Comprehension of the war in the novel life and fate. Vasily Grossman: life and destiny

How strikingly all the Soviet spells and formulas listed above have disappeared! [cm. Grossman's article "For a Just Cause" - analysis by A. Solzhenitsyn] - and no one will say that this is from the author's insight at 50? And what Grossman really did not know and did not feel until 1953 - 1956, he managed to overtake in last years work on the 2nd volume, and now, with passion, he plunged all that was lost into the fabric of the novel.

Vasily Grossman in Schwerin (Germany), 1945

Now we learn that not only in Hitler's Germany, but also in our country: mutual suspicion of people towards each other; if people talk over a glass of tea - that's already suspicion. Yes, it turns out: Soviet people also live in terrifying cramped housing (the driver reveals this to the prosperous Shtrum), and in the registration department of the police - oppression and tyranny. And what disrespect for the shrines: a fighter can easily wrap a piece of sausage "in a greasy battle sheet". But the conscientious director of Stalgres stood at his death post throughout the siege of Stalingrad, went beyond the Volga on the day of our successful breakthrough - and all his merits were down the drain, and broke his career. (And the previously crystal-clearly positive secretary of the regional committee, Pryakhin, now recoils from the victim.) It turns out that Soviet generals may not be at all brilliant with achievements, even in Stalingrad (III part, ch. Stalin! Yes, even the corps commander dares to talk to his commissar about the landings in 1937! (I-51). In general, now the author dares to raise his eyes to the untouchable Nomenklatura - and it is clear that he has thought about it a lot and his heart is boiling strongly. With great irony, he shows the gang of one of the Ukrainian regional committees of the party, evacuated to Ufa (I - 52, however, as if he reproaches them for their low village origin and caring love for their own children). But what, it turns out, are the wives of responsible workers: being evacuated by the Volga steamer in comfort, they protest indignantly against the landing on the decks of that steamer of a detachment of military men going to battle. And young officers at the quarters hear downright frank recollections of the inhabitants "about complete collectivization." And in the countryside: “no matter how hard you work, they will still take away the bread.” And the evacuees, starving, steal the collective farm. Yes, the Questionnaire of Questionnaires reached Shtrum himself - and how rightly he reflects on her about her stickiness and claws. But the commissar of the hospital is being “bugged” that he “didn’t fight enough against disbelief in victory among some of the wounded, against enemy attacks among the backward part of the wounded who were hostile to the collective farm system” - oh, where was it before? oh, how much truth is still behind this! And the hospital funerals themselves are cruelly indifferent. But if the coffins are buried by the labor battalion, then from whom is it recruited? - not mentioned.

Grossman himself - does he remember what he was like in the 1st volume? Now? - now he undertakes to reproach Tvardovsky: “how to explain that a poet, a peasant from birth, writes with sincere feeling a poem glorifying the bloody time of the suffering of the peasantry”?

And the Russian theme itself, compared with the 1st volume, is still pushed back in the 2nd. At the end of the book, it is sympathetically noted that "seasonal girls, workers in heavy workshops" - both in dust and in dirt "retain a strong stubborn beauty, with which hard life can do nothing." The return from the front of Major Berezkin is also attributed to the finale - well, and a Russian unfolded landscape. That, perhaps, is all; the rest is of a different sign. Shtrum's envious at the institute, hugging another of the same: "And yet the most important thing is that we are Russian people." Grossman inserts the only very true remark about the humiliation of Russians in their own country, that “for the sake of friendship between peoples, we always sacrifice Russian people,” Grossman inserts the crafty and boorish party boss Getmanov, from that new (post-Comintern) generation of party nominees who “loved their Russian in themselves inside and in Russian they spoke incorrectly”, their strength is “in cunning”. (As if the international generation of communists had less cunning, uh-oh!)

From some (late) moment, Grossman - yes, he is not the only one! - brought for himself the moral identity of German National Socialism and Soviet communism. And honestly strives to give a newfound conclusion as one of the highest in his book. But for this he is forced to disguise himself (however, for Soviet publicity it is still extreme courage): to state this identity in a fictional nighttime conversation between Obersturmbannführer Liss and Comintern prisoner Mostovsky: “We look in the mirror. Don't you recognize yourself, your will in us?" Here, we will “defeat you, we will be left without you, alone against a foreign world”, “our victory is your victory”. And it makes Mostovsky horrified: is there really any truth in this “full of snake venom” speech? But no, of course (for the safety of the author himself?): "the obsession lasted a few seconds", "the thought turned to dust."

And at some point, Grossman directly names the Berlin uprising of 1953 and the Hungarian uprising of 1956, but not by themselves, but along with the Warsaw ghetto and Treblinka, and only as material for a theoretical conclusion about a person’s striving for freedom. And then this desire breaks through: here is Shtrum in 1942, though in a private conversation with a trusted academician Chepyzhin, but directly picks at Stalin (III - 25): "here the Boss kept strengthening friendship with the Germans." Yes, Shtrum, it turns out, we could not have imagined that - for years, with indignation, he has been following excessive praises to Stalin. So he understands everything? we have not been told this before. So the politically soiled Darensky, publicly standing up for a captured German, shouts to the colonel in front of the soldiers: “scoundrel” (very implausible). Four little-acquainted intellectuals in the rear, in Kazan, in 1942, discuss the massacres of 1937 at length, naming famous cursed names (I - 64). And more than once in general terms - about the entire terrorized atmosphere of 1937 (III - 5, II - 26). And even Shaposhnikov’s grandmother, politically completely neutral throughout the entire 1st volume, busy only with work and family, now recalls the “traditions of the Narodnaya Volya family” of hers, and 1937, collectivization, and even the famine of 1921. The more reckless her granddaughter, still a schoolgirl, conducts political conversations with his suitor, a lieutenant, and even sings a Magadan song of prisoners. Now we will meet the mention of the famine of 1932-33.

And now - we are walking to the last one: in the midst of the Battle of Stalingrad, the unwinding of the political "case" against one of the highest heroes - Grekov (this is Soviet reality, yes!) And even to the general conclusion of the author about the Stalingrad celebration, which is after him " the silent dispute between the victorious people and the victorious state continued” (III – 17). This, however, was not given to everyone in 1960. It is a pity that this was expressed without any connection with the general text, some kind of cursory intrusion, and - alas, it is not developed in the book any more. And even towards the very end of the book, excellent: “Stalin said:“ brothers and sisters ... ”And when the Germans were defeated, the director of the cottage should not enter without a report, and brothers and sisters in dugouts” (III - 60).

But even in the 2nd volume you will sometimes meet from the author either “worldwide reaction” (II - 32), or quite state-of-the-art: “the spirit of the Soviet troops was unusually high” (III - 8); and let's read a rather solemn praise to Stalin that on July 3, 1941, he "was the first to understand the secret of the transformation of the war" into our victory (III - 56). And in a sublime tone of admiration, Shtrum thinks about Stalin (III-42) after Stalin's telephone call - such lines cannot be written without the author's sympathy for them. And undoubtedly, with the same complicity, the author shares Krymov's romantic admiration for the ridiculous solemn meeting on November 6, 1942 in Stalingrad - "there was something reminiscent of the revolutionary holidays of old Russia." Yes, and Krymov's excited memories of Lenin's death also reveal the author's complicity (II - 39). Grossman himself undoubtedly retains faith in Lenin. And he does not try to hide his direct sympathy for Bukharin.

This is the limit that Grossman cannot cross.

And all this was written - in the calculation (naive) for publication in the USSR. (Isn’t that why the unconvincing one also intervenes: “Great Stalin! Perhaps a man of iron will is the most weak-willed of all. A slave of time and circumstances.”) So if the “squabblers” are from the district trade union council, and something directly in the forehead of the communist authorities ? - God forbid. About General Vlasov - one contemptuous mention of Commander Novikov (but it is clear that it is also the author's, for who in the Moscow intelligentsia understood anything about the Vlasov movement even by 1960?). And then even more untouchable - once the most timid guess: "what Lenin was smart about, and he did not understand," - but it was said again by this desperate and doomed Grekov (I - 61). Moreover, towards the end of the volume, like a monument, the indestructible Menshevik (the author's wreath in memory of his father?) Dreling, the eternal prisoner, looms.

Yes, after 1955-56 he had already heard a lot about the camps, that was the time for “returns” from the Gulag, and now the author of the epic, even if only out of conscientiousness, if not considerations of composition, is trying to cover the barred world as much as possible. Now, the echelon with prisoners (II - 25) opens up to the eyes of the passengers of the free train. Now - the author dares to step into the zone himself, to describe it from the inside according to signs from the stories of those who returned. For this, Abarchuk, who had failed deafly in the 1st volume, emerges, the first husband of Lyudmila Shtrum, however, an orthodox communist, and in company with him is the conscious communist Neumolimov, and also Abram Rubin, from the Institute of the Red Professors : “I am a lower caste, untouchable”), and also the former Chekist Magar, allegedly touched by late remorse for one ruined dispossessed, and other intellectuals - such and such and then returned to Moscow circles. The author tries to realistically portray the camp morning (I - 39, some details are correct, some are incorrect). In several chapters, he densely illustrates the impudence of the thieves (but why does Grossman call the power of the criminals over the political “innovation of National Socialism”? - no, don’t take it away from the Bolsheviks, since 1918!), And the learned democrat improbably refuses to stand at the guard round. These several camp chapters in a row pass as if in a gray fog: as if it looks like, but - done. But you can’t blame the author for such an attempt: after all, with no less courage he undertakes to describe the prisoner of war camp in Germany - both according to the requirements of the epic and for a more persistent goal: to finally compare communism with Nazism. He rightly rises to another generalization: that the Soviet camp and the Soviet will correspond to the "laws of symmetry." (Apparently, Grossman seemed to be shaky in understanding the future of his book: he wrote it for the Soviet public! - but at the same time he wanted to be completely truthful.) Together with his character Krymov, Grossman enters Bolshaya Lubyanka, also collected from stories . (Some mistakes in reality and in the atmosphere are also natural here: sometimes the person under investigation sits right across the table from the investigator and his papers; sometimes, exhausted by insomnia, he does not spare the night for an exciting conversation with his cellmate, and the guards, strangely, do not interfere with them in this. ) He writes several times (erroneously for 1942): "MGB" instead of "NKVD"; and only 10 thousand victims are attributed to the terrifying construction site 501 ...

Probably, several chapters about the German concentration camp should be taken with the same amendments. That the communist underground operated there - yes, this is confirmed by witnesses. Impossible in the Soviet camps, such an organization was sometimes created and maintained in the German camps thanks to the general national soldering against the German guards, and the myopia of the latter. However, Grossman exaggerates that the scope of the underground was through all the camps, almost to the whole of Germany, that parts of grenades and machine guns were carried from the factory to the residential area (this could still be), and “they were assembling in blocks” (this is already a fantasy). But what is certain: yes, some communists rubbed themselves into the confidence of the German guards, made their own fools, and could send those they disliked, that is, anti-communists, to be punished or sent to penal camps (as in Grossman's case they send the people's leader Ershov to Buchenwald).

