"Life And Fate" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grossman Vasily)

LIFE AND FATE

The structure of Life and Fate is similar to that of War and Peace: the life of a whole society is evoked by means of a large number of different sub-plots centred around one family. Alexandra Vladimirovna is an old woman whose spiritual roots are in the Populist traditions of the pre-Revolutionary intelligentsia; it is her children, together with their own families, who are the central figures in the novel. Two sub-plots, set in a Russian labour-camp and a Physics Institute, revolve around the former and present husbands of Lyudmila Nikolaevna, Alexandra Vladimirovna's elder daughter. Two more sub-plots trace the careers of Commissar Krymov and Colonel Novikov, the ex-husband and the present fiancé of Lyudmila's sister Yevgenia: Krymov, an Old Bolshevik, ends up in the Lubyanka; Novikov, after commanding a tank corps that plays a crucial role at Stalingrad, also falls foul of the authorities. Other sub-plots concern friends and relatives of the family working at the Stalingrad power station, serving at the Front, attempting to organize rebellions in a German concentration camp, and being transported by cattle-truck to the gas chambers…

Like War and Peace, Life and Fate contains many of the author's own reflections on history and philosophy. It is perhaps these reflections, even more than the devastatingly accurate portrayal of Stalinist Russia, that appalled the authorities. No other writer has so convincingly established the identity of Nazism and Soviet Communism. The parallels between the two systems are drawn repeatedly: between the career of a typical German Party functionary and that of a typical Russian Party functionary, between the thoughts of a German dissident and those of a Russian dissident, between a German concentration camp and a Russian concentration camp.

The real battle portrayed in the novel is not the clash between the Third Reich and Stalin's Russia, but the clash between Freedom and Totalitarianism. At Stalingrad the Russian people believed they were fighting against Totalitarianism in the name of Freedom; the freedom they won, however, lasted only as long as the final outcome of the war remained undecided. Grossman movingly describes the development of a genuine spirit of camaraderie and egalitarianism among the defenders of Stalingrad; he also shows how this spirit was stamped out by Party functionaries who saw it as a greater danger than the Germans themselves.

'The clash between Freedom and Totalitarianism', however, is too grand and abstract a phrase. Grossman sees no value in fighting for freedom unless one can do so in a spirit of humility, a spirit of love and kindness. The battle Grossman portrays is the battle we must fight each day in order to preserve our humanity, the battle against the power of ideology, against the power of the State, against all the forces that combine to destroy the possibility of kindness and compassion between individuals.

The victors in this battle are not the Soviet military commanders, not General Chuykov who finally crosses to the East bank, after his heroic defence of Stalingrad has culminated in the German surrender, only in order to attend a banquet celebrating the 25 th anniversary of the founding of the Soviet Secret Police. The true victors are the Russian peasant woman who takes pity on a wounded German soldier while his comrades are shooting her friends and relatives, the woman who sacrifices her own career and happiness in order to send a food-parcel to the Lubyanka – everyone whose actions, however historically insignificant, are motivated by the spirit of senseless, irrational kindness. It is these spontaneous, dangerous acts of kindness that Grossman sees as the truest expression of human freedom.

In Le Cas Grossman, Simon Markish quotes an anonymous Russian friend's opinion of Life and Fate: 'Yes, all this is noble, elevated, morally irreproachable, but I don't need a follower of Leo Tolstoy.' The novel is indeed a remarkably old-fashioned one. It could, paradoxically, be described as the greatest work of fiction to have been written according to the Soviet doctrine of Socialist Realism. Even its faults are typical of Socialist Realism: an occasional tendency towards sententious philosophizing, a certain long-windedness and lack of sparkle.

Grossman has succeeded in achieving what every other Socialist Realist has merely pretended to do: he has portrayed the life, not of a few individuals, but of an entire age. All the characters endure fates that are typical of their generation. Each character, however vividly realized, is somehow typical of a particular group or class: Krymov and Mostovskoy the Old Bolsheviks, Getmanov the successful Stalinist functionary, Novikov the honourable and talented officer whose talents were never acknowledged before the war, Shtrum the Jewish intellectual. There is nothing eccentric about the novel, either stylistically or in the action and characterization. Probably no great novel of the last sixty years is so untouched by the influence of Modernism.

Grossman reached adolescence only after the Revolution and he had little contact, even through reading, with the West. Unlike Solzhenit-syn with his idealization of nineteenth-century Russia, he never tried to break free of his age. His power as a writer is that of an insider, that of a man who speaks from within Soviet society and in its own language. It is perhaps only through writing in its own style that one can portray an entire age; it would surely be impossible to portray the world of Jane Austen in the language of Joyce, or the world of Beowulf in the language of Jane Austen. It is interesting to note that Ilya Ehrenburg, many of whose books are modernist in technique, chose to write his novel about Stalinism, The Thaw, in the same slightly ponderous style, the style that is so characteristic of Socialist Realism.