Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman

And here she was, an old woman now, living and hoping, keeping faith, afraid of evil, full of anxiety for the living and an equal concern for the dead; here she was, looking at the ruins of her home, admiring the spring sky without knowing she was admiring it, wondering why the future of those she loved was so obscure and the past so full of mistakes, not realizing that this very obscurity and unhappiness concealed a strange hope and clarity, not realizing that in the depths of her soul she already knew the meaning of both her own life and the lives of her nearest and dearest, not realizing that even though neither she herself nor any of them could tell what was in store, even though they all knew only too well that at times like these no man can forge his own happiness and that fate alone has the power to pardon and chastise, to raise up to glory and to