Now, Grossman is much freer in the military theme; now let's read something that was impossible to think about in the 1st volume. As the commander of a tank corps, Novikov arbitrarily (and risking his entire career and orders) delays the attack appointed by the front commander for 8 minutes - so that they can better suppress the enemy’s firepower and ours would not have heavy losses. (And it is characteristic: Novikov-brother, introduced in the 1st volume solely to illustrate selfless socialist labor, now the author completely forgets, how he failed, he is no longer needed in a serious book.) Now, ardent envy is added to the former legendaryness of Commander Chuikov him to other generals and dead drunkenness, before falling into the wormwood. And the company commander spends all the vodka received for the fighters on his own name days. And their own aircraft are bombing their own. And they send infantry to unsuppressed machine guns. And we no longer read those pathetic phrases about the great national unity. (No, there is something left.)

But the receptive, observant Grossman grasped enough of the reality of the Stalingrad battles even from his correspondent position. The battles in the “Grekov’s house” are described very honestly, with all the combat reality, just like Grekov himself. The author clearly sees and knows the Stalingrad combat circumstances, faces, and even the atmosphere of all headquarters - all the more reliably. Finishing his review of the military Stalingrad, Grossman writes: "His soul was freedom." Does the author really think so or inspire himself as he would like to think? No, the soul of Stalingrad was: "for the native land!"

As we see from the novel, as we know both from witnesses and from other publications of the author, Grossman was sharply stung by the Jewish problem, the situation of Jews in the USSR, and even more so, burning pain, oppression and horror from the destruction of Jews on the German side were added to this. front. But in the 1st volume he was numb before the Soviet censorship, and inwardly he still did not dare to break away from Soviet thinking - and we saw to what a belittled degree the Jewish theme was suppressed in the 1st volume, and, in any case, not a stroke of what -either Jewish constraint or displeasure in the USSR.

The transition to freedom of expression was given to Grossman, as we have seen, not easily, aimlessly, without balance throughout the volume of the book. The same is true of the Jewish problem. Here, the Jewish employees of the institute are prevented from returning with others from evacuation to Moscow - Shtrum's reaction is completely in the Soviet tradition: "Thank God, we do not live in tsarist Russia." And here - not Shtrum's naivety, the author consistently holds that before the war there was neither a spirit nor a rumor of any hostility or a special attitude towards Jews in the USSR. Shtrum himself “never thought” about his Jewishness, “before the war, Shtrum never thought that he was a Jew”, “his mother never spoke to him about this - neither in childhood, nor during his student years”; about this "fascism forced him to think." And where is the "evil anti-Semitism" that was so vigorously suppressed in the USSR for the first 15 Soviet years? And Shtrum's mother: "forgotten during the years of Soviet power that I am a Jew", "I never felt like a Jew." Persistent repetition loses credibility. And where did that come from? The Germans came - a neighbor in the yard: "Thank God, the Jews are finished"; and at a meeting of the townspeople under the Germans, “how much slander there was against the Jews” - where did all this suddenly break through? and how did it hold up in a country where everyone forgot about Jewry?

If in the 1st volume almost no Jewish surnames were mentioned, in the 2nd volume we meet them more often. Here is the staff hairdresser Rubinchik playing the violin in Stalingrad, in the Rodimtsevo headquarters. In the same place - combat captain Movshovich, commander of a sapper battalion. Military doctor Dr. Meisel, a surgeon of the highest class, selfless to such an extent that he performs a difficult operation at the onset of his own angina attack. An unnamed quiet child, the frail son of a Jewish manufacturer who died sometime in the past. Several Jews in today's Soviet camp have already been mentioned above. (Abarchuk is a former big boss in the famine-stricken Kuzbass construction, but his communist past is presented softly, and today’s enviable position in the camp as a tool storekeeper is not explained.) And if in to the family Shaposhnikovs in the 1st volume, the semi-Jewish origin of two grandchildren - Seryozha and Tolya was vaguely obscured, then about the third granddaughter Nadia in the 2nd volume - both without connection with the action, and without necessity - it was emphasized: “Well, not a drop of our Slavic blood in she is not. A completely Jewish girl. - To strengthen his view that the national attribute has no real influence, Grossman more than once emphatically opposes one Jew to another in their positions. “Mr. Shapiro, a representative of the United Press agency, asked tricky questions at conferences to the head of the Sovinformburo, Solomon Abramovich Lozovsky.” Between Abarchuk and Rubin - a fabricated irritation. The arrogant, cruel and mercenary commissar of the air regiment Berman does not defend, but even publicly stigmatizes the unjustly offended brave pilot of the King. And when Shtrum begins to be persecuted at his institute, the sly and fat-assed Gurevich betrays him, at the meeting he debunks his scientific successes and hints at Shtrum's "national intolerance". This calculated method of arranging the characters is already taking on the character of a raster by the author of his sore spot. Unfamiliar young people saw Shtrum at the station waiting for a train to Moscow - immediately: "Abram is returning from the evacuation", "Abram is in a hurry to receive a medal for the defense of Moscow."

Tolstovets Ikonnikov, the author gives such a course of feelings. “The persecutions that the Bolsheviks carried out after the revolution against the church were useful for the Christian idea” - and the number of victims at that time did not undermine his religious faith; he preached the gospel during the general collectivization, observing mass casualties, but, after all, "collectivization was in the name of good" too. But when he saw "the execution of twenty thousand Jews ... - on that day [he] realized that God could not allow such a thing, and ... it became obvious that he was not."

Now, at last, Grossman can afford to reveal to us the contents of Strum's mother's suicide letter, which was given to her son in the 1st volume, but only vaguely mentioned that it brought bitterness: in 1952, the author did not dare to give it to publication. Now it occupies a large chapter (I - 18) and with a deep spiritual feeling conveys the experience of the mother in the Ukrainian city captured by the Germans, disappointment in the neighbors, next to whom they lived for years; everyday details of the removal of local Jews into the corral of an artificial temporary ghetto; life there, various types and psychology of captured Jews; and self-preparation for inexorable death. The letter is written with stingy drama, without tragic exclamations - and very expressive. Here they are chasing Jews along the pavement, and on the sidewalks there is a staring crowd; those - dressed in summer, and the Jews who took things in reserve - "in coats, in hats, women in warm scarves", "it seemed to me that for the Jews walking along the street, the sun had already refused to shine, they were walking among December night cold.

Grossman undertakes to describe both mechanized, central destruction, and tracing it from the plan; the author is tensely restrained, neither a cry nor a jerk: Obersturmbannführer Liss is busily inspecting the plant under construction, and this is in technical terms, we are not aware that the plant is designated for the mass extermination of people. The author’s voice breaks only at the “surprise” to Eichmann and Liss: they are offered in the future gas chamber (this is artificially inserted, in etching) - a table with wine and snacks, and the author comments on this as a “cute fiction”. When asked how many Jews are in question, the figure is not named, the author tactfully evades, and only "Liss, amazed, asked: - Millions?" - the artist's sense of proportion.

Together with Dr. Sophia Levinton, who was captured by the Germans back in the 1st volume, the author now draws the reader into the thickening stream of Jews doomed to destruction. At first, it is the reflection in the brain of the distraught accountant Rosenberg of mass burnings of Jewish corpses. And another madness - an undershot girl who got out of a common grave. When describing the depth of suffering and incoherent hopes, and the naive last everyday worries of doomed people, Grossman tries to stay within the limits of dispassionate naturalism. All these descriptions require remarkable work of the author's imagination - to imagine what no one has seen or experienced from the living, there was no one to collect reliable evidence from, but one must imagine these details - a dropped children's cube or a butterfly chrysalis in a matchbox. The author in a number of chapters tries to be as factual as possible, and even everyday, avoiding an explosion of feelings both in himself and in the characters, drawn in by forced mechanical movement. He presents us with an extermination plant - generalized, without calling it by the name "Auschwitz". A surge of emotions allows itself only when responding to the music that accompanies the column of the doomed and outlandish shocks from it in the souls. This is very strong. And immediately close - about the black-and-red rotten chemical water, which will wash away the remnants of the destroyed into the world's oceans. And now - the last feelings of people (the old maid Levinton flares up a maternal feeling for someone else's baby, and in order to be with him, she refuses to go out to the saving challenge “who is the surgeon here?”), And even - the spiritual upsurge of death. And further, further, the author gets used to every detail: a deceptive "waiting room", cutting women to collect their hair, someone's wit on the verge of death, "the muscular strength of smoothly curving concrete, drawing in a human stream", "some kind of half-asleep slip ”, more and more dense, more and more compressed in the chamber, “everything is shorter than the steps of people”, “hypnotic concrete rhythm”, whirling the crowd - and gas death, darkening the eyes and consciousness. (And that would be to break it off. But the author, an atheist, gives the following reasoning that death is “the transition from the world of freedom to the realm of slavery” and “the Universe that existed in man has ceased to be”, - this is perceived as an insulting breakdown from a spiritual height reached by previous pages.)

Compared to this mighty self-convincing scene of mass destruction, a separate chapter (II - 32) of an abstract discussion about anti-Semitism is weak in the novel: about its heterogeneity, about its content and reducing all its causes to the mediocrity of envious people. The reasoning is inconsistent, not based on history and far from exhausting the topic. Along with a number of correct remarks, the fabric of this chapter is highly unequal.

And the plot of the Jewish problem in the novel is more built around the physicist Shtrum. In the 1st volume, the author did not dare to expand the image, now he decides to do so - and the main line is closely intertwined with the Jewish origin of Shtrum. Now, belatedly, we learn about the nauseating “eternal inferiority complex” that he experiences in a Soviet setting: “you enter the meeting room - the first row is free, but I don’t dare to sit down, I’m going to Kamchatka.” Here - and the shaking effect on him of his mother's dying letter.

According to the laws of a literary text, the author, of course, does not tell us about the very essence of Strum's scientific discovery, and should not. And the poetic chapter (I - 17) about physics in general is good. The moment when the seed of the new theory was guessed is very plausibly described - the moment when Strum was busy with completely different conversations and concerns. This thought "seemed not to be generated by him, it rose simply, easily, like a white water flower from the calm darkness of the lake." In deliberately inaccurate terms, Strum's discovery is raised as epoch-making (this is well expressed: “gravity, mass, time collapsed, space is doubled, which has no being, but only magnetic meaning”), “the classical theory itself has become only a special case in the new Strum developed wide solution," the Institute's staff directly put Strum after Bohr and Planck. From Chepyzhin, more practical than that, we learn that Strum's theory will be useful in the development of nuclear processes.

In order to vitally balance the greatness of the discovery, Grossman, with true artistic tact, begins to delve into Strum's personal shortcomings, some of his fellow physicists consider him unkind, mocking, arrogant. Grossman also lowers him outwardly: “scratching and protruding his lip”, “schizophrenic bites”, “shuffling gait”, “sloven”, likes to tease his family, loved ones, is rude and unfair to his stepson; and once “in a rage, he tore his shirt and, tangled in his underpants, galloped to his wife on one leg, raising his fist, ready to strike.” But he has a “tough, bold directness” and “inspiration”. Sometimes the author notes Shtrum's pride, often his irritability, and rather petty, that's for his wife. "A painful irritation seized Shtrum", "an agonizing irritation coming from the depths of the soul." (Through Shtrum, the author, as it were, discharges himself from those tensions that he himself experienced in the constraints of many years.) “Shtrum was angry with conversations on everyday topics, and at night, when he could not sleep, he thought about being attached to a Moscow distributor.” Returning from the evacuation to his spacious, comfortable Moscow apartment, he casually notices that the driver, who brought their luggage, “apparently was seriously concerned with the housing issue.” And having received the coveted privileged "food package", he is tormented that the employee of a smaller caliber was given no less: "It's amazing we know how to insult people."

