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

THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

From January 1941 Stalin had received repeated warnings of Hitler's intentions, both through his own intelligence network and through those of Britain and the United States. He chose to ignore these warnings, to do everything in his power to appease Hitler, to avoid scrupulously any action that might be construed as provocation.

Possibly he was playing for time, aware that the Soviet Union was unprepared for war, both militarily and industrially; more likely he was simply burying his head in the sand, expecting his own wishes automatically to take on the status of objective reality. In any case, he clung desperately to the Nazi-Soviet pact. As a result the Soviet armed forces were taken largely unawares by the German offensive of 22 June 1941.

During the ensuing months the Soviet forces were thrown into headlong retreat. Armies that attempted to hold their ground were for the most part encircled. By late October the Germans had taken nearly three million prisoners, had isolated Leningrad, and had breached the outer defence line of Moscow itself. Meanwhile more than 1500 factories, not to mention entire universities and scientific institutes, had been evacuated by rail to the Urals, Siberia, the Volga and Central Asia.

The first important Soviet success was Zhukov's defence of Moscow in December 1941. This gave an important boost to national morale, destroying the myth of German invincibility. The Soviet counter-offensive of early 1942, however, was largely unsuccessful; throughout the rest of 1942 the Germans continued to hold their ground in the north and centre, while sweeping through the Ukraine towards the Volga and the oil-fields of the Caucasus. By September 1942 they were laying siege to Stalingrad, the key industrial and communications centre on the Volga. It is at this point that For a Just Cause ends, and Life and Fate begins.

From an historical point of view, Life and Fate is on the whole accurate; Grossman's observations as a journalist have clearly been supplemented by a vast amount of detailed historical research. Like Tolstoy, he includes in the novel a number of historical figures: Hitler and Stalin make brief appearances – as do Paulus, Eichmann, several important German officers, and most of the senior Russian officers at Stalingrad. Several of the minor characters are also based on real figures: Naum Rosenberg, for example, the Jewish accountant, was derived by Grossman from his researches for the Black Book.

The Jewish nuclear physicist Viktor Shtrum, perhaps the most important character in the novel, is a portrait of the author himself: his mother's death, his growing consciousness of his Jewish roots, his increasingly hostile attitude to Stalin, his agony over whether to write a letter of repentance – all these reflect the various stages of Grossman's own development. In other, more superficial respects, Shtrum is based on Lev Davidovich Landau, a brilliant physicist, not a Party member, who was dismissed from his work during the anti-Jewish campaigns of the early fifties, only to be reinstated by P. L. Kapitsa, an ex-student of Rutherford's and one of the most important Soviet physicists of the time. Kapitsa himself, at least in his eventual refusal to work on the development of the atom bomb, is clearly a model for Chepyzhin in Life and Fate.

The novel does contain one important departure from historical truth, though only in regard to chronology: Grossman considerably telescopes the rise of official anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. Symbolically, Grossman is justified in linking the Stalingrad victory to the rise of Russian chauvinism; in reality it developed more slowly, reaching its peak in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The campaign against Einstein, for example, began only in the late forties, not – as in the novel-in 1942…