Little is known about Grossman's last years. He died of cancer on 14 September 1964. It appears he was deeply depressed, that he suffered great physical pain, and that he lived in a state of poverty and isolation. Worst of all, he had no assurance that his masterpiece would ever see the light of day. One of his few friends of the time reports him lamenting the confiscation of the manuscript and saying: 'They strangled me in a doorway.'
He did, however, continue writing until the end of his life. In the first place he completed the short novel
During his last years Grossman also wrote several short stories that have yet to be published either in the Soviet Union or in the West, and 'Peace Be with You', an account of a journey to Armenia. This fine essay, Grossman's literary testament, has been published in the Soviet Union, though only in a censored version.
There are a large number of important 'Soviet' writers who were brought up as members of the pre- Revolutionary intelligentsia: Pasternak, Bulgakov, Mandelstam, Akhmatova… Grossman, however, is a Soviet writer in a deeper sense; he will be remembered as both the first and the greatest of the dissidents of the post-Stalin era, the generation of dissidents who emerged from within Soviet Russia and who are themselves products of Soviet Russia.
LIFE AND FATE
The structure of
Like
The real battle portrayed in the novel is not the clash between the Third Reich and Stalin's Russia, but the clash between Freedom and Totalitarianism. At Stalingrad the Russian people believed they were fighting against Totalitarianism in the name of Freedom; the freedom they won, however, lasted only as long as the final outcome of the war remained undecided. Grossman movingly describes the development of a genuine spirit of camaraderie and egalitarianism among the defenders of Stalingrad; he also shows how this spirit was stamped out by Party functionaries who saw it as a greater danger than the Germans themselves.
'The clash between Freedom and Totalitarianism', however, is too grand and abstract a phrase. Grossman sees no value in fighting for freedom unless one can do so in a spirit of humility, a spirit of love and kindness. The battle Grossman portrays is the battle we must fight each day in order to preserve our humanity, the battle against the power of ideology, against the power of the State, against all the forces that combine to destroy the possibility of kindness and compassion between individuals.
The victors in this battle are not the Soviet military commanders, not General Chuykov who finally crosses to the East bank, after his heroic defence of Stalingrad has culminated in the German surrender, only in order to attend a banquet celebrating the 25 th anniversary of the founding of the Soviet Secret Police. The true victors are the Russian peasant woman who takes pity on a wounded German soldier while his comrades are shooting her friends and relatives, the woman who sacrifices her own career and happiness in order to send a food-parcel to the Lubyanka – everyone whose actions, however historically insignificant, are motivated by the spirit of senseless, irrational kindness. It is these spontaneous, dangerous acts of kindness that Grossman sees as the truest expression of human freedom.
In
Grossman has succeeded in achieving what every other Socialist Realist has merely pretended to do: he has portrayed the life, not of a few individuals, but of an entire age. All the characters endure fates that are typical of their generation. Each character, however vividly realized, is somehow typical of a particular group or class: Krymov and Mostovskoy the Old Bolsheviks, Getmanov the successful Stalinist functionary, Novikov the honourable and talented officer whose talents were never acknowledged before the war, Shtrum the Jewish intellectual. There is nothing eccentric about the novel, either stylistically or in the action and characterization. Probably no great novel of the last sixty years is so untouched by the influence of Modernism.
Grossman reached adolescence only after the Revolution and he had little contact, even through reading, with the West. Unlike Solzhenit-syn with his idealization of nineteenth-century Russia, he never tried to break free of his age. His power as a writer is that of an insider, that of a man who speaks from within Soviet society and in its own language. It is perhaps only through writing in its own style that one can portray an entire age; it would surely be impossible to portray the world of Jane Austen in the language of Joyce, or the world of Beowulf in the language of Jane Austen. It is interesting to note that Ilya Ehrenburg, many of whose books are modernist in technique, chose to write his novel about Stalinism,
THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
From January 1941 Stalin had received repeated warnings of Hitler's intentions, both through his own intelligence network and through those of Britain and the United States. He chose to ignore these warnings, to do everything in his power to appease Hitler, to avoid scrupulously any action that might be construed as provocation.
Possibly he was playing for time, aware that the Soviet Union was unprepared for war, both militarily and industrially; more likely he was simply burying his head in the sand, expecting his own wishes automatically to take on the status of objective reality. In any case, he clung desperately to the Nazi-Soviet pact. As a result the Soviet armed forces were taken largely unawares by the German offensive of 22 June 1941.
During the ensuing months the Soviet forces were thrown into headlong retreat. Armies that attempted to hold their ground were for the most part encircled. By late October the Germans had taken nearly three million prisoners, had isolated Leningrad, and had breached the outer defence line of Moscow itself. Meanwhile more than 1500 factories, not to mention entire universities and scientific institutes, had been evacuated by rail to the Urals, Siberia,