What are his political views? (His cousin served a camp term and was sent into exile.) “Before the war, Shtrum did not have particularly acute doubts” (according to Volume 1, we recall that they did not arise during the war either). For example, at that time he believed the wild accusations against the famous professor Pletnev - oh, from the “prayerful attitude to the Russian printed word”, - this is about Pravda ... and even in 1937? .. (Elsewhere: “I remembered 1937 , when the names of those arrested last night were called almost daily ..-.”) In another place we read that Shtrum even “groaned about the suffering of the dispossessed during the period of collectivization”, which is completely unimaginable. That's what Dostoevsky "rather "The Diary of a Writer" should not have been written" - this is his opinion is believed. By the end of the evacuation, in the circle of institute employees, Shtruma suddenly breaks through that in science for him there are no authorities - "the head of the science department of the Central Committee" Zhdanov "and even ...". Here "they were waiting for him to pronounce the name of Stalin," but he prudently only "waved his hand." Yes, however, already at home: "all my conversations ... blowing in my pocket."

Grossman's not all of this is linked (maybe he did not have time to finish the book to the last stroke) - but more importantly, he is leading his hero to a difficult and decisive test. And then it came - in 1943 instead of the expected 1948 - 49, an anachronism, but this is a permissible technique for the author, because he camouflage transfers here his own equally difficult test of 1953. Of course, in 1943, a physical discovery promising nuclear applications could only expect honor and success, and not the persecution that arose among colleagues without an order from above, and even discovered the “spirit of Judaism” in the discovery - but this is how the author needs to: reproduce the situation at the end 40s. (In a series of chronologically unthinkable runs, Grossman already mentions both the execution of the Anti-Fascist Jewish Committee and the "doctors' case", 1952.)

And - it fell. "A chill of fear touched Shtrum, that which has always secretly lived in the heart, fear of the wrath of the state." Immediately, a blow is dealt to his minor Jewish employees. At first, not yet assessing the depth of the danger, Shtrum undertakes to express impudence to the director of the institute - although he is shy in front of another academician, Shishakov, a “pyramidal buffalo”, “like a shtetl Jew in front of a cavalry colonel”. The blow is the more painful that it befalls instead of the expected Stalin Prize. Shtrum turns out to be very responsive to the outbreak of bullying and, last but not least, to all its domestic consequences - the deprivation of the dacha, the closed distributor and possible apartment constraints. Even before his colleagues tell him, Shtrum, by the inertia of a Soviet citizen, himself guesses: “I would write a letter of repentance, because everyone writes in such situations.” Further, his feelings and actions alternate with great psychological fidelity, and are described resourcefully. He tries to unwind in a conversation with Chepyzhin (at the same time, Chepyzhin's old servant kisses Strum on the shoulder: is she admonishing for execution?). And Chepyzhin, instead of encouragement, immediately embarks on a presentation of his confused, atheistically delusional, mixed scientific and social hypothesis: how humanity will surpass God by free evolution. (Chepyzhin was artificially invented and shoved in Volume 1, he is just as exaggerated in this invented scene.) But regardless of the emptiness of the stated hypothesis, the behavior of Shtrum, who came after all for spiritual reinforcement, is psychologically very correct. He half-hears this tedium, he thinks drearily to himself: “I don’t care about philosophy, because they can put me in prison,” he still continues to think: should he go to repentance or not? and the conclusion aloud: “people of great soul, prophets, saints should be engaged in science in our time”, “where can I get faith, strength, stamina,” he quickly said, and a Jewish accent was heard in his voice. Feel sorry for yourself. He leaves, and on the stairs "tears flowed down his cheeks." And soon go to the decisive Academic Council. Reads and rereads his possible penitential statement. He starts a game of chess - and then absentmindedly leaves it, everything is very lively, and the remarks adjacent to it. Now, “thievishly looking around, hastily tying his tie with miserable parochial antics,” he hurries to catch his repentance - and finds the strength to push this step away, takes off both his tie and his jacket - he will not go.

And then he is oppressed by fears - and ignorance, who opposed him, and what they said, and what will they do with him now? Now, in ossification, he does not leave the house for several days - they stopped calling him on the phone, he was betrayed by those whose support he hoped for - and domestic constraints are already choking: he was already “afraid of the house manager and the girl from the card bureau” , take away the surplus of living space, correspondent member's salary - to sell things? and even, in the last despair, “often thought that he would go to the military registration and enlistment office, refuse the armor of the Academy and ask the Red Army to go to the front” ... And then there was the arrest of his brother-in-law, ex-husband wife's sister, isn't she threatening that Shtrum will be arrested too? Like any prosperous person: they haven’t shaken him too much yet, but he feels like the last edge of existence.

And then - a completely Soviet turn: Stalin's magical friendly call to Shtrum - and immediately everything changed fabulously, and employees rush to Shtrum to curry favor. So the scientist - won and survived? The rarest example of resilience in the Soviet era?

It wasn’t there, Grossman unmistakably leads: and now the next, no less terrible temptation is from affectionate hugs. Although Shtrum proactively justifies himself that he is not the same as the pardoned campers, who immediately forgave everything and cursed their former martyrs. But now he is already afraid to cast a shadow on himself as his wife's sister, fussing about her arrested husband, his wife also irritates him, but the goodwill of the authorities and "getting into some special lists" became very pleasant. "The most surprising thing was" that from people "until recently full of contempt and suspicion towards him", he now "naturally perceived their friendly feelings." I even felt with surprise: "administrators and party leaders ... unexpectedly, these people opened up to Shtrum from the other side, the human side." And in such a complacent state of mind, this Novolaska bosses invites him to sign the most vile patriotic letter to the New York Times. And Shtrum does not find the strength and trick how to refuse, and limply signs. “Some dark nauseating feeling of humility”, “powerlessness, magnetization, an obedient feeling of a fed and spoiled cattle, fear of a new ruin of life.”

In such a plot twist, Grossman executes himself for his obedient signature in January 1953 on the “doctors' case”. (Even, for literalness, so that the “case of doctors” remains, - anachronistically intersperses those long-destroyed professors Pletnev and Levin here.) It seems: now the 2nd volume will be printed - and repentance has been uttered publicly.

But instead of that, the KGB came and confiscated the manuscript...

(II option)
The natural desire of man for freedom is indestructible, it can be suppressed, but not destroyed. Man will not voluntarily give up freedom. V. Grossman
“Manuscripts do not burn...” How many times have Woland's phrase been quoted, but I want to repeat it again. Our time is the time of discoveries, returned masters, waiting in the wings, finally seeing the light. The novel by V. Grossman "Life and Fate", written thirty-five years ago, came to the reader only in 1988 and shocked the literary world with its modernity, the great power of its truthful word about war, about life, about fate. He reflected his time. Only now, in the nineties, it became possible to speak and write about what the author of the novel is thinking about. And therefore this work belongs to today, it is topical even now.
Reading “Life and Fate”, one cannot but be amazed at the scale of the novel, the depth of the conclusions made by the author. It seems that philosophical ideas are intertwined, forming a bizarre but harmonious fabric. Sometimes it is difficult to see and understand these ideas. Where is the main thing, what is the main idea pervading the story? What is life, what is destiny? “Life is so confusing... paths, ravines, swamps, streams... And fate is straight, straight, you go with a string... Life is freedom,” the author reflects. Fate, however, is unfreedom, slavery; it is not for nothing that people doomed to death in gas chambers feel how "a sense of fate is growing in them." Fate is not subject to the will of man.
The main theme of Grossman's work is freedom. The concept of "freedom", "will" is familiar to the wild beast. But that is physical freedom or lack of freedom. With the advent of the human mind, the meaning of these concepts has changed, become deeper. There is moral freedom, moral freedom, freedom of thought, non-enslavement of the soul. So what is more important - to preserve the freedom of the body or the mind? Why is this philosophical problem did the author care? Obviously, this was predetermined by the era in which he lived. Two states rose above the world at that time, converged in the struggle, and the fate of mankind depended on the outcome of this battle. Both powers, according to one of the characters in the novel, are party states. “The strength of the party leader did not require the talent of a scientist, the talent of a writer. She was above talent, above talent.” The term “the will of the party” meant the will of one person, whom we now call a dictator. Both states were similar to each other in that their citizens, deprived of the official right to think, feel, behave in accordance with their individuality, constantly felt the power of fear prevailing over them. One way or another, state buildings, more like prisons, were erected and seemed indestructible. Man was assigned an insignificant role in them; far higher than he stood the state and the spokesman of its will, infallible and mighty. “Fascism and man cannot coexist. On one pole is the state, on the other is the need of man.” It is no coincidence that Grossman, comparing the two camps, compares the totalitarian states - Germany and the Soviet Union of the thirties and forties. People sit there for the same “crimes”: a careless word, bad work. These are "criminals who have not committed crimes." The only difference is that the German camp is given through the eyes of Russian prisoners of war, who know what they are sitting for and are ready to fight. The people who are in the Siberian camps, consider their fate a mistake, write letters to Moscow. Tenth-grader Nadia Shtrum will understand that the one to whom her letters are addressed, in fact, is the culprit of what is happening. But the letters keep coming... The Siberian camp is perhaps worse than the German one. “Get to your own camp, your own to your own. That's where the trouble is!" - says Ershov, one of the heroes of the novel. Grossman leads us to a terrible conclusion: a totalitarian state resembles a huge camp, where prisoners are both victims and executioners. It is not for nothing that the “philosopher” Kazenelenbogen, a former security worker, would like to turn the whole country into a camp, now trapped in a cell on the Lubyanka, but continuing to declare that “in the merger, in the destruction of the opposition between the camps and the life behind the wire, there is ... the triumph of the great principles." And now two such states enter into a war against each other, the outcome of which was decided in the city on the Volga in the forty-second year. One people, drugged by the speeches of their leader, advanced, dreaming of world domination; the other, retreating, did not need calls - he saved up strength, preparing to give millions of lives, but to defeat the invader, to defend the Motherland. What happens to the souls of those who press the enemy army, and what happens in the hearts of those who are oppressed? In order to turn back the enemy, which has little power over the people, freedom is needed, and in this difficult time it has come. Never before have people had such bold, truthful, free conversations as in the days of the battles near Stalingrad. The breath of freedom is felt by people in Kazan, in Moscow, but most of all it is in the “world city”, the symbol of which will be the house “six fraction one”, where they talk about the thirty-seventh year and collectivization. Fighting for the independence of their homeland, people like Ershov and Grekov are also fighting for the freedom of the individual in their own country. Grekov will tell Commissar Krymov: “I want freedom, and I fight for it.” In the days of defeat, when free power rose from the very bottom of human souls, Stalin feels that ... not only today's enemies were victorious on the battlefields. Behind Hitler's tanks in the dust and smoke were all those whom he seemed to have pacified and reassured forever. "Not only history judges the vanquished." Stalin himself understands that if he is defeated, then he will not be forgiven for what he did to his people. A feeling of Russian national pride is gradually rising in the souls of people. At the same time, insight comes to the encircled German soldiers, to those who a few months ago crushed the remnants of doubt in themselves, convinced themselves of the rightness of the Fuhrer and the party, like Oberleutnant Bach. The Stalingrad operation determined the outcome of the war, but the silent dispute between the victorious people and the victorious state continues. So who will win - the state or the individual? After all, freedom begins with a person. Totalitarian power suppresses, the feeling of fear for life fetters, gives rise to humility before this power. However, many people sincerely believe that their strength lies in admiring the state, the party, in perceiving the statements of the leader as holy truths. Such may not bow before the fear of death, but with a shudder they reject doubts about what they have believed throughout their lives. Such is the old Bolshevik, Leninist Mostovskaya, having heard from the lips of the Gestapo Liss what tormented him, what he was even afraid to admit to himself in his heart, only for a moment loses confidence: “We must abandon what we have lived all my life, condemn what that defended and justified." This strong, unbending man himself seeks unfreedom, feels relieved, once again obeying the will of the party, approving the sending of Yershov, who despises violence, to the death camp. Others, like Magar, Krymov, Shtrum, needed a defeat in order to become human, to see the truth, to return freedom to their souls. Krymov begins to see clearly, once in the camera. Magar, having lost his freedom, is trying to convey his conclusions to his student Abarchuk: “We do not understand freedom, we distributed it ... It is the basis, meaning, basis over basis.” But, faced with distrust, fanatical blindness, Magar commits suicide. He paid a heavy price for spiritual emancipation. Losing illusions, Magar loses the meaning of existence. The influence of freedom on thoughts, human behavior is especially convincingly shown on the example of Shtrum. It is at the very moment when the “mighty power of the free word” has completely swallowed up thoughts that Strum comes to his scientific victory, his discovery. Just when his friends turned away from him and the power of the totalitarian state crushed and oppressed, Strum will find the strength not to sin against his own conscience, to feel free. But Stalin's call blows out these sprouts of freedom, and only by signing the vile, false letter will he be horrified by what he has done, and this defeat will reopen his heart and mind to freedom. The most powerful, unbroken, unenslaved human personality in the novel will be the pathetic prisoner of the German Ikonnikov camp, who proclaims ridiculous and absurd categories of supra-class morality.

