THE BOOK ENDURES--THE REGIME DOES NOT:

Tolstoy's Heir: Vasily Grossman's 'Life and Fate' is an unflinching chronicle of the Battle of Stalingrad (JOSEPH EPSTEIN, May 5, 2007, Wall Street Journal)

One Russian writer who until only recently slipped through my own net is Vasily Grossman (1904-64), author of a novel called "Life and Fate," which was written under the direct influence of "War and Peace." The first I had heard of this book was six or so months ago from my friend Frederic Raphael, the English novelist and screenwriter, a man never given to overstatement. "It's a masterpiece," he said, and, upon investigation, this assessment turns out to be precisely correct.

Grossman was born in Berdichev, in the Ukraine, near Kiev and the scene of one of the first large massacres of Jews before Babi Yar, the infamous mass execution of Jews outside Kiev. A chemist by training, he worked as a mining engineer, and then, following his instincts and talent, became a writer. During World War II, he covered -- was "embedded with" we should say today -- the Russian army on its eastern front. His dispatches for the publication known in English as Red Army were widely read, but nowhere more intensely than by Stalin, who, knowing Grossman had too much integrity to turn hack, was said to have been extremely wary of his ardor for truth-telling.

Like Isaac Babel, author of the "Red Cavalry" stories, Grossman was a Jewish writer with more of a taste than a physique for the military life. As a journalist, he indulged this taste by educating himself on all aspects of weaponry, strategy and tactics. He wrote about the great battle of Stalingrad and then followed the German army in its retreat, reporting on the extermination camps of Majdanek and Treblinka, arriving with the Soviet army in Berlin. He was unblinking in his accounts of war's devastation and horror, and turned in the most significant account of the bloodiest battle of the 20th century, the attack upon and defense of Stalingrad, which cost 27 million Russian soldiers and civilians and four million troops of the Wehrmacht.

That battle of Stalingrad is at the center of "Life and Fate." Grossman said that the only book he read -- which he read twice -- during his time as a journalist was "War and Peace." The parallel between Napoleon's attack on Russia through Borodino and Hitler's attack on Russia through Stalingrad is obvious. In each, the fate of Europe was at stake; in both battles the losses, but especially those incurred by the Russians, were unprecedented. On each occasion, against all odds, Russia emerged victorious.

To attempt a novel modeled on "War and Peace" is easy; to write one that is unembarrassing by comparison is not. Far from embarrassing, "Life and Fate" is one of the great novels of the 20th century. The book has more than 150 characters, panoramically representing almost all strains of Russian life during the nightmarish Stalin years; various plots and subplots are neatly interwoven with detailed descriptions of battles and penetrating excursuses on totalitarianism, on the history of the persecution of the Jews ("anti-Semitism," Grossman writes, "is . . . an expression of lack of talent, an inability to win a contest on equal terms"), on the evolution of morality and kindness. The novel is rich in apercus. Viktor Shtrum, one of its central characters, is an experimental physicist who claims that "the value of science is the happiness it brings to people," but he also holds that "science today should be entrusted to men of spiritual understanding, to prophets and saints. But instead it's left to chessplayers and scientists."

Like almost all first-order imaginative literature produced in the Soviet Union, the book could not be published there. Mikhail Suslov, a powerful member of the Politburo, said that it was unlikely to be published for another 200 or 300 years. History intervened to squash this prediction, yet in sad fact Grossman, who died of stomach cancer, did not live to see his great novel in print.

The Soviets won. The Russians lost.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 6, 2007 12:00 AM