Felix Purat and Mike Goodenow Weber published a series of articles about the Soviet writer Vassily Grossman, which lead me to read Life & Fate. Thank you both!
Tolstoy, Grossman, Individuals, and History
So much could be said about Vasily Grossman's Life & Fate (1959). It’s a big book. This humble essay aims to compare its large scale, historic worldview with that of another big book, Leo Tolstoy’s War & Peace (1865-1869). How does history move, and what does that mean for the individual? Tolstoy answers the first question directly, the second, less so. Grossman answers the second question directly, but his answer to the first one is tricky, and may take another essay.
Leo Tolstoy (1828 - 1910)
Vasily Grossman (1905 – 1964)
Life & Fate knows of War & Peace
Where shall I start? You no doubt heard of Tolstoy’s War & Peace! Grossman's Life & Fate is a War & Peace for the USSR. It’s a long narrative panorama that visits characters exterior and inner lives during a time of foreign invasion, but so different that the differences are worth noting.
First, it’s not technically true that both are both Russian novels, because Grossman was not Russian. Many nationalities and languages made up the the Soviet Union. L&F consciously reflects this and this tension becomes one of its many themes. Characters and situations in L&F express both expansive and exclusionary definitions of “Russianness” as the war, and the Stalingrad victory.
Second, one novel came first and the mind of the second novel knows it: the word “Tolstoy” appears 31 times in L&F! Characters discuss Tolstoy; one man, in a German camp, is a Tolstoyan Christian (executed for refusing to build a gas chamber). Third, the civilizational epochs of the two novels are radically different, the one pre-atomic modern, the other atomic.
War & the Novelist
Grossman participated in the fronts of what Russians call the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945), and the Siege of Stalingrad. Leo Tolstoy was not yet born when the Corsican Ogre invaded Russian (1812). However, Tolstoy did participate in a siege, with explosive shells, bunkers, railways and telegraph, Siege of Sevastopol (1854–55). Therefore, like Grossman, Tolstoy knew from war from experience (and wrote directly about it in his Sevastopol Sketches of 1855-1856). To what extent was the Napoleonic War different the Crimean War, and to what extent similar, for the purposes of a writer? For comparison, consider Stephen Crane who, born after the American Civil War, felt he could, from life experiences such as American football, infer what that war was like (Red Badge of Courage, 1894). Stendhal was with Napoleon at Waterloo, and wrote about it briefly in The Charterhouse of Parma, Chapter III, including this: “Suddenly every one broke into a gallop. In a few minutes Fabrizio saw another ploughed field, about twenty paces in front of him, the surface of which was heaving in a very curious manner.” I don’t think it likely that a writer who was not at a musket battle would know about the heaving of the earth under musket fire volley. Tolstoy, a junior artillery officer at Crimea, wrote his character Pierre carrying ammunition for a battery at the battle of Borodino.
History Is A Brute At Gallop
Tolstoy conceives historical outcomes determined by a vast Newtonian universe in which the individual soul exists but cannot interact outside that same membrane of physical laws. Indeed, in the Epilogue of War & Peace, Chapter XI, Tolstoy spells it out.1 At a large scale, human free will has no influence on history; to believe that it does the laws of Kepler and Newton, because defies introduces “a free force” “not subject to laws.” The Napoleonic battle, and its chaos, are manifestations of this. In that chapter, Rostóv listens to a military conference and thinks, “What science can there be in a matter in which, as in all practical matters, nothing can be defined and everything depends on innumerable conditions, the significance of which is determined at a particular moment which arrives no one knows when?” ***
“And why do they all speak of a ‘military genius’? Is a man a genius who can order bread to be brought up at the right time and say who is to go to the right and who to the left? It is only because military men are invested with pomp and power and crowds of sycophants flatter power, attributing to it qualities of genius it does not possess. The best generals I have known were, on the contrary, stupid or absent-minded men.”
Grossman, Freedom and House 6/1
Grossman echoes this in Part One, Chapter 11 of Life & Fate, with a truism many soldiers could say of many battles across the centuries: "The intuition of a deafened and isolated soldier often turns out to be nearer the truth than judgments delivered by staff officers as they study the map.”