A few words about the book.

The era of witnesses is ending - people who remember that time because they saw it.
Vasily Grossman was not only "one of the most profound witnesses of the present century", but also far ahead of his contemporaries in the comparative consideration of fascism and Stalinist terror.

Vasily Grossman wrote a hopeful letter to Nikita Khrushchev in 1962 about the publication of his novel: "I ask you to return the freedom to my book, I ask that the editors speak and argue with me about my manuscript, and not employees of the State Security Committee. ... There is no truth , there is no point in the current situation, in my physical freedom, when the book to which I gave my life is in prison, because I wrote it, because I did not renounce and do not renounce it. ... I still believe that I wrote the truth that wrote it, loving and pitying people, believing in people. I ask for freedom for my book.

After that, a conversation took place between the writer and the main ideologist Mikhail Suslov, who categorically rejected the possibility of publishing the book. The official reviewers of the manuscript claimed that this novel was “more harmful” than Doctor Zhivago, and it could only be published in 250 years. As a result, its publication in Moscow took place almost thirty years later.

The history of the creation of the novel and its withdrawal from the author is written in a joint book by Anna Samoilovna Berzer and Semyon Izrailevich Lipkin.

What was the main thing in the book is not reflected in the director's film of the same name. There were two main themes:

Theme one is the identity of the totalitarian regimes-Stalin and Hitler.
The central idea is a parallel of the world of Nazi and Soviet camps.

The second theme is the Holocaust.

There is no scene in the film where naked people are sent to the gas chamber. Adults and children who do not understand that they are sent not to wash, but to die.

From the Izvestia newspaper:

"There is such an opinion, very widespread, which has become almost an axiom. There are good people in Russia, beautiful people but terrible inhuman power. The people, too, are a scoundrel. And it is still unknown what is more immoral - ideological anti-Semitism or everyday, when not fascists, but neighbors in a communal apartment rent Jews with giblets for extra square meters. Who is more disgusting - a Gestapo man or an experienced Bolshevik sitting in a concentration camp, with the connivance of which a bunk neighbor is sent to the gas chamber.

The writer Vasily Grossman spent the entire war from 1941 to 1945 at the front as a correspondent for Krasnaya Zvezda. In the first days of the defense, the writer ended up in Stalingrad and saw all subsequent events with his own eyes, from the inside. He looked at the war through the eyes of a soldier, and his war turned out to be truthful and not at all heroic.

Heinrich BÖLL about Grossman's book: "This is a mighty achievement, not just a book, it is even more than a few interconnected novels, it has its own history and its own future."

Director Ursulyak, together with wonderful actors, created a wonderful film about the war. But this is not Grossman. Although, of course, the film will draw readers' attention to the best book of the twentieth century.

In connection with questions about the novel by V. Grossman, I will add some information and bibliography.

The writer was born in Berdichev. Father - Solomon Iosifovich, a graduate of the University of Bern, a chemical engineer by profession. Mother - Ekaterina Savelyevna Vitis was educated in France, a French teacher. Parents subsequently divorced. The mother raised her son. The name Vasily became the pseudonym of the writer.

In 1934 he published a story about the life of miners and factory intelligentsia "Glukauf", which met with the support of Gorky, and a story about the Civil War "In the city of Berdichev". The success of these works strengthened Grossman's desire to become a professional writer. This story - "In the city of Berdichev" later became a film. In 1967, director A. Ya. Askoldov shot the film "Commissioner", which was banned and first shown in 1988.

In 1941, Grossman was drafted into the army.
During the German occupation, along with other Berdichev Jews, a mother was killed
Vasily Grossman.
From 1946-1959 he created the novel "For a Just Cause".

After numerous critical responses, the writer redoes the work. The second part of the novel "Life and Fate" had its own tragic history. She was not printed. Her
arrested.

During the battle for Stalingrad, the writer was in the city from the first to the last day of street fighting. For participation in the Battle of Stalingrad, including in battles on the front line of defense, he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of War.

In 1943 he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel.

On the memorial of Mamaev Kurgan, the words from his essay “The Direction of the Main Strike” are engraved: “The iron wind hit them in the face, and they kept moving forward, and again a feeling of superstitious fear seized the enemy: did people go on the attack, were they mortal?” The stories “The People are Immortal”, “Stalingrad Essays”, and other military essays were compiled into the 1945 book “During the War”.

Grossman was among the correspondents who were the first to set foot in the Majdanek and Treblinka concentration camps liberated by the Soviet troops.

The description of what he saw in Majdanek was entrusted to Konstatin Simonov, and at the end of 1944 Grossman published an article about Treblinka "Treblin hell", which opened the topic of the Holocaust in the USSR. After the war, Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg compiled the so-called " black book» - a collection of testimonies and documents about the Holocaust.

The Black Book was published on English language in 1947 in New York, but its Russian edition did not appear then. The set was scattered in 1948

Vasily Grossman died after a serious illness. S. I. Lipkin, the closest friend of the writer, was able to keep one copy of the arrested novel. After the death of Grossman, with the help of A.D. Sakharov and V.N. Voinovich took the book to the West.
In 1980 it was published in Switzerland. Published in the USSR in 1988.

From current entries:

February 1961 The novel by Vasily Grossman "Life and Fate" was arrested. Typewritten copies, the manuscript, all drafts and sketches related to Life and Fate were confiscated from the author. They even confiscated carbon paper and typewritten tape. They demanded that Grossman sign a non-disclosure agreement. Grossman did not. Copies of the manuscript were also confiscated from the typist in the editorial office of Novy Mir, and a copy of the novel was taken from the magazine Znamya. In search of the remaining copies of the novel, they dug up the garden of the author's cousin, Viktor Sherentsis. Grossman sent a letter to Khrushchev: "I ask for freedom for my book." It was accepted by Suslov, whose verdict was as follows: "This 'harmful book' will not be published before 250 years."

Even for 1960, this novel turned out to be "too free": it was rejected by the press and confiscated by the secret services. In 1980, the novel was printed in Switzerland. In the USSR, the novel was published in the October magazine in 1988. In 1961, Grossman's story "Everything flows", which was published in Germany in 1970 and in his homeland only in 1989, was also confiscated. In 2007, Lev Dodin staged a play based on the novel "Life and Fate" on the stage of the Maly Drama Theater - the Theater of Europe in St. Petersburg. In France, the book was published with a circulation of 30,000 copies.

"Glukauf", 1934

"Stepan Kolchugin", vols. 1-3, 1937-40, vols. 1-4, 1947. Filmed in 1957 (directed by T. Rodionova)

"The people are immortal", 1942

"Stalingrad", 1943

"Years of War", 1945

"For a Just Cause", 1954 ("New World", 1952, No. 7 - 10)

"Tales, stories, essays", 1958

"Old teacher", 1962

"Good to you!", 1967

“Everything flows…”, Frankfurt/M., “Sowing” 1970

"Life and Destiny", Lausanne, 1980

"On Jewish Themes", in 2 vols., Tel Aviv, 1985.

Screen adaptations

In 1957, the novel "Stepan Kolchugin" was filmed (directed by T. Rodionova).
According to the story "In the city of Berdichev" (In 2011-2012). In 1967, director A. Ya. Askoldov shot the film "Commissioner", which was banned and first shown in 1988.

Sergei Ursulyak directed the television series "Life and Fate" based on the script by Eduard Volodarsky (the last work of E. Volodarsky.)

Notes

Anninsky, L. A. "The Universe of Vasily Grossman". In: Grossman V.S. Life and destiny. - M.: Eksmo, 2011. - P. 7-26. - $864 - ISBN 978-5-699-45917-9

Gessen, Keith Under Siege. The New Yorker (March 6, 2006). Archived from the original on August 5, 2012. Retrieved July 7, 2012.

Document No. 11 // EAC, V. S. Grossman, I. G. Ehrenburg - to the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks with a request to publish a “black book” // 11/28/1946 Alexander Yakovlev Fund
G. Alexandrov. Memorandum of the agitprop of the Central Committee to A. A. Zhdanov on the issue of publishing the Black Book. Stalin and cosmopolitanism. Alexander Yakovlev Foundation (February 3, 1947). Archived from the original on August 27, 2011. Retrieved December 20, 2010.

Autobiography of V. Grossman. 1952. Op. by: Huber, F. "THE IMPLEMENTING LIFE AS
I WANTED..." From the book about Vasily Grossman "Memory and Letters" // Questions of Literature. - 1996. - V. 2.

Decree of the Presidium of the Board of the Union of Soviet Writers of the USSR “On the novel by V. Grossman “For a Just Cause” and on the work of the editors of the journal Novy Mir”, 03/23/1953 Almanac “Russia. XX century”, Archive of Alexander N. Yakovlev

FAREWELL, belousenko.com, Anna Berzer, MOSCOW "BOOK", 1990

Saint Basil, who did not believe in God

LIFE AND FATE OF VASILY GROSSMAN, Semyon Lipkin, belousenko.com
Huber, F. V. Grossman. In the last years of life // Questions of literature. - M., 1998. - V. 4.

E. V. Korotkova-Grossman: “Father emerged victorious from the confrontation with the system”

Epstein, Joseph Tolstoy's Heir. The Wall Street Journal (May 5, 2007). Archived from the original on August 5, 2012. Retrieved July 8, 2012.

