Well, I couldn't take any more of John Keay's "dynastic kaleidoscope," for the moment at least. I closed his "China: A History" after reading a paragraph on the succession of four "dynasties," i.e. claimants of the Mandate of Heaven, in northern China in the fifth or sixth century AD over the course of one year. So what do I do? It's back to the Eastern Front of WWII - this time with Vasily Grossmann's "Life and Fate," a fully engaging novel, of which I read very few. Stalingrad - now that was a world class slaughter that would impress even the founder of the Qin.After page 175.Grossman intended his novel to be a latter-day "War and Peace," less the Peace, it seems to me. He describes (1) the lunacy of unremitting, remorseless and seemingly mindless, undirected, chaotic total war and (2) the lunacy of a remorseless, autocratic, fixated/obsessive and mindless totalitarian state that demands unreflecting and fully willing submission and that annihilates any opponents as well as anyone whose behaviors/opinions suggest even the remotest possibility of development into opposition at some point in the dimest reaches of the future. Both lunacies in full throttle, unconstrained operation simultaneously. Then it seems to me Grossman asks the question how can any genuinely human being (as opposed to an animated, humanoid heap of mindless/souless organic matter/filth) survive such onslaughts. I'm not sure that he has an answer, but he has suggested certain possibilities. One character thinks: "He knew it was only the peace and silence within him that enabled him to endure this stress ... that the man with no quiet at the bottom of his soul was able to endure for long." Only the serene survive - maybe - if they shut up and their internal silence also becomes their approach to the world.What does Grossman affirm? Not much. He has one character state: "I don't believe in your 'Good.' ... You can ask Hilter ... and he'll tell you that even this camp (Auschwitz) was set up in the name of Good. ... I believe in human kindness." And he also writes: "Everything that lives is unique. If you attempt to erase the peculiarities and individuality of life by violence then life itself must suffocate." So much for the New Soviet Man.What do Grossman's "successful" characters (who happen to be "human") live for? To discover what they were made to be and do in their world, to trust that discovery, to pursue their individual "life and fate," to cultivate serenity in that knowledge and to act with kindness as they can when a need arises and as circumstances permit. Is there nothing else? Is that enough for them? Not sure yet. Perhaps not in the world of the Soviet Eastern Front during WWII. And now that I think about it, perhaps those are the elements of any man's highest achievement, at any time, in any place. Who didn't win the Stalin Prize? You get one guess. An interesting historical fact - the KGB placed this book under arrest, but not its author. Agents seized every extant copy, the carbon paper, all the type writer ribbons they could find, etc. But Grossman, anticipating all this, made one copy that none of his friends/associates in the literary world knew anything about. He gave it for safekeeping to someone who knew nothing about books, may have read only one or two, and with whom no one could expect that Grossman was acquainted in the most superficial way. That's why we have this book now.Maybe I'll just go back to the mutual exterminations of opposing dynasties in northern China of the sixth and seventh centuries. Same story anyway.After page 400.Not much new to report. I see now 2that Grossman views life, and rightly so from the perspective of his "life and fate" that every form of life engages continuously in a relentless, unremitting and remorseless war of extermination on every other life form. What motivates this war? Life and breath, it appears, as if a blinding lust for annihilation is part of our biological existence. No aggregate of human beings, even sets of lovers and the family, exhibits any other behavior. Certain cultivated, serene individuals may act differently from time to time under special circumstances - those extremely rare specimens who by some perversity, mutation or deformity - are capable of genuine sympathy, Mitgefuehl, identification with another and setting themselves aside for just a moment in a self-forgetting way in order to support and uphold another human being for no purpose whatever apart from a desire, a sense of obligation to enhance the well-being of the other. Such persons appear every two hundred characters or so.Grossman does present a