But Grossman does not develop the same feeling of big, dumb historical forces colliding with another subject to resolution through random magnifications of molecules of order and chaos (such as, whether or not a soldier in the front line shouts, “We are lost!” or “Huzzah!”). In Life & Fate, the big historical forces are ideologies as well as nations. Furthermore, nations have minorities within them. Everything moves and changes. The war builds a sense of nationalism within Communism, and here and there, uncovers a Communism less and less distinct from fascism, even Nazism. In Grossman’s Life & Fate, it’s dark, but not unremitting, and not certain. Meanwhile, the minds of individual characters have their own concerns, sometimes related to the large historic forces, but often not.
In Life & Fate, a group of Soviet defenders in the ruins of House 6/1 confound the Nazi advance. Commanded by Gastov, far in front of friendly forces, the defenders drink water from the radiators of the ruins, and scavenge moldy potatoes, and fight disconnected from higher command. Gastov ignores orders to report to the political wing of the military. For this reason, they send a radio and operator; off stage, Gastov apparently sabotages the radio, and sends the operator back. When the Party sends Commissar Krymov to end what they call a “state within a state”, Grekov waits until he’s asleep. They he apparently shoots to wound Krymov (grazing the skull) and force his evacuation. It is the confounding and defiant independent nature of the defenders that rules House 6/1, defying both Germans and communists, until bombed to oblivion. In this sense, the battle of Stalingrad for Grossman gives birth to a temporary and fragile freedom in Stalinist USSR. Although they can and do oppress and kill them, neither the Germans nor the communists can stop people from being people. This is not much solace, but it is more than nothing.
In Life & Fate, a Problem, and a Telling Error
The “Great Man of History” theory that Tolstoy disdains, its manifestation by Napoleon on his horse, is bunk, for command is impotent to momentum and change. In contrast, he shows the famous Russian commander Katusov, old, fat, and tired, wins battles by sleeping through staff meetings, by not submitting the cohesion of his forces to the chaos of foolish, egoist commanders.
Keep this in mind as I try to show you how Grossman (probably by accident) sets up problem a Part Three, Chapter 49:
“But, at the same time, new passions were ripening; the spirit of the war was changing. What had been crucial in Stalingrad and during 1941 was coming to be of merely secondary importance. The first person to understand this change was the man who on 3 June, 1941, had said: “My brothers and sisters, my friends…”
Yes, of course victory of Stalingrad changed the Soviet war spirit and more. Yes, the victory of Stalingrad (winter of 1943) signaled the reverse of Soviet retreats to Soviet advances. The problem is that Stalin didn’t give that speech on the 3rd of June, 1941. He broadcast it on the 3rd of July, 1941. A simple and honest mistake in a manuscript stolen by the secret police, perhaps. But what does that simple and honest mistake hide?
It hides that Stalin was silent during the first weeks of German invasion (June 22), during the retreats, destruction, disaster, and surrenders. When Minsk fell on June 28, Stalin retreated to his dacha until July 1. For comparison, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941, and President Roosevelt gave his famous “a date that will live in infamy” speech to Congress the very next day.
Some accounts say Stalin had a nervous breakdown, and expected a coup that held him responsible. When Katusov napped through a staff meeting before battle at Borodino, his Russian troops waited in prepared positions including earthworks (flèches). Napping through the bluster was a means of preventing the meddling of the generals, and forestalling chaos. Stalin’s silence as the German army advanced hundreds of miles was not Katusov in 1812 napping through the bluster of his unrealistic generals. This was Stalin’s personal collapse and failure of leadership. What was Stalin’s culpability? Historians will argue. But let’s include in the discussion: so many Russian generals purged, paroxysms of state terrorism culminating in 1937, the Molotov-Ribbontrop Pact, distribution of border defenses in ways that made them vulnerable to “lightning war”, the dismissal of warnings of German attack… “1937” appears 55 times in Grossman’s Life & Fate, usually in the context of political arrests, state terrorism. Communism claims to understand history as a science, and therefore can guide it, yet fails. Stalin is more Napoleon than Katusov.
Stalin’s silence from June 22 to July 3 increased the confusion of the Soviet people, and weakened the defense of the USSR. When Stalin finally did speak to the Soviet people to rally a defense, it no doubt meant a lot to those who heard him. It makes sense that Grossman’s characters who remember it, and compare that broadcast to the broadcasts of the victory at Stalingrad, But I see a lot half-hidden behind Grossman’s simple, honest mistake of June 3, 1941 for July 3, 1941.