Sarnov, B. M. "War and Peace" of the twentieth century // Lechaim. - 2007. - V. 1 (177).

Dashevsky, G. M. About "Life and Fate" by Vasily Grossman // Kommersant-Weekend. - 2012. - V. 39(284).

Shtedtke, K. Life and Fate // Emergency Reserve. - M., 2005. - V. 2-3 (40-41).

Kahn, Alexander Grossman's novel topped the UK bestseller list (Russian).

BBC Russian service (September 22, 2011). Archived from the original on 5 February 2012. Retrieved 9 October 2011.

Grossman led the novel best-seller list in Britain. Archived from the original on August 5, 2012. Retrieved July 8, 2012.
Literature

Cossack V. Lexicon of Russian literature of the XX century = Lexikon der russischen Literatur ab 1917. - M .: RIK "Culture", 1996. - 492 p. - 5000 copies. - ISBN 5-8334-0019-8

Grossman Vasily - article from the Electronic Jewish Encyclopedia
Links
Grossman, Vasily Semyonovich in the library of Maxim Moshkov

Vasily Grossman: Writer at War
Red Army: life side by side with death, The Times, (UK), inosmi.ru, 31/01/2006

Book Review
"Writer at War: Vasily Grossman - War Correspondent of the Red Army, 1941-45"

("A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941-1945"),
"War through Ivan's Eyes: The Red Army in 1939-45" (Catherine Merridale, "Ivan's War: The Red Army, 1939-1945"),

The lessons of Vasily Grossman - an article in the magazine "The Seagull"
Works by Vasily Grossman at the Jewish Electronic Library

Vasily Grossman "On Jewish Themes". Ukraine without Jews
Dedicated to Vasily Grossman, Tatyana Menaker "My People" No. 18 (406) 09/30/2007
Anatoly Kardash (AB MISH) MARRAN (100 years of V. Grossman)

Life and fate of Vasily Grossman // To the 100th anniversary of his birth, M. ERENBURG, D. SHIMANOVSKY
Unknown pages of history The Washington Post, USA, inosmi.ru, 12/04/2006

(Recording a Hidden History, By Andrew Nagorski, April 5, 2006)
Vasily Grossman - the tragic genius of the 20th century or "Life is stronger than fate" // History of the publication of the great epic Mastinskaya Faina, andersval.nl

Vasily Grossman, Russia's greatest chronicler, still hasn't been given his due, Luke Harding, The

An epic painting about the Battle of Stalingrad. Grossman, for the first time in Soviet literature, speaks of the similarities between Nazism and Bolshevism and asks how to preserve humanity in the face of a totalitarian state.

comments: Polina Barskova

What is this book about?

In the center of the epic novel is a real historical event, the Battle of Stalingrad (1942-1943), and its significance in the life of one fictional family (Shaposhnikov-Shtrumov), however, hundreds of characters, plot conflicts, places and circumstances are included in the narrative. The action is transferred from the Berdichevsky ghetto to the dungeons of the NKVD, from the Nazi concentration camp to the Soviet one, from the secret physical laboratory in Moscow to the far rear.

Before us is a military novel, akin to its main prototype, Tolstoy, or Stendhal's "Parma Monastery", but Grossman poses other questions and tasks in it that are characteristic of the 20th century. In "Life and Fate" for the first time in Soviet literature, it is proposed comparative analysis fascism and communism as comparable political regimes that had to clash in a monstrous duel on the banks of the Volga in 1943. Grossman is the first Soviet writer to speak about state anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union: he shows the massacre of Jews in the death camp, the beginning of Stalin's anti-Semitic campaign of the late 1940s.

The Battle of Stalingrad becomes not only and not so much the main event of the novel, but rather an "assembly point", a node that connects destinies, historical collisions and historical and philosophical concepts.

Vasily Grossman, war correspondent for the Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper, in Schwerin, Germany. 1945

When was it written?

Work on the novel went from 1950 to 1959. Life and Fate was affected by a deep social upheaval from the process of de-Stalinization and the onset of the thaw, the beginning of which was laid by Khrushchev's speech at the 20th Party Congress On February 14, 1956, at the XX Congress of the CPSU, Nikita Khrushchev delivered a closed report condemning Stalin's personality cult. At the XXII Congress, in 1961, the anti-Stalinist rhetoric became even tougher: words were publicly heard about the arrests, torture, crimes of Stalin against the people, it was proposed to remove his body from the Mausoleum. After this congress, the settlements named after the leader were renamed, and the monuments to Stalin were liquidated. ⁠ . Instead of the Stalinist cult of personality in this novel, there is a cult of many individuals who are desperately trying to defend their right to freedom (Grekov, Shtrum, Novikov) and the right to follow their convictions (Ikonnikov, Krymov, Mostovsky).

The decade in which the novel was written was a time of amazing intersections between literature and politics. Thus, the term “thaw” came from the eponymous title of the novel by Ilya Ehrenburg (1954): Ehrenburg, who perfectly understood the situation, described the feeling of the need for changes in society, but very carefully. Grossman had much in common with Ehrenburg: they were (together with Konstantin Simonov) leading writers and military journalists on the Soviet fronts of World War II, together with Ehrenburg Grossman worked on the Black Book, a collection of testimonies about Nazi crimes against Jews in the USSR. However, if Ehrenburg's novel simply responded to the ideological demand of the moment, Grossman understood the end of the Stalin period much deeper and proceeded to a structural analysis of the ideological distortions of the century - as we know, neither society nor the authorities were yet ready for such an analysis.

Another important context is the novel by Boris Pasternak and the history of his persecution in 1958-1959. Grossman was also familiar with harassment: after the publication of the novel For a Just Cause, the writer was ostracized in the Union of Writers and the party press. The manuscript of "Life and Fate" was arrested by functionaries who in their actions correlated with the "incident" of "Zhivago": "Life and Fate" they considered the text even more dangerous for the Soviet ideology. After the worldwide scandal with Zhivago, it was decided to “isolate” Grossman’s novel in order to completely silence him.

Manuscript of the novel "Life and Fate". 1960

How is it written?

Grossman's narrative apparatus can be compared to a movie camera, or rather a dozen movie cameras that then present us with a panorama of grandiose and tragic historical events(be it the Battle of Stalingrad or the death of Jews in the territories occupied by the Germans), then they take a close-up of individual characters, allowing the reader to closely observe the thoughts and feelings of the characters, to penetrate into their inner world. The all-knowing and all-seeing narrator of the novel has access to inner world his characters, showing them to the reader from the outside and from the inside, forcing them to identify with them. The composition of the novel is built on the principle of montage: “glued”, intertwined storylines, destinies and collisions are connected by their attitude (sometimes very indirect, at first glance) to the Battle of Stalingrad.

What influenced her?

In a sense, Life and Fate can be considered a structural remake of Tolstoy's War and Peace in a completely different era. At the center of "Life and Fate" is the turning point of the Great Patriotic War. Where Tolstoy has the Battle of Borodino, Grossman has the Battle of Stalingrad. There are many heroes involved in the battle, both historically accurate and fictional. Sometimes it seems that even the central characters of the novel - Zhenya Shaposhnikova, a fatal "natural" beauty, and Shtrum, a doubting intellectual, have a literary pedigree from Natasha and Pierre.

But if Tolstoy showed how, in the wheel of history and war, individual people unite into a single Russian people, then Grossman wants to show how they, even united by the common goal of winning the war, do not merge together: everyone is thirsty (although very often they fail to cope with this task). ) to remain themselves under the yoke of not one, but two totalitarian states that entered the war for world superiority. The whole novel, dizzying in its complexity of structure and the multitude of characters and storylines, rests on the idea of ​​opposing the individual and the crowd (collective, mass). From the first lines about the dissimilarity of any two trees on earth, two huts and two people, this book is a discussion about the fate of a person under a totalitarian system that erases individuality. This is precisely the "individual thought", and not the "people's thought", which kept and nourished "War and Peace".

First edition of the novel. Publisher L'Age Homme (Switzerland), 1980

The history of the movement of the novel to the reader is unique (not a single novel was taken away from a Soviet writer forever, while leaving the author free and not even depriving him of the opportunity to be published) and is surrounded by legends. In particular, Mikhail Suslov's "curse" ("This novel can only be published in 200 years") is not documented.

The editorial policy of the moment played a huge role in the tragic history of the novel. If Grossman had offered his new novel to Novy Mir to Alexander Tvardovsky, things might have turned out differently, but Grossman was in a bitter quarrel with Tvardovsky, who had previously published his novel For a Just Cause, but then retracted it after critical signals from above . After Grossman transferred Life and Fate to Znamya Vadim Kozhevnikov Vadim Mikhailovich Kozhevnikov (1909-1984) - writer, journalist. He worked as a correspondent for Komsomolskaya Pravda, Ogonyok, Smena, editor of the literature and art department at Pravda. Since 1949, he was the editor-in-chief of the Znamya magazine. In 1973 he signed a collective letter of writers against Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov. Kozhevnikov is the author of the novels Meet Baluev and The Shield and the Sword, based on which films of the same name were made in the 1960s. ⁠ , they “came” for the novel: on February 14, 1961, all found manuscripts and typescripts were arrested, including the typewriter tape on which the novel was retyped.

After that, Grossman wrote a letter to Khrushchev, where, in particular, he stated: “I ask you to return the freedom to my book, I ask that the editors speak and argue with me about my manuscript, and not employees of the State Security Committee.” A meeting was arranged for him with Mikhail Suslov, secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, the party gray eminence from ideology. During the conversation, it turned out that the novel would neither be published nor returned to the author - it can be assumed that this catastrophe and the ostracism that followed it (many colleagues turned their backs on the disgraced writer) caused Grossman's untimely death. However, the writer devoted the last three years of his life to fierce and vivid literary work: in particular, he created a story about the Soviet camp experience and the Holodomor “Everything flows” (1963).

At least two copies of the novel remained at large with Grossman's friends. A copy that belonged to the poet Semyon Lipkin Semyon Izrailevich Lipkin (1911-2003) - poet, translator, prose writer. He translated into Russian the oriental epic: Bhagavad Gita, Manasa, Dzhangara, Gilgamesh, Shahnameh. The first book of poems "The Eyewitness" was able to release only in 1967, at the age of 56. Together with his wife Inna Lisnyanskaya, he was a member of the Metropol almanac, left the Writers' Union, protesting against the exclusion of Viktor Erofeev and Evgeny Popov from it. Author of the novel "Decade", memoirs about Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Grossman, Arseny Tarkovsky. ⁠ , efforts Inna Lisnyanskaya Inna Lvovna Lisnyanskaya (1928-2014) - poetess, prose writer. In 1960 she moved from Baku to Moscow. In the early 1970s, she married the poet Semyon Lipkin, together with her husband participated in the Metropol almanac and left the Writers' Union, protesting against pressure on Viktor Erofeev and Yevgeny Popov. Laureate of the Alexander Solzhenitsyn Prize (1999), the State Prize of Russia (1999) and the Poet Prize (2009). ⁠ , Vladimir Voinovich, Andrei Sakharov and many others came to the West and was published first in 1980 in Switzerland by the publishing house L’Age Homme, and then, in 1988, in the USSR in the magazine Oktyabr.