stream of characters who value nothing so highly as the freedom to think and to express their thoughts freely, without constraint or consideration of consequences. But I'm not entirely sure just what Grossman thinks about these persons. Perhaps their "will to freedom" is merely a prelude to a compulsion to exterminate all those whose "will to freedom" causes them to hold different and perhaps conflicting views. Perhaps he will present this "will to freedom" as the source of man's genocidal mania. I've been asked whether this book "works" as literature. I can't say, really. I view Grossman's book as a historical document, as I do most writing. It certainly illucidates Sheila Fitzpatrick's, Everyday Stalinism, and Olando Figes', "The Whisperers." Perhaps his book is great literature, perhaps not. Such questions concern me very little. As for literature, my sense is that one needn't read any works apart from the works of Homer, Virgil, Dante and Milton. Shakespeare, perhaps. No one else quite matters.After page 600.I'm beginning to find Grossman's themes a bit overwrought and obtrusive. [Yeah, yeah, I get it already.] But then I read precise, complete, dispassionate and highly detailed descriptions of the people, places and events of his world - soldiers, Nazi and Soviet bureaucrats, battles, mass murder, mostly, the usual - that present Grossman's journalistic genius. I now understand why millions waited in anxious anticipation for the publication of every issue of "Red Star," why they read every issue cover to cover, silently to themselves, and out loud to anyone who cared to listen, why copies of this newpaper went from hand to hand until the smear of ink rendered its print indecipherable, and there was nothing left to do but use their tattered remnants for kindling. And that was his gift, it seems to me. He could transport attentive readers to any time and place he pleased, and keep them there until he had recorded what he found necessary to document. No great novelist, no Virginia Woolf, perhaps. So what?After reading the last page.What to write? Two further comments.I'm beginning to understand the title. Grossman leaves me considering the question: can notions of "life" and "fate" be anything but ambiguous, internally contradictory and ultimately pointless and meaningless.Let's consider fate. Of course, no one can choose his parents, the time and place of one's birth, the circumstances of one's infancy, the terrible destructive "forces" in place at the time one attains awareness of the world he's been born into - presuming, of course, that awareness arrives at all. That much fate determines. But he also writes: "A man may be led by fate, but he can refuse to follow." And in this sense, Grossman holds all persons responsible for their acts - none of which fate renders inevitable at all. Then there is "life," a great good, to be sure, provided that one lives one's life as a human being - a notion that he develops over 880 pages. Whatever can that mean? I find it significant (for reasons I haven't yet determined) that he allows two elderly women, both mothers of towering emotional/psychological strength, to express his answer. Mother One: "Human history is not the battle of of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer." Mother Two: "...neither fate, nor history, nor the anger of the State, nor the glory or infamy of battle has any power to affect those who call themselves human beings. No, whatever life holds in store ... they will live as human beings and die as human beings, the same as those who have already perished; and in this alone lies man's eternal and bitter victory over all the grandiose and inhuman forces that ever have been or will be." Taken in isolation from a particular narrative, I find sermonettes of this kind rather tedious, until I recognizes how very, very few "human beings" (in Grossman's sense) are ever born - or made. They exist, of course, in small numbers as isolated individuals, for the most part, among multitudes of livestock each in possession of 46 chromosomes per cell, and these "humans" often choose death over life, once it becomes evident that living requires them to relinquish their "humanity," a notion that never once arises in their consciousness. An inmate of Auschwitz, a Russian "holy fool," refuses to contribute his labor to the construction of gas chambers and crematoria, for example, and so dies. A Jewish doctor chooses to accompany a frightened little boy to the gas chamber rather than to save herself only to treat ill and injured SS soldiers who will take up their work of genocide upon recovery. Others