In both Grossman and Tolstoy great novels, two national-historical forces press against each other; one develops a crack first and that side fails. Grossman’s nations match up their ideologies. Soviet labor camps measure against Nazi. Russian nationalism rises at the expensive of Soviet minorities.
Tolstoy's characters blunder or act stoically into, through, upon waves much stronger than them, with results that are from human perspective as emphatically random as they are inescapable. As made explicit in his epilogue, there is a higher principle of Newtonian universe at effect, which would be predictable from a god-like vantage, but the newsprint dots of the pattern appear at human level as unprincipled and random.
Given the scale of national catastrophes in both novels, one might think the individuals in each shrinks to insignificance. Yes, I think that’s partly true. But consider the fact that both novels focus so much on the individuals. Consider the flow of their relationships, sometimes as impacted by history, sometimes not. Most particularly, consider the drama of their shifting thoughts. Grossman emphasizes the world of the mind, its tricks and dynamics, more than Tolstoy. This emphasis demonstrates to us that the blind and roaring historical colossus can crush individuals, but not stop them from having lived as individuals. Grossman’s conclusion, just shy of futility, stands out as a defiance of his age of brutal ideologies. Tolstoy’s novel tells the story through the experience of individuals surviving (or not) through a variety of futilities (high society, glory, romance, divination, Freemasonry, family). I would like to suggest that for all its ultimate futility atop the conservation of massive momentum, Tolstoy’s characters carries this meaning as an arguable necessity to the experience of reading the novel made worthwhile by individual lives. Grossman is more explicit in Life & Fate, Part Three, Chapter 60:
“…No man can forget his own happiness and that fate alone has the power to pardon and chastise, to raise up the glory and to plunge into need, to reduce a man to labour-camp dust, neverless neither fate, nor history, not the anger of the State, nor the glory or infamy of battle has any power to affect those who call themselves human beings. No, whatever life holds in store — hard-won glory, poverty and despair, or death in a labour-camp — they will live as human beings and die as human beings, the same as those who have already perished; and in this alone lies man’s eternal and bitter victory over the grandiose and in human forces that ever have been or will be…”
Remember that Tolstoy became more religious as he grew old, which must have changed his view of the individual and history. In contrast to the Tolstoy’s War & peace philosophy of Newtonic momentum and history, Grossman (a physicist among other things) interprets his time, and its ideologies, as that of the new atomic theories. I’ll explore this in another essay.
© Mosby Woods
War & Peace, EPILOGUE, CHAPTER XI
History examines the manifestations of man’s free will in connection with the external world in time and in dependence on cause, that is, it defines this freedom by the laws of reason, and so history is a science only in so far as this free will is defined by those laws.
The recognition of man’s free will as something capable of influencing historical events, that is, as not subject to laws, is the same for history as the recognition of a free force moving the heavenly bodies would be for astronomy.
That assumption would destroy the possibility of the existence of laws, that is, of any science whatever. If there is even a single body moving freely, then the laws of Kepler and Newton are negatived and no conception of the movement of the heavenly bodies any longer exists. If any single action is due to free will, then not a single historical law can exist, nor any conception of historical events.
No problem! Love the pictures, especially Tolstoy by a tank. XD
In my view, Stalin's hesitation had to do with his unwavering belief (and supreme, accompanying confidence) in things going his way. Roger Moorhouse (in The Devil's Alliance - great book!) argues that economics are what eventually caused Hitler to launch Operation Barbarossa; the Pact was as much an economic deal as it was a territorial one, and the Soviets were extremely tight-fisted negotiators. But many of the head Nazi party leaders were relative amateurs compared to Stalin and his purge-hardened elites, although for all of Ribbentrop's shortcomings their side of the deal could have been a lot worse. I don't think either Stalin or Molotov were impressed with Ribbentrop, whose persona was rather buffoonish. Perhaps they underestimated them?
I like that about the Russians. Their literature balances out individualism and collectivism quite healthily. (Excepting, of course, socialist realism)
Life and Fate is my second favorite novel of all time, after The Lord of the Rings.
I'm not sure I have anything to add.
(My understanding is that Stephen Crane relied heavily on newspaper accounts from the Civil War.)