Years ago, I struggled to engage with Life and Fate. Since then Grossman's wartime fiction has been fully translated as a trilogy, of which The People Immortal is the first and Stalingrad the third. I wanted so much to try again and starting at the beginning, with the shortest of the novels, seemed to me ideal.
And it was. I was gripped from the moment it began. It is set - and was written - during Operation Barbarosa, the German invasion of their supposed ally in June 1941. Grossman, despite having to use a walking stick at only 35, volunteered for service and was embedded as the front line correspondent for Red Star. His articles and notes became material for this novel, written during a two-month leave of absence in April and May 1942. The events depicted are fundamentally real but fictionalised. Captain Babadjanian, for example, who inspires one of the two protagonists (Bogariov) was absolutely real. Grossman shows him killed him in battle, which was what Grossman thought had happened. In fact he wasn't dead and joked about the mistake when Grossman interviewed him in Berlin immediately after the war.
Commisar Bogariov and Semion Ignatiev are our two protagonists, the former an academic turned senior officer, Ignatiev a light=hearted peasant in Babadjanian's Rife Company. I hadn't understood what a Commisar was in wartime. I do now. Bogariov is the political commander alongside and equal to the military commander. In The People Immortal Bogariov lambasts Major Mertsalov, the regimental commander, for losing sight of the big picture - that it is the Soviet Union's destiny to smash fascism - thereby inspiring Mertsalov to take the radical, unexpected tactic which secures victory in the battle that is the climax of the novel. Bogariov in turn takes inspiration from Ignatiev, who embraces his life knowing full well that it could end at any moment. Ignatiev is not fighting for a political creed, he is defending the land he loves.
That brings us to the key point of the novel. This is not a victory which sends the German army back where it came from. It is a victory gained against the odds during a full scale retreat. Russia is not winning overall. It trying to rescue crumbs of comfort from a massive defeat. Germany invaded on June 22; a week later they had taken Minsk and captured 300,000 Soviet troops. By mid-September they are encircling Kiev having taken another half-a-million prisoners of war.
Grossman knows the Nazis are killing Jews and destroying communities. He illustrates this in the novel with the story of Lionya, the son of a general, who is tries to walk to Moscow after fleeing the village where he lived with his grandmother. For all Grossman's realism and light hand with the fictional gloss, we are genuinely moved when Lionya finds safety in the vast forest, and when our two protagonists emerge together from the carnage of battle.
Can I handle Life and Fate now? It's surely worth a second try. By the way, the translation by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler is brilliant. I'm pretty sure Robert translated Life and Fate. Must check...