choose self-sacrifice in a self-forgetting way. And so, "human" history concerns only a vanishingly small proportion of homo sapiens ever born. And that is enough, it seems, no more than any "human being" has reason to expect when "life" presents us with the "fate" of taking up our individual existences in an arena of relentless, unremitting and remorseless war of all against all in a world governed by the iron law of perpetual extermination.Second point.Grossman possessed a great gift - he could "disemprison the soul of fact" (Samuel Taylor Coleridge). If I were an instructor of history - which thankfully I am not - I would require that any student who aspired to master the art and craft of history (as opposed to those who want only to compile chronicles - an entirely necessary labor, to be sure) read novels such as "Life and Fate." There are other novels of this kind, but Grossman's scores of vignettes evoke the experience of historical fact more powerfully, more emotionally devastating, than any other writing I've yet encountered. So what next? I need to recover from Life and Fate. I'm eyeing Giesele Jahn's "Meiji Ceramics: The Art of Japanese Export Ware, 1868-1912."Subsequent thoughts.This book is haunting me, and I can't exorcise it quite yet. I suppose it shows.I knew that there was something about this book that seemed familiar, even though I'd never before read a page of it. Then I thought of Norman Cohn's "The Pursuit of the Millennium," a history of revolutionary millenarians and mystical anarchists of medieval Europe, which I read when it first appeared in 1969. It's true, as far fetched as that may seem. Chapter 1 provides an overview of ancient Jewish eschatology, the fundamentals of which Grossman may have appropriated, knowingly or unknowingly, as a "master narrative" that he transforms in fundamental ways to serve as the foundation of his novel. From Chapter 1 of "Pursuit:" "Already in theProphetical Books there are passages ... that foretell how, out of an immense cosmic catastrophe, there will arise a Palestine which will be nothing less than a new Eden, Paradise regained. Because of their neglect of Yahweh the Chosen People must indeed be punished by famine and pestilence, war and captivity, they must indeed be subjected to a sifting judgement so severe that it will effect a clean break with the guilty past. There must be a Day of Yahweh, a Day of Wrath. ... But this is not the end: a 'saving remnant' of Israel will survive these chastisements and through that remnant the divine purpose will be accomplished. When the nation is thus regenerated and reformed Yahweh will cease from vengeance and become the Deliverer. The righteous remnant ... will be assembled once more in Palestine and Yahweh will dwell amongst them as ruler and judge." And so on.If this thought has any validity, and I am not arguing that it does, then Grossman does retain certain elements of this prophetic narrative - the cosmic catastrophe, the peoples of Gog and Magog, for example - Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union - and dispenses with others - e.g. Paradise regained. But the ancient idea of the saving remnant, the righteous remnant just might have become Grossman's "human beings," who appear, who become fully human only through their responses to the most horrific circumstances imaginable. Of course, he eliminates all traces of prophecy, but he just might have retained the notion of that vanishingly small number, the saving remnant of "human beings." In any case that possibility makes me a bit more at ease with/accepting of Grossman's very disturbing comfort with an extraordinary exclusivity.
I have to use the “M” word for this panoramic portrayal of the Soviet experience of World War 2—masterpiece. I was moved and uplifted, enlightened and devastated, and ultimately made into a better person wit more empathy and understanding of the human condition. This is an insider’s view, as is made clear by the wonderful background provided by the translator, Robert Chandler. Grossman was a Ukrainian Jew who studied chemistry in his youth, became a novelist with the support of Gorky, and with the advent of war became a renowned war correspondent who covered Stalingrad and the fall of Berlin and who pieced together for the first time in print the hidden story of the operations of a German death camp, Treblinka. This book was completed in 1960, but the manuscript was seized and suppressed by the KGB. Fortunately, a copy was smuggled out a decade later (through the efforts of Sakharov and Voinovitch) and reached print in the West in the early 80s.The novel is very