Mikhail Suslov, 1976 It was Suslov, the secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU for ideology, who announced that the novel would neither be published nor returned to the author.

Writer Vadim Kozhevnikov, 1969. Editor-in-Chief of Znamya magazine, to whom Grossman gave Life and Fate for publication, after which all manuscripts of the novel were arrested

RIA News"

Russian State Archive of Literature and Art

How was it received?

answer Lev Oborin

Grossman's closest friends, primarily Semyon Lipkin, rated the novel very highly, although they immediately assumed that it would not go to print. At the discussion in the Znamya editorial office, completely different opinions were expressed: the critic and editor of the prose department Boris Galanov stated that the novel leaves "a painful, unpleasant feeling" ("more than once you involuntarily ask yourself the question - in the name of what great feats and sacrifices were made?" , "this is a distorted, anti-Soviet picture of life"), screenwriter Vasily Katinov considered that "Grossman's novel ... is inhabited by vile, spiritually crippled people ... party workers are especially vilely depicted in the novel." Critic Viktor Pankov summed it up: “The novel is stoically biased. He can only please our enemies." All this, of course, removed the issue of publication in the USSR.

And after the appearance of individual chapters in the foreign press, and after the release of a complete book edition in 1980, little was written about Grossman. There is a version that this was due to the primacy in the eyes of the emigrant intelligentsia of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In the first review of "Life and Fate", published in 1979 in the journal "Time and Us", the philologist Yefim Etkind ⁠ consistently contrasted Grossman and Solzhenitsyn, clearly giving preference to the former. This review had almost no effect. The following significant mentions of Grossman in the émigré press appeared only in 1985: Shimon Markish Shimon Markish (1931-2003) - literary critic, translator. In 1970 he emigrated to Hungary. For more than twenty years he taught at the University of Geneva at the Department of Slavic Studies. He studied the history of Russian-Jewish literature, defended his doctoral dissertation on this topic. In the early 1990s, he published the Jewish Journal in Berlin. Markish was a close friend of Joseph Brodsky. ⁠ and Grigory Svirsky in their articles again compare Life and Fate and Everything Flows with The Gulag Archipelago, placing Grossman's books higher. Much more was written about Grossman's novel, already translated into several languages, in the Western press: French criticism put Grossman and Solzhenitsyn on the same level already in the 1980s.

All people are guilty before the mother who lost her son in the war, and in vain they try to justify themselves to her throughout the history of mankind.

Vasily Grossman

In the USSR, the official publication of the novel caused heated discussions. The end of the 1980s was the time of "returned literature", but Grossman's book was not lost against the backdrop of the newfound Bulgakov, Platonov, Zamyatin, Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn. In 1991, reviews of Life and Fate were even published as a separate book 1 From different points of view: "Life and Fate" by Vasily Grossman / Comp. V. Oscotsky. Moscow: Soviet writer, 1991. ⁠ . For the most part, the reaction was not so much aesthetic as political: in the perestroika USSR, the perception of Life and Fate changed in parallel with the maturation of post-Soviet political thought. Some perceived the novel as anti-Stalinist and pro-Leninist, criticizing not the spirit, but the dogma of the communist idea. Criticism of anti-Semitism in the novel also gradually reached the readers.

Most of the reviews were enthusiastic or sympathetic: the bitter fate of the book and the author was invariably noted, and historical authenticity and "artistic truth" were emphasized - let's compare this with the assessments of the party editors of the 1960s: "Life and Fate" is at the same time a reliable, strict to the point of documentary narrative about the Stalingrad battle, its real heroes ... and at the same time - the free, not constrained distance of the novel " (Alexander Borschagovsky) Alexander Mikhailovich Borschagovsky (1913-2016) - writer, theater critic. A front-line soldier, he was awarded the medal "For the Defense of Stalingrad". After the war, he was in charge of the literary part of the Theater Soviet army. In 1949, he was fired from the theater and expelled from the party because of the campaign against "cosmopolitanism". Borschagovsky is the author of the story "Three Poplars on Shabolovka", which formed the basis of the script for the film "Three Poplars on Plyushchikha". ⁠ ; “In a huge ... extended dispute, the decisive argument is the right of people to be different”; “given a detailed study of the functioning of Stalinism in almost all spheres of society” (Natalia Ivanova). Vladimir Lakshin Vladimir Yakovlevich Lakshin (1933-1993) - literary critic, prose writer. He worked in the "Literary Gazette", the magazines "Znamya" and "Foreign Literature". In the 1960s he was a leading critic and first deputy chief editor of the Novy Mir magazine. He defended Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Matryonin Dvor in print. He studied the work of Alexander Ostrovsky, to whom he dedicated his doctoral dissertation. ⁠ , who once defended Solzhenitsyn, called the reading of "Life and Fate" "difficult, long and happy" - happy despite the horror described in the book: "the feeling of joy always carries a strong artistic gift." Lev Anninsky shrewdly ranked "Life and Fate" as a world classic.

Accusations against Grossman were also heard in the era of glasnost: the poet Sergei Vikulov stated that through Grossman's novel "a black thread ... runs almost undisguised hostility towards the Russian people." The poet and critic Stanislav Kunyaev, editor-in-chief of the conservative Nashe Sovremennik, was disappointed with Grossman's reflections on anti-Semitism: he found them primitive, similar to "the judgments of the founders and ideologists of Zionism" and "mechanically copying the historiosophical digressions of Leo Tolstoy's epic" (in which, by the way, , there is not a word about anti-Semitism).

Vasily Grossman. Late 1950s

After decades of obscurity, not meeting the reader, Grossman's novel has become one of the most revered novels of the Soviet century in the West (along with Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita and Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago). A lot of research has been devoted to it, more and more new translations into different languages ​​​​appear, recognition in the English-speaking world is largely due to the exemplary translation of Robert Chandler (among other things, the author of highly acclaimed translations of Grossman's front-line friend Andrei Platonov). The radio series on the BBC (2011) brought the novel even wider fame in the West.

In 2007, Lev Dodin staged "Life and Fate" at the St. Petersburg MDT - a performance on which the director worked with his students for several years, received the "Golden Mask". In 2012, the novel was filmed by Sergei Ursulyak. With significant acting work, this version is striking in one interpretive decision: one of the central topics for the novel, the theme of the Jewish Holocaust and anti-Semitism, is actually excluded from the film adaptation. Only a letter from Shtrum's mother is preserved in the series, however, there are no extermination camps or persecution of Jews during late Stalinism. Without these storylines, the film adaptation has lost one of the main pillars on which Grossman's historiosophical concept stands.

Another significant recent film treatment of the “Grossman incident” is Elena Yakovich’s documentary “I Realized I Died” (2014), which shows how the FSB returns the arrested copies of the novel to the writer’s relatives.

The critic and poet Grigory Dashevsky spoke soberly about how Life and Fate is perceived today. He noted that the novel "cannot be called either forgotten or unread - it is included in the school curriculum, even those who have not read it have a rough idea of ​​what it is about," however, it does not seem to be present in the cultural consciousness: "So far You don’t start rereading the novel, it seems that something correct, almost naive, in a traditional, almost banal form is written about totalitarian regimes.” In fact, Dashevsky believes, this amazing and complex text is still not fully understood.

The series "Life and Destiny". Directed by Sergei Ursulyak. Russia, 2012

The series "Life and Destiny". Directed by Sergei Ursulyak. Russia, 2012

The series "Life and Destiny". Directed by Sergei Ursulyak. Russia, 2012

Lev Dodin's performance based on "Life and Fate", staged at the Maly Drama Theater in St. Petersburg. 2007

Lev Dodin's performance based on "Life and Fate", staged at the Maly Drama Theater in St. Petersburg. 2007

Lev Dodin's performance based on "Life and Fate", staged at the Maly Drama Theater in St. Petersburg. 2007

The series "Life and Destiny". Directed by Sergei Ursulyak. Russia, 2012

The series "Life and Destiny". Directed by Sergei Ursulyak. Russia, 2012

The series "Life and Destiny". Directed by Sergei Ursulyak. Russia, 2012

The series "Life and Destiny". Directed by Sergei Ursulyak. Russia, 2012

Lev Dodin's performance based on "Life and Fate", staged at the Maly Drama Theater in St. Petersburg. 2007

Lev Dodin's performance based on "Life and Fate", staged at the Maly Drama Theater in St. Petersburg. 2007

Lev Dodin's performance based on "Life and Fate", staged at the Maly Drama Theater in St. Petersburg. 2007

Lev Dodin's performance based on "Life and Fate", staged at the Maly Drama Theater in St. Petersburg. 2007

The series "Life and Destiny". Directed by Sergei Ursulyak. Russia, 2012

The series "Life and Destiny". Directed by Sergei Ursulyak. Russia, 2012

The series "Life and Destiny". Directed by Sergei Ursulyak. Russia, 2012

The series "Life and Destiny". Directed by Sergei Ursulyak. Russia, 2012

Lev Dodin's performance based on "Life and Fate", staged at the Maly Drama Theater in St. Petersburg. 2007

Lev Dodin's performance based on "Life and Fate", staged at the Maly Drama Theater in St. Petersburg. 2007

Lev Dodin's performance based on "Life and Fate", staged at the Maly Drama Theater in St. Petersburg. 2007

Lev Dodin's performance based on "Life and Fate", staged at the Maly Drama Theater in St. Petersburg. 2007

"Life and Fate" - an independent thing or part of a cycle?

"Life and Fate" can formally be considered a continuation of previous novel Grossman about the Battle of Stalingrad - "For a Just Cause", published by Alexander Tvardovsky in the "New World" in 1952. However, there are serious ideological, stylistic, and historiographic differences between the two novels: the books belong to different eras (late Stalinism and the thaw, respectively) and reflect changes in the writer's views. For example, one of the many censorship requirements for the publication of the novel "For a Just Cause" was the addition of a chapter about Stalin in odic tones - which Grossman did, although in the end the chapter was still considered unworthy of the subject of the image and was removed from the magazine version. Grossman's desperate efforts to make the novel "publishable" did not save him from devastating criticism: both Tvardovsky himself and Alexander Fadeev, who led the Writers' Union under Stalin, accused Grossman of underestimating the role of the party and other ideological blunders.

An interesting way to study Grossman's creative evolution is to compare Life and Fate with what happened before (For a Just Cause, 1952) and after (Everything Flows, 1963). The relationship between these texts is a hotly debated issue: in his wonderful memoirs of Grossman, his friend, the poet Semyon Lipkin, enters into a discussion with Yefim Etkind Efim Grigoryevich Etkind (1918-1999) - literary critic, translator. After the war he taught French literature in Leningrad, was a professor at the Herzen Leningrad Pedagogical Institute. He supported Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, participated on the side of the defense in the trial of Joseph Brodsky and prepared a samizdat collection of his works. In 1974 he was dismissed from the institute, deprived of scientific degrees and expelled from the USSR. In France, he taught Russian literature, prepared Grossman's Life and Fate for publication. ⁠ And Benedikt Sarnov Benedikt Mikhailovich Sarnov (1927-2014) - writer, literary critic. He worked in the "Literaturnaya Gazeta", the magazines "Pioneer", "Spark", "Questions of Literature", "Lechaim". In the 1970s, together with literary critic Stanislav Rassadin, he hosted a radio program for children “In the country literary heroes". Author of the documentary series "Stalin and Writers", books about Pushkin, Mayakovsky, Solzhenitsyn, Blok, Mandelstam. ⁠ , arguing that "For a Just Cause" is not just an ordinary socialist realist novel (Etkind compares it with the writer's "White Birch" Bubennova Mikhail Semyonovich Bubennov (1909-1983) - writer, literary critic, journalist. In 1947 he released his very own famous work- military novel "White Birch". He was an active participant in the campaign against cosmopolitanism, and was famous for his open anti-Semitic views. ⁠ ), but already a proto-version of Life and Fate. According to Lipkin, already in the novel "For a Just Cause" Grossman approaches the task of recreating "War and Peace" for the 20th century.

