Freeing the book that redeems the individual, lost in a world at war

THE KGB did not arrest Vasily Grossman, but they did arrest his novel. The knock on the door of his apartment in Moscow came in 1959, after which the grey men from the collision of consonants scoured the room for every single typed manuscript page and hand-written note; even the typewriter on which it had been composed was stripped of its inky ribbon. Life and Fate was a dangerous book, liable to cause considerable harm to the Soviet Union, as Mikhail Suslov, head of ideology of the Politburo, explained in a letter to the author: “Why should we add your book to the atomic bombs that our enemies are preparing to launch against us?”

Yet Mr Suslov was not inconsiderate of an author’s desire for his work to find an audience. He said the book could be published: in 200 years’ time. In the end, the delay was measured in decades, not centuries, but it was long enough for Vasily Grossman, a bespectacled Jewish writer, once portly but eventually stripped bare by stomach cancer, to die in 1964 in the knowledge that his masterpiece remained imprisoned. As he wrote to Nikita Khrushchev, who had himself turned his back on the brutality of the Stalinist era in his Secret Speech: “What is the point of me being physically free when the book I dedicated my life to is arrested?”

The liberation of Life and Fate began ten years after his death, when Grossman’s best friend, Semyon Lipkin, who had hidden a copy of the manuscript in a farmhouse outside Moscow, transferred it on to a microfilm, which was then smuggled out of the Soviet Union by the nuclear scientist Andrei Sakharov. In Switzerland, two supporters, Efim Etkind and Shimon Markish, laboriously retyped all 871 pages, and the novel was first published in Switzerland in 1980. An English translation by Robert Chandler appeared in 1985 and, three years later, the exiled novel finally fluttered home to Russia and the warmer political climate created by Mikhail Gorbachov’s Glasnost.

Yet, later this month, the novel will enjoy its widest release when Radio 4 launches its largest ever drama adaptation, running the book in 12 episodes over eight hours from 18 to 24 September and utilising two of Scotland’s warmest voices, those of David Tennant and John Sessions. It is a bold move, and one the current controller of Radio 4, Gwyneth Williams, inherited from her predecessor, Mark Damazer, who owns three copies, has given away 15 paperbacks to friends and clearly recognised an opportunity to convert millions more to the man described by Martin Amis as “the Tolstoy of the Soviet Union”.

In support of the adaptation, there will be a special edition of Start the Week dedicated to the author and his work, as well as two other radio documentaries. So why is Radio 4 pouring so many resources into resurrecting the life and work of one, largely unknown, Russian novelist? First, there is the strength of the novel, which bears worthy comparison to War and Peace, but then also there is the subject matter: Russia’s role during the Second World War, which, for many, still remains unappreciated. For it was not the Americans or the British who won the war, it was the Russians. By sheer weight of numbers, by an ability to absorb the loss of lives at a rate and a magnitude unprecedented in history, the Soviet Union drove back the German invasion of their mother land and broke their back in Berlin.

Yet today we are aware that the clash between Nazism and Communism was evil grappling with evil, with Stalin’s plinth in any hall of monsters but a few millimetres lower than Hitler himself. Last year, in Russia, the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War was marked by the Kremlin taking a revisionist view of history and portraying Josef Stalin not as a mass murderer whose disbelief that Germany was planning a mass invasion almost destroyed the nation and whose post-war anti-Semitism verged on Hitler’s, but as a great wartime leader.

Fifty years ago, Vasily Grossman refused to toe the line when presenting his unvarnished truth about “the Great Patriotic War”, and so even now in Russia there is still no place for him among the anniversary celebrations. The reason it was suppressed was for being too ambivalent about the “Great Patriotic War” and for drawing too sharp parallels between Nazi and Soviet power. He was, however, the nation’s finest war correspondent, and Life and Fate is infused with the sights and experiences he accrued during the three years he spent with the Red Army, which took him from the brutal siege of Stalingrad, the battle of Kursk, the largest tank battle in history, to the gates of Treblinka and, finally, down into Hitler’s bunker. A former engineer who began writing in his thirties, he had originally been rejected as a war correspondent because of his lack of military experience, but the editor insisted he had sharper qualities: “That’s all right, He knows about people’s souls.”

The power of his great novel is that he redeems the individual lost in a world at war. Among the Russian leadership the life of an individual had meaning, but only as digit on a form or as a means of holding a position for a few extra minutes. As General Zhukov said at the siege of Leningrad: “blood is time”. However, Grossman never lost his humanity, he recognised the tragedy of the individual as he had experienced it. His mother was among the Jews murdered by the Nazis in Berdichev, and the character of Viktor Shtrum in the novel, modelled on himself, is tormented by the death of his mother, who wrote to him from the ghetto.

At one point in the novel Grossman has one of his characters extol the importance of the individual. The character explains that the attitude in Russia has too often been sectarian and cruel: “But Chekhov said: ‘Let’s put God and all these grand progressive ideas to one side. Let’s begin with man. Let’s be kind and attentive to the individual man – whether he’s a bishop, a peasant, an industrial magnate, a convict in the Sakhalin islands or a waiter in a restaurant . . . That’s democracy, the still unrealised democracy of the Russian people.”

Although a man of principle, Vasily Grossman was not above capitulating to the demands of the Soviet state. In 1952 he was persuaded to sign a letter condemning a number of Jewish doctors, after Stalin had accused them of conspiring to murder state officials. (Stalin loved to read, but he didn’t love to read Vasily Grossman. When one of his novels was nominated for a Stalin prize, the dictator struck him off the list for his alleged support of the Mensheviks.) The doctors were condemned to death and the author was haunted for the next 12 years by what he had done. So he knew only too well the weakness of people, yet he had one over arching message. “In the cruel and terrible time in which our generations has been condemned to live on this earth, we must never make peace with evil. We must never become indifferent to others or undemanding of ourselves.”