ambitious in portraying seminal events from a range of perspectives, from peasants to scientists, from partisans to generals, with brief forays into viewpoint of German soldiers as well. What helps with integration across its broad scope is that most of the stories are confined to the Winter of 1942-43 during which the Battle of Stalingrad became the turning point in the war. Also, in the tradition of “War and Peace” (which I haven’t read), the narrative places various members of one large extended family at the core of most of the scenarios used to bring to life a nation and a society at war: the elderly Shaposhnikova matriarch, stuck in Ukraine at the onset of war, ends up confined by the Germans in a Jewish ghetto that is later massacred; her son Viktor, a Jewish theoretical physicist who is driven by pure science and tested in his integrity by politics; his wife’s ex-husband, who is placed in a Soviet work camp among Trotsky-style Bolsheviks purged in 1937; his sister-in-law who is torn between her ex-husband and her fiancé, the first a party true-believer who serves as a political officer in Stalingrad and is later falsely accused and imprisoned in Moscow as a traitor, and the latter a colonel of a tank brigade who leads the Soviet counterstrike at Stalingrad; Viktor’s sister, a Moscow physician caught while traveling, bravely experiences a trip by cattle car to meet her fate in a gas chamber. There is a pervasive tender compassion for all, but not for the true enemies, the totalitarian states of Hitler and Stalin, which Grossman shows to be mirrored twins in so many ways. Grossman’s compassion comes from wanting to give voice to the dead, such as his own mother, who was killed with about 30,000 other Jews in Bedichev in Ukraine and to whom the book is dedicated. Like others writers who have borne witness to the Holocaust, he is concerned with how it affects our conception of what it means to be human and the nature of good and evil. How so many held on forlornly to hope and passively obeyed. How millions could ignore what was happening and let people be led like lambs to the slaughter. And how others rebelled and resisted, in small ways or at great risk to themselves. Grossman breaks through from the narrative to speak of these things, but mostly he brings these themes to life through his characters, and in both approaches uses transcendent language full of sublime or horrific beauty.Reading this book takes a special commitment, not just of the investment of time it takes to read such a massive tome, but also in emotional trust that it will not just wrench you pitilessly and leave you like a rag in despair. Grossman somehow achieves the miracle of infusing hope at every turn in a way that transcends death. For example, there is a point where a poet in a work camp expounds on how simple human kindness, such as sharing a scrap of bread with an enemy, is a core of humanity that persists despite all brutality and despair. In this quote, Viktor’s mother speaks eloquently of resilient hope in a letter to him from a doomed Jewish ghetto:The more sorrow there is in man, the less hope he has of survival—the better, the kinder, the more generous he becomes.The poorest people, the tailors and tinsmiths, the ones without hope, are so much nobler, more generous and more intelligent than the people who’ve somehow managed to lay by a few provisions. The young schoolmistresses; Spilberg, the eccentric old teacher and chess-player; the timid women who work in the library; Reyvich, the engineer, who’s more helpless than a child, yet dreams of arming the ghetto with hand-made grenades—what wonderful, impractical, dear, sad, good people they all are! …People carry on, Vitra, as though their whole life lies ahead of them. It’s impossible to say if that is wise or foolish—it’s just the way people are.The woman doctor in her last moments is here uplifted by communion with a boy she helped on the cattle-car to the gas chamber:Her eyes—which have read Homer, Izvestia, Huckleberry Finn and Mayne Reid, that had looked at good people and bad people, that had seen the geese in the green meadows of Kursk, the stars above the observatory at Pulkovo, the glitter of surgical steel, the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, tomatoes and turnips in the bins at market, the blue water of Issyk-Kul—her eyes were no longer of any use to her. If someone had blinded her, she would have felt no sense of loss.