If a person is destined to be killed by another person, it is interesting to see how their paths gradually converge.

Vasily Grossman

Grossman starts For a Just Cause at the turning point of World War II, after Stalingrad; there, Grossman, quite in the spirit of party ideology, talks about the people thanks to whom the Soviet Union can defeat Germany: peasants, ordinary workers are shown, but the most important role is still attributed to party workers.

Already in the first novel, characters appear who are destined to develop or be reborn in Life and Fate: first of all, this is the dramatic figure of the old Bolshevik Mostovsky, but if in the first novel he is presented rather as a victim of history, then in Life and Fate - as a person responsible for his own tragedy and the tragedy of others. Mostovsky, unable to critically evaluate the dogmatism of his own convictions, embodies the inhumanity and falsity of the Bolshevik doctrine in its development and application to reality.

After the arrest of Life and Fate, Grossman, actually isolated from the reader, continues to work: he writes sketches about his trip to Armenia, as well as the story Everything Flows, in which he continues to reflect on the catastrophes of the Soviet century. This text shows the return of a prisoner from the Gulag and his collision with both the outside world and the painful world of his memory. The emphasis shifts entirely from the feat and triumph of Soviet weapons to the price the country paid for the "triumphs" of building the Soviet state. As a political thinker in these texts, Grossman made an amazing evolution: from a Soviet writer professing Soviet values, he turned into a writer who took himself out of the brackets of ideology. He is no longer interested in the tasks of the state - only the person whom it oppresses.

Cremation ovens on the territory of the former Buchenwald concentration camp. 1961

Lehnartz/ullstein bild via Getty Images

What in the novel caused the wrath of literary functionaries?

First of all, there are parallels between communism and Nazism, two systems that, according to Grossman, level out the value of the human person and the independence of human thought. These thoughts are openly expressed in the novel - however, they are spoken by the Nazi Liss, who is trying to convince the communist Mostovsky that Hitler is a disciple of Lenin and Stalin: "Believe me, whoever looks at us with horror looks at you with horror." Another devout party member, Krymov, caught in the wheel of repression, realizes that the Stalinist state has betrayed Bolshevik ideals. In addition to the direct statements of the novel's characters, the whole composition, where the action moves from one situation of "taming" a person to another in a wide montage throw, is designed to convince the reader of the unnaturalness of the totalitarian system.

Another topic, notoriously unrepresentable in Soviet literature, was state anti-Semitism, both Nazi and Soviet. Of course, the heroes of the novel in 1943 do not know much that their author already knew when he wrote about their anxieties and insights: for example, the physicist Shtrum, main character and the “nerve” of the Jewish part of the story, does not know about everything that happened in Kyiv, where his mother dies, as well as about the anti-Semitic campaigns in the USSR, in which the USSR will become mired after the end of the war, outside the chronological framework of the novel. Nevertheless, Grossman forces Shtrum to sign a letter stating that the “enemies of the people” who allegedly killed Maxim Gorky, doctors Levin and Pletnev, were at fault. Also in this letter are named "enemies of the people" writers Pilnyak, Babel and others who died during the Great Terror. The authors of the letter claim that the "enemies" got what they deserved. Levin and Pletnev were convicted at the Third Moscow Trial in 1938; recalling this process, Grossman clearly refers to another - the "doctors' case" of 1948-1953. It is known that in 1953 Grossman himself signed a letter similar to the one slipped on Shtrum (this, however, did not save him from new dangerous "studies": in February, a completely Black Hundred, clearly subverted to the "doctors' case" appeared in Pravda article by Mikhail Bubennov about the novel "For a Just Cause"). Solzhenitsyn, analyzing Life and Fate, writes: “In this turn of the plot, Grossman executes himself for his obedient signature of January 1953 on the ‘doctors’ case’. (Even, for literalness, so that the "doctors' case" remains, - anachronistically intersperses here those long-destroyed professors Pletnev and Levin.) "It is believed that in 1953 a mass deportation of Jews to the Far East was planned and corresponding letters from the intelligentsia in support of this measure. These plans were thwarted by Stalin's death.

The Jewish theme was central to Grossman from the beginning of his literary path (“In the city of Berdichev” - the film adaptation of this story, which is interesting, to a certain extent repeated the path of “Life and Fate”: the film Alexandra Askoldova Alexander Yakovlevich Askoldov (1932-2018) - film director, writer. A researcher of Mikhail Bulgakov's work, he helped the writer's widow Elena Bulgakova compile an inventory of the archive and prepare works for publication. He worked as an assistant to the Minister of Culture of the USSR Ekaterina Furtseva. In 1967 he made the film "Commissioner" based on the story of Vasily Grossman "In the city of Berdichev". The film was banned, and Askoldov himself was fired from the film studio and expelled from the party. ⁠ "Commissioner" lay on the shelf for 20 years). Together with Ilya Ehrenburg, Grossman prepared for publication the famous "Black Book", a collection of documents and testimonies "about the villainous widespread murder of Jews by Nazi invaders in the temporarily occupied regions of the Soviet Union and in the camps of Poland during the war of 1941-1945." The book was published with cuts in Israel only in 1980.

The annihilation of Jewry became a personal tragedy for Grossman, and talking about it became the subject of work and struggle.

ullstein bild via Getty Images

What role does documentary writing play in the novel?

Vasily Grossman spent about three years on the fronts of World War II (in particular, his friendship with another observant and unsentimental military correspondent, Andrei Platonov, grew up at the front). He owns one of the first documentary works about the Holocaust - Treblin Hell (1943-1944), for which Grossman himself interviewed numerous witnesses - both prisoners and executioners this death camp Treblinka is a concentration camp in Poland near the village of Treblinka, built by the Nazis in 1941. In 1942, in addition to the labor camp at Treblinka, a death camp was established. In one year, 870,000 people were killed in the gas chambers of Treblinka. On August 2, 1943, the camp staff rebelled, some managed to escape. In October of the same year, the camp was liquidated. ⁠ . This document was used in the Nuremberg Trials.

Grossman was in Stalingrad throughout the battle, he took part in the battles, described what was happening in the military press, and in 1943 he was promoted to lieutenant colonel. As a participant in the Battle of Stalingrad, he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner; words from Grossman's essay "The Direction of the Main Strike" are engraved on the Mamaev Kurgan memorial.

However, Grossman's military impressions end up in the novel altered precisely by the novel's logic, by the need to unfold the psychology of the characters. Perhaps the most important (and by far the most poignant) quasi-document in the novel is the letter Viktor Shtrum receives from his mother, from which he learns of the destruction of the Kiev ghetto; Shtrum's mother understands that death awaits her. This text is often considered to be a genuine letter from Grossman's mother, who died in the Berdichev ghetto. In reality, however, Grossman did not receive such a “last” letter, he invented it (just as many years later he composed letters to his mother, to whom he dedicated Life and Fate). From his tragedy, Grossman creates an image of both personal and common misfortune, one of the most powerful texts in world literature about the power of maternal love and the helplessness of a person in the face of the onslaught of a totalitarian state.

Vasily Grossman (second from left) with front-line comrades. 1943

RIA News"

Grossman pays close attention (and a significant number of pages) to at least a dozen characters that are most important for the development of the narrative and philosophy of the novel: these are Zhenya and Olga Shaposhnikovs, Zhenya's chosen ones Krymov and Novikov, Sofia Levinton and Shtrum's mother (who appears on the pages of the novel only in absentia, in the text of his own letter), Grekov and Ershov.

The main function, the distinguishing feature of the hero of this novel is the ability to decide on an act. In Life and Fate, the same collision is repeated: a person must make a decision whether or not to betray another and (or) himself, and often in Grossman it is the decision not to betray that turns out to be suicidal.

Grekov finds himself in this situation (who decides to defend the 6/1 house cut off by the Germans - his prototype was Lieutenant Ivan Afanasyev, who defended the Stalingrad “Pavlov’s house” for 58 days with three dozen fighters), Zhenya Shaposhnikova (who decides to return to her arrested husband), Sofia Osipovna Levinton ( deciding to go hand in hand with an unfamiliar boy into the gas chamber), Novikov (deciding to save his people against the order).

Mostovskoy and Krymov decide to betray people who are far from dogmatism and therefore do not correspond to their understanding of the party line, they try to remain faithful to a degenerate, frankly inhuman ideology.

Do you know the difference between a good person and a bad person? Good man meanness does reluctantly

Vasily Grossman

Most obviously, the autobiographical character, the Jewish physicist Viktor Shtrum, asks himself (and the reader) agonizing questions about the role of the individual in history: for example, the individual who had to lose his stepson and mother in a war and invent weapons for the next war that would probably destroy humanity. We see Strum in a constant situation moral choice: sometimes he triumphs, sometimes he "fails" (as happens at the end of the novel, when he signs a collective anti-Semitic letter in essence). Shtrum is not a “heroic” hero at all, he makes many and bitter mistakes, he has to make many different, difficult decisions, we observe him in moments of moral triumphs and failures, in periods of doubt. “... An invisible force pressed against him.<…>Only people who have not experienced such a force on themselves are able to be surprised at those who submit to it. People who have known this power on themselves are surprised at something else - the ability to flare up at least for a moment, at least one angrily broken word, a timid, quick gesture of protest ”- Grigory Dashevsky, quoting these lines about Shtrum in an article about Life and Fate, noted that has become a commonplace in modern culture: once having fallen into the system of evil, a person inevitably becomes its cog, and this humility in front of what seems inevitable turns into a waiver of personal responsibility: loneliness, and in reality are not visible only interesting people- a judge or doctor who stands on his own in spite of his environment. In Grossman's novel, writes Dashevsky, a person is always a part of the system, "but without his consent, the human in him is indestructible."

Grossman repeatedly shows that love is stronger than death: the tragic, momentary motherhood of Dr. Levinton echoes the appeal of Strum's mother to her distant son, her only consolation at the moment of disaster.

In the house of Grekov, the love of the "doomed" signalman Katya and Lieutenant Seryozha is born. Their feeling is threatened not only by certain death in battle, but also by the war-specific understanding and use of sexuality - as an anesthetic for fear or as the privileges of the strong (in the house of “six fraction one”, a young radio operator is not so frightened by bombings as heavy male glances). Both Grekov's attempt to save the lovers and their very "untimely" feeling in Grossman's world are acts of resistance to absolute evil.

At the same time, eros in the novel is also shown as a cruel force that can not only heal loneliness, but also intensify it: Strum's infatuation with his friend's wife brings doubt and disunity into the world of these people. This novel line had an autobiographical basis - the late love of Vasily Grossman for the wife of his friend, the poet Nikolai Zabolotsky, who, in the despair of separation, enriched Russian poetry of the 20th century with one of the strongest, it seems, her love poems:

…What are you scratching on paper?
Why are you always so angry?
What are you looking for, digging in the dark
Your failures and insults?
But since you are really busy
About the good, about the happiness of people,
How could you not see before
Treasures of your life?

