The People Immortal - Vasily Grossman

 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...

Everything Flows - Vasily Grossman

I tried reading Grossman's Life and Fate when Radio 4 did an epic dramatisation a couple of years ago. I failed. I saw this much shorter work and thought it might be a way in to Grossman's work. I finished it, which was good, but I'm not sure I want to commit myself to another go at Life and Fate which is ten times longer.


Don't get me wrong, Everything Flows is a major work, impressive in many ways. It took Grossman eight years to write, his last eight years, and it is obviously unfinished. But there are several problem. It is a story of the Gulag - specifically the challenge facing Ivan Grigoryevich on his release after thirty years - and the atrocity of the Soviet penal system is always interesting. But it is not Grossman's story. Despite being Jewish, intellectual, a writer and opinionated, he was in no way suppressed by the Stalin regime. Indeed, his fame as a war reporter - his account of the extermination camps was used as evidence at the Nuremberg war trials - cushioned him from criticism. Some of his novels and short stories were successful. It was Krushchov rather than Stalin who took against him and the late novels were held up indefinitely as the censors demanded more and more rewrites.


The unfinished nature of the book, no doubt exacerbated by Grossman's stomach cancer, is all too evident. He has no vision for what the novel should be. He has an overarching theme about the Russian people's fetish for totalitarianism but cannot find a way to incorporate it as story. Instead the last quarter of what is only a 220 page book is given over to a historical essay purportedly written by Ivan Grigoryevich after the death of his landlady-lover. The essay is far too long and full of rather convenient aphorisms which strike my inner ear as glib and facile rather than insightful. It suffers especially because it follows a first-person narration of the Ukranian famine by the landlady-lover which is truly heart-rending.


There are other promising strands never followed up on - a widow who is sent to an all-female camp in Siberia and Ivan's cousin Nikolay, who has done rather well out of playing the system and thus feels an appalling burden of guilt. What we are left with, then, is the skeleton of a potentially great novel in progress.


There are, in my view, far too many notes and explanations. There was one thing that struck me, though, in the afterword by Grossman's daughter. When the novel came to light in the Perestroika era no Russian paper would publish it because it wasn't sufficiently Gulag. Are we any different today? An unfinished collection of linked fragments like Everything Flows gets translated and published because it supports our preconceptions about Soviet Russia whilst complete novels of Russian heroism, like Grossman's Stalingrad (For A Just Cause), based on his actual experience, are passed over.