…Sofya Levinton felt the boy’s body subside in her arms. …This boy, with his slight, bird-like body, has left before her. “I’ve become a mother,” she thought. That was her last thought.Her heart, however, still had life in it: it contracted, ached, and felt pity for all of you, both living and dead; Sofya Osipovna felt a wave of nausea. She pressed David, now a doll, to herself; she became dead, a doll.The political commissar in the besieged tractor factory at Stalingrad is suddenly uplifted by music in a pause in the fighting:Somehow the music seemed to have helped him understand time. Time is a transparent medium. People and cities rise out of it, move through it and disappear back into it. It is time that brings them and time that takes them away. …Such is time: everything passes, it alone remains; everything remains, it alone passes. And how swiftly and noiselessly it passes. Only yesterday you were sure of yourself, strong and cheerful, a son of the time. But now another time has come—and you don’t even know it.In yesterday’s fighting, time has been torn to shreds; now it emerged again from the plywood fiddle belonging to Rubunchik the barber. This fiddle told some that their time had come and others that their time had passed.‘I’m finished,’ Krymov said to himself. ‘Finished!’ …Suddenly, Krymov remembered one summer night: the large, dark eyes of a Cossack girl and her hot whisper … Yes, in spite of everything, life was good.The fiddler stopped and a quiet murmur became audible: the sound of the water flowing by under the wooden duckboards. It seemed to Krymov that his soul was indeed a well that had been dry and empty; but now it was gently filling with water.I end this excessively long review with samples of the many kernels of truth that help make the journey of this book worthwhile:Having established man’s readiness to obey when confronted with limitless violence, we must go on to draw one further conclusion that is of importance for an understanding of man and his future. Does human nature overcome a true change in the cauldron of totalitarian violence? Does man lose his innate yearning for freedom? The fate of both man and the totalitarian State depends on the answer to this question. If human nature does change, then the eternal and world-wide triumph of the dictatorial State is assured; if his yearning for freedom remains constant, then the totalitarian State is doomed.From examples over history of individual and group defiance of these destructive forces, Grossman finds that:All these bear witness to the indestructability of man’s yearning for freedom. The yearning was suppressed but it continues to exist. Man’s fate may make him a slave, but his nature remains unchanged.Man’s innate yearning for freedom can be suppressed but never destroyed. Totalitarianism cannot renounce violence. If it does, it perishes. eternal, ceaseless violence, overt or covert, is the basis of totalitarianism. Man does not renounce freedom voluntarily. This conclusion holds out hope for our time, hope for our future.In the words of a poet in a Soviet work camp, I find sustenance in Grossman’s vision of the eternal in individual consciousness:When a person dies, they cross over from the realm of freedom to the realm of slavery. …What constitutes the freedom, the soul of an individual life, is its uniqueness. The reflection of the universe in someone’s consciousness is the foundation of his or her power, but life only becomes happiness, is only endowed with freedom and meaning when someone exists as a whole world that has never been repeated in all eternity. Only then can they experience the joy of freedom and kindness, finding in others what they have already found in themselves.
Do You like book Life And Fate (2006)?
"Vita e destino" è uno di quei libri che non si dimenticano facilmente, che ti entrano dentro, ti scorticano la pelle fino a sanguinarla e farti male lasciandoti a pezzi sperando che qualcuno ti raccolga.E' un romanzo difficile, una riflessione amara, dolorosa sul male e le sue conseguenze. Grossman analizza in maniera attenta, precisa, dettagliata la battaglia di Stalingrado, il periodo della lotta al totalitarismo e al nazismo. Durante la lettura, il lettore vive con i personaggi la vita del lager, cosa significa vivere in un lager, in mezzo al dolore, la tragedia che una esperienza del genere comporta.Vita e destino è la tragedia di chi vive qualcosa di terribile e di sovrumano, spietato, atroce, terribile, impossibile da raccontare e anche solo da descrivere. Questo romanzo è semplicemente la vita nelle sue mille sfaccettature, nelle sue manifestazioni di ogni attimo. E' la vita dolorosa, cruda, tragica, ma stupenda, in ogni caso, come ci dice anche uno dei protagonisti:"Non è niente, non è niente, mio caro, è la vita".