"Wife", 1948

It is the loss of loved ones that causes the breakdown in the Shtrum family: mother and son, husband and wife who have lost each other, are not able to overcome the disunity that a personal, unhealed loss produces.

Love returns to the heroes the individuality that the totalitarian machine is trying to erase. According to Grossman, a person who is not absorbed by the fear of this machine is always paradoxical. So, Zhenya Shaposhnikova renounces her love for the brigade commander Novikov, choosing loyalty to Krymov, who has fallen into the dungeons - mercy for the fallen turns out to be more important for her than happiness. In Life and Destiny, the ability to follow your love, to fight for it, to triumph and be smitten by it, is a powerful antidote to depersonalization.

The real author of the poem became known much later. This is Ion Degen (1925-2017), who went to war at the age of 16 in the fighter battalion of volunteers, where students of the ninth-tenth grades were taken. During the war years, Degen became an ace tanker, knocked out a record number of German tanks in battle. However, all his nominations for the title of Hero of the Soviet Union were suppressed by the authorities: the intractable character, as well as nationality, were the reason for this. In his last battle, Degen lost his crew, survived severe injuries. After prolonged treatment and disability, Degen chose the profession of a doctor. Later he emigrated to Israel, writing poetry all his life. The famous poem in the novel was written in 1944. Grossman quotes him inaccurately - the author's version sounds like this:

My comrade, in death agony
Do not invite your friends in vain.
Let me warm my palms
Above your smoking blood.
Don't cry, don't moan, you're not small
You're not hurt, you're just dead.
Let me take off your boots as a keepsake.
We still have to come.

It is noteworthy that, although the novel includes precisely this exemplary text about the inhumanity of war, it seems that the author of the text, Degen, belongs to the world of Grossman's prose: a Jew who survived the Holodomor in Ukraine as a child (in one interview he tells how he gnawed stones), constantly entered into conflicts with the authorities during the war, refusing to obey the rules, in particular the rules for composing poems about the war. Grossman did not know all this, but, of course, he included poems in the novel not by chance: we have a poem-document that enhances the feeling complex connection"Life and Fate" with the reality of war.

Is Life and Fate a novel about people or about ideas?

Along with people of action in Life and Fate, there are people of thought, characters-ideas, which brings Grossman's novel (directly connected with the novel tradition of Tolstoy) also with Dostoevsky's works - especially if we consider them in the light of the concept of the philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, for whom Dostoevsky's novel is a dialogue of ideas. However, if Dostoevsky, with the exception of , did not touch on politics proper, it is precisely political ideas that clash with Grossman.

First of all, the conflict of ideas unfolds in the dialogue between the Nazi Liss and the old Bolshevik Mostovsky in a German concentration camp. In addition, the internal monologues of the true communists Krymov and Abarchuk are revealed to us. Liss provokes Mostovsky, puts before him unbearable for the opponent (but not without foundation) questions about the similarities between Bolshevism and fascism. But the inner monologues of Krymov and Abarchuk show us what happens to an idea when it starts to collide with the reality of life and crush it under itself. A prisoner Abarchuk, once a member of the party, accustomed to strong and cruel decisions (for example, he broke up with his wife because of her alleged "philistinism"), sees with horror the reality of the Gulag, where fear and humility reign, where no one will stand up for a comrade whom killed in front of witnesses. His old friend, a revolutionary who once taught him the basics of Marxism, hangs himself in the camp, and Abarchuk is unable to accept his dying penitential words: “We did not understand freedom. We crushed her.<…>... The Communists created an idol, put on epaulettes, uniforms, profess nationalism, they raised their hand against the working class, it will be necessary, they will reach the Black Hundreds ... "The former political worker Krymov, having been imprisoned on an absurd, but so frequent in Stalin's time, accusation of espionage, begins to recall, that he himself was a part of the terror machine - he did not defend his friends, dispossessed the peasants, sent soldiers to penal companies, denounced the Stalingrad hero Grekov, who did not correspond to his ideas of political reliability. At the same time, the former security officer Katzenelenbogen, who is in prison with Krymov, declares the state security agencies a new collective deity, and the Gulag a new religion. Katzenelenbogen is going crazy in front of his readers, but even these speeches of his are distorted Bolshevik political ideas taken to the limit.

All living things are unique. The identity of two people, two bushes of rose hips is inconceivable... Life stalls where violence seeks to erase its originality and peculiarities.

Vasily Grossman

An important character-idea is the bearer of the concept of non-political, non-state humanism Ikonnikov, whom Mostovskoy encounters in a German concentration camp. Ikonnikov, who survived the fascination with both Christianity and Tolstoyism, poses questions to his opponent about the inhumanity of the totalitarian system, where the interests of the state absolutely prevail over the interests of man. For Mostovsky, these questions, which his opponent (a witness of the Holodomor and the Holocaust) suffered through, are alien and untenable.

Another idea explored in the novel is anti-Semitism, a state ideology that, according to Grossman, became fundamental to both German Nazism and advanced Soviet communism. Grossman makes a remarkable compositional decision: he demonstrates the anti-Semitic state policy in full development (the extermination of Jews in Nazi concentration camps) and at the point of origin (the beginning of the anti-Semitic campaign in the USSR).

Greeks! Some amazing combination of strength, courage, dominance with everyday life.<…>

Then he talked about pre-war army affairs with purges, attestations, with blasphemy when receiving apartments, he spoke about some people who reached the generalship in 1937, who wrote dozens of denunciations and statements that exposed imaginary enemies of the people.

It seemed that his strength was in the lion's courage, in the cheerful desperation with which he, jumping out of a hole in the wall, shouted:

“I won’t let you in, you bitches!” - and threw grenades at the oncoming Germans.

It seems that his strength is in a cheerful, simple friendship, in friendship with all the residents of the house.

The atmosphere in the "Grekov's house" and Grekov himself are shown to us through the eyes of "children" - the signalman Katya Vengrova and Seryozha Shaposhnikov, who is in love with her, whose love Grekov is trying to save from a common fate and death. Like many other characters and situations in the novel, the “Grekov’s house” had a prototype - the heroically defending house of Sergeant Pavlov. In reality, however, most of the defenders of Pavlov's house managed to survive (the last of them died in 2015 at the age of 92), while Grossman turned his imaginary locus of utopian freedom into a tragic episode that cannot have a happy ending.

bibliography

• Bit-Yunan Yu. G. Roman by V. S. Grossman "Life and Fate" in literary criticism and journalism of the Russian diaspora in the 1980s. // Vestnik RGGU. Series “History. Philology. Culturology. Oriental studies". 2016, pp. 58–71.
• Lipkin S. I. Life and fate of Vasily Grossman. M.: Book, 1990.
• Lipkin S.I. Stalingrad Vasily Grossman. Ann Arbor: Ardis, .
• Sarnov B. M. How it was: On the history of the publication of Vasily Grossman's novel "Life and Fate" // Questions of Literature. 2012. No. 6. P. 9–47.

: an epic novel about the events of the Great Patriotic War, written in 1950-1959. Completes the dilogy begun with the novel For a Just Cause (1952, published in 1954). Unlike the first part, which is loyal to the Soviet regime, the second part was written after Stalin's death and contains a sharp criticism of Stalinism. In the USSR, the first publication took place during perestroika, in 1988. The most complete edition was published in 1990.

Publication history

In early 1961, all copies of the manuscript were confiscated by the State Security Committee as a result of a search conducted at the writer's. According to a number of sources, this happened after the editor-in-chief of the Znamya magazine Vadim Kozhevnikov, to whom Grossman brought the manuscript of the novel for review, handed it over to the CPSU Central Committee (according to other sources, to the KGB). At the same time, the daughter of V. Kozhevnikov, Nadezhda Kozhevnikova, denies the transfer of information about the novel by his father to " punitive bodies", and believes that " ... a manuscript of such a volume, and even with such dangerous insights, parallels Hitler-Stalin, fascism-communism - should have been sent to the Central Committee, to the ideological sector" anyway. A. I. Solzhenitsyn, who knew the history of the Novy Mir magazine first-hand, wrote in the book A Calf Butted an Oak, “I remember how Grossman’s novel was taken precisely from the Novy Mir safe.”

The editorial board of the journal discussed the novel on December 19, 1960. He was recognized as "anti-Soviet". The manuscript and typewritten copies were confiscated from the writer on February 14 of the following year. After 9 days, Grossman sent a letter to N. S. Khrushchev, in which he asked to clarify the fate of the book. In response, Mikhail Suslov invited the author to a conversation at the Central Committee. Grossman was told that the book would not be published.

A copy of the novel, preserved by the poet Semyon Lipkin, was taken to the West in the mid-1970s, after the death of the writer, with the help of A. D. Sakharov, B. Okudzhava and V. N. Voinovich and was first published in Switzerland in 1980.

main characters

The connecting rod of the novel is the Shaposhnikov family, the fate of their relatives and friends.

Before the revolution, Alexandra Vladimirovna Shaposhnikova graduated from the Higher Women's Courses in the natural department. After the death of her husband, she was at one time a teacher, then worked as a chemist at a bacteriological institute, and in recent years she was in charge of a labor protection laboratory.

Alexandra Vladimirovna has three daughters (Lyudmila, Marusya and Zhenya) and a son Dmitry (Mitya).

Lyudmila's son from her first husband, Tolya, died at the front in 1942. First husband left her baby, forbade giving Tolya the surname Abarchuk. Abarchuk is arrested and dies in the camp, leaving no communist convictions. Lyudmila's second husband, Viktor Shtrum, is a physicist who made a major discovery, but left the institute due to anti-Semitic persecution. The daughter of Lyudmila and Victor - Nadia - lives with her parents.

Marusya dies during the battles for Stalingrad, and her husband and daughter Vera remain there. Vera works in a hospital, meets the wounded pilot Viktorov, and they get married.

Zhenya leaves her first husband Nikolai Krymov because of his impenetrable party membership during the period of dispossession and famine. Subsequently, when Krymov is arrested, she carries him packages to the Lubyanka. Zhenya falls in love with the military Novikov, but he will also be arrested.

Dmitry Shaposhnikov and his wife Ida were exiled and died in the camps. Their son Seryozha lives with his grandmother almost all his life, then he fights in Stalingrad.

Meaning

Grossman's novel is directed against totalitarianism, both Nazi and Soviet. “Grossman deduced for himself the moral identity of German national socialism and Soviet communism,” wrote A. Solzhenitsyn. The novel echoes the title and structure of Tolstoy's epic War and Peace. In 2007, an American business newspaper Wall Street Journal called the novel "Life and Fate" one of the greatest books of the twentieth century.

Adaptations

• In 2007, Lev Dodin staged a performance based on his own play, based on the plot of the novel. Dodin placed at the center of events the figure of the reflective scientist Strum, who is in many ways likened to the author himself.
• In the fall of 2011, the BBC Theater Department created a 13-episode radio play for Britain's Radio 4. After that, the 900-page novel topped the UK bestseller list.
• In 2011-2012 Sergei Ursulyak directed the television series Life and Fate based on the script by Eduard Volodarsky (his last work).