LIFE AND FATE
Vasily Grossman
New York: Harper & Row, 1986
$22.50
Why did Khrushchev have Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich sent to all Soviet embassies abroad for immediate publications, while Grossman's novel was confiscated down to used typewriter ribbons? Stalin's persecution of Grossman as a Jew made the victim see the light of "kindness, morality, and mercy," even during the Soviet-Nazi war to the death.
When I am asked whether I knew Vasily (Vaseely) Grossman, I answer: "Why should I have?" Everything he published in Russia was pulp. The question as to which pulp is worse from the literary point of view, Soviet pulp or American pulp (as produced by John Updike, William Styron, the late Irwin Shaw, and hordes of lesser-known names), is beyond the scope of this essay. But in any case, from the sociopolitical and ethical point of view, Soviet pulp is usually part of totalitarian propaganda, which made it unbearable to me.
Now, here is Grossman's novel Life and Fate, which he finished in 1960. It was published posthumously in the West first in excerpts in our Russian-language émigré magazines in 1975, then in full in 1980 in Russian, and now in English. The novel has never been published inside Russia, since sociopolitically and ethically it is the opposite of totalitarian propaganda.
The Realistic Novel in Russia and in the West
Many Western-born reviewers drop the names of Tolstoy, Dostoyevski, or Chekhov, generally known in the West, whenever they review a "Russian book." It is the same as to believe that every portrait painted in Europe from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century is a Rembrandt, a Raphael, or a Titan. Actually, the realistic, and in particular historical, novel flourished prior to the twentieth century in all European or Europe-influence countries, just as portrait painting did. But Rembrandt's Lady with a Pink is not valued today because it "Caught a likeness" as well as Kodak photography. Similarly, Tolstoy's War and Peace is not valued today because it is as good as any university-level historical study. Indeed, War and Peace is not historical scholarship in the sense of the word is understood today, for the first requirement of such scholarship is a hierarchy of sources analyzed for reliability, while Tolstoy's piece does not contain a single source note.
Just as portraits which merely "catch a likeness" are unnecessary in the West in the age of photography, so are "realistic novels" which merely attempt to substitute for scholarship, electronic documentary evidence, social and behavioral sciences, or statistics. Only prose at the literary level of Tolstoy's War and Peace or Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men (novelette and play, 1937) deserves serious attention in the West. Whether prose at this literary level exists in the United States and finds a quality-conscious market or patronage is, again, a separate issue. But it is natural that the realistic novel below this literary level is of no interest to the serious reader in the West and had degenerated into airport newsstand fiction.
The literary scene is all different in
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