide a searing portrait of the immense quantities of blood that were so readily given and so nonchalantly wasted to win a victory that had to be won.

Grossman’s prose moves from the mundane to the exalted, anticipating the greatness of Life and Fate but also staying very close to the immediacy of the events he is experiencing. Any war correspondent writing today about the horrors we are still being subjected to by ideologues, mean-spirited leaders and fanatics of various shades and faiths, should take the time to read him. There is a profound humanity in his prose, an ability for empathy and a capacity for rage that one rarely meets in papers which consider themselves much nobler than the Red Star. “At war,” Grossman writes, “a Russian man puts on a white shirt. He may live in sin, but he dies like a saint.” He then expands on this comment. “We Russians don’t know how to live like saints, we only know how to die like saints. The front [represents] the holiness of Russian death, the rear is the sin of Russian life.”

After the terrible battles of 1941, Grossman prepares for the horrors of Stalingrad without yet knowing what awaits him. At the front, he writes, “lies the answer to all questions and to all fates”. The answers he finds there, and the fate that he too will have to confront as Stalin tightens his hold on the nation as soon as the battle has been won, will need years to digest, rework and commit to paper. And when he finally reaches his birthplace, the Ukrainian town of Berdichev, in early 1944, and learns how the Germans murdered his mother, along with most of the other 30,000 Jewish inhabitants of the town, he soon realizes not only that the fate of an entire people had been sealed under the guise of a murderous war, but that the Soviet authorities will never let him write about it. His article on Berdichev was censored, lest the Jews appear as unique victims and the Ukrainians as willing collaborators. And The Black Book, the attempt by Ilya Ehrenburg and Grossman to document the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, was finally barred from publication in 1947. This was Stalin’s answer to the fate of the Jews as he turned his attention to persecuting those who had done so much, for better and for worse, to create the reality and myth of the Soviet people.

That myth is shattered for Grossman also as he confronts the atrocities perpetrated by the Red Army as it enters Germany: the mass rapes, looting, murder of civilians and wanton destruction of property. “Horrifying things are happening to German women”, he writes. Even “Soviet girls liberated from the camps are suffering a lot now”, he notes, for the fury of the soldiers no longer makes any distinctions. And yet, in groping for an answer to the brutalization of the men he loves, Grossman does discover a truth that has long been forgotten. As German soldiers marched into Russia, they mocked what they called the “Soviet Paradise” of filth and poverty and considered the “Untermenschen” they encountered as hardly worthy of life. As the Red Army marched into Germany, writes Grossman,

our soldiers really started to ask themselves, why did the Germans attack us so suddenly? Why did the Germans need this terrible and unfair war? Millions of our men have now seen the rich farms in East Prussia, the highly organized agriculture, the concrete sheds for livestock, spacious rooms, carpets, wardrobes full of clothes . . . the well-built roads . . . and the German autobahns . . . the two storey suburban houses with electricity, gas, bathrooms and beautifully tended gardens . . . the villas of the rich bourgeoisie in Berlin, the unbelievable luxury of castles, estates and mansions. And thousands of soldiers repeat these angry questions when they look around them in Germany: “But why did they come to us? What did they want?”.