Book review: Why was Vasily Grossman’s novel "Stalingrad" shunned by publishers for so long?
STALINGRAD by Vasily
Grossman, translated by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler
Reviewed by SOPHIE PINKHAM
Reviewed by SOPHIE PINKHAM
In the Soviet Union,
every literary work was a political statement, whether the writer liked it or
not. Soviet censorship allowed some room for negotiation, but outside the USSR,
official and dissident literature were perceived as polar opposites. This stark
distinction imbued Soviet-era literature with a gratifyingly Manichaean
quality, and Western readers became enamored of the stories of books that
had escaped to
liberty while their authors remained at the mercy of the Soviet authorities.
The more strenuous the Soviet efforts to suppress a work, the greater its
frisson of the forbidden. Meanwhile, literature that had been
published in the Soviet Union was most often ignored. This left Western readers
with an imperfect understanding of the many authors who resorted to illicit
publication only at desperate moments.
Vasily Grossman is
best known in the West for his World War II novel Life and Fate, which he wrote in the
1950s. Grossman’s attempts to publish his novel in the Soviet Union ended with
the manuscript’s famous “arrest” in 1961, one of the only cases when the KGB
seized a manuscript but not its author. Fortunately, two of Grossman’s friends had
hidden copies. Grossman died of cancer in 1964, in despair over the suppression
of his masterpiece. The dissident satirist Vladimir Voinovich arranged to have
microfilm of Life and Fate smuggled abroad in 1975, but it
took years to find a publisher. By then, the Orthodox Russian nationalist
Solzhenitsyn was the new big thing in Soviet dissidence; Grossman’s Jewish
themes had a narrower appeal. The novel was published at last in 1980, in
Switzerland, due to the tireless efforts of a handful of mostly Jewish
Russophone writers and intellectuals, and it eventually became a classic.
Running to nearly 900
pages, this monumental work traces the wartime experiences of an extended
family, the Shaposhnikovs, their spouses, lovers, friends, and colleagues, and
figures from various spheres of Soviet life. Several key characters end up in
Nazi concentration camps or in the Gulag; the novel’s juxtaposition of the
German and Soviet systems brought Grossman admiration in the West, where he was
cast as a visionary anti-totalitarian. This is a reductive understanding of an
author who not only cherished individual subjectivity, but also valorized the
transcendent power of collective action. Grossman’s anger at Soviet abuses was
motivated in part by grief over the betrayal of revolutionary ideals.
Nevertheless, his work has been touted as a warning against radical visions of all kinds, used to
support the argument that communism and fascism are merely two sides of the
same coin.
Yet Life and
Fate was only the second half of an epic work that started
with Stalingrad, written in the 1940s and all but forgotten until
recently. Only now is the novel available in English for the first time.. read more:
https://newrepublic.com/article/154658/vasily-grossmans-stalingrad-lost-epic-review