—Simona
The worst reviews, in my humble opinion, are those that begin with this sentence: I really wanted to like this book? Oh? This confounds me? Who starts to read a book that they hope they will not like? Do people really open books they hope will appall them, torture them with typos and improbable plots, confuse them with experimental mazes of style and drown them in gibberish? Isn't every book we start one we hope will be the greatest ever? What kind of twisted reader DOESN'T WANT TO LIKE A BOOK?I really wanted to like this book.Sorry. Was the stinker in me coming out. My point, I think, is that this book comes with a lot of hype. And it sat on my Mt. TBR for a long time (thank you, Karen). I finally stared it down and invested the requisite 3 to 4 weeks. (Did anybody miss me?). I hoped it would be the greatest book ever. It's good. It's real good. But not the greatest ever.The first thing you have to figure out is that there are eight pages of characters listed in the back of the book. This is an essential find. Without this cast of characters you have no hope. Alexandra Vladimirovna Shaposhnikova has three daughters but one of them is already dead. Her daughter Lyudmila Nikolaevna has two husbands but only one is in prison. Lyudmila's husband Viktor Pavlovich Shtrum has discovered nuclear fission but he really just wants to hold hands with Marya Ivanovna Sokolova, his best friend's wife and his wife's best friend. Lyudmila's sister, Yevgenia Nikolaevna (aka Zhenya, Zhenechka and Zhenevyeva) is married to Krymov but is soon to marry Pyotr Pavlovich Novikov.Got it?But while I read, and wished away the patronymics, Grossman would take me onto a cattle car, or a concentration camp, or an oven; and I'd hear the music being played, see the hands being held. I'd feel the cold and the hunger. All in new, shattered light.When Eisenhower got to the first Nazi concentration camp (not even the death camps yet), he stopped and brought the reporters and the cameras in. So the world could see what we were fighting. He could have given the world this book instead and it would have been as real.Come with me, where Grossman took me, inside a cattle car, with the stench and the death. There are so many of us and so few of them. Why can't we take them?Now and again the SS guards glanced at each other and exchanged a few words. Their passage along the platform was like the sun's through the sky. The sun doesn't need to watch over the wind and the clouds, to listen to the sound of the leaves or of a storm at sea; it knows as it follows its smooth path that everything in the world depends on it.And we'd hope anyhow, wouldn't we, that this simply couldn't be true.What saves people when their bovine melancholy, their mute fatalism yields to a piercing sense of horror - what saves people then is the opium of optimism.Grossman answers, too, how Communist party members confessed, informed. You will feel the paranoia of the Soviet State. Stalin at one point asked Yezhov why he carried punitive measures to such an extreme. Yezhov answered that he was simply following Stalin's orders. Wrong answer, Yezhov.There probably is not a more important novel about the experience of the Russian Jew in World War II. At times, the writing soars to glorious heights. Yet, the book seemed more essential than wonderful. I really wanted to like it.
—Tony
In a way it's silly putting stars on a book like this - a book that was arrested, whose author never saw it published, and which is now, once again, persona non grata in Russia because Stalin is being rehabilitated. Nobody who is a Goodreads member can have had to make the decisions facing Grossman's characters, deal with the moral compromises, the equivocations, the desperate need to survive, all the while second guessing who might prevail next, who might be an ally, who should be supported and who denied - not for ethical or moral reasons but purely in order to stay alive. Only one character, not the 'hero' Viktor Shtrum, but a prisoner in a German camp does the right thing. He kills himself once he realises that he will be required to help construct the gas chambers. To him too is given what one might take as Grossman's credo: only senseless acts of kindness towards individuals have value. The rest is ideology, whether religious or political; and all totalitarianisms are ultimately faces of the same coinage. No character is utterly sympathetic, nor is any without a single redeeming feature. All are flawed, prevaricataing, implicated, scheming, terrified, hungry. It is extraordinary that Grossman managed to write this without anyone finding out; typically canny of Khrushchev to arrest the book rather than the writer. Read it. But set aside time to read it in long stretches. If you pick it up and put it down you will get hoplessly lost - especially if Russian names are a barrier to you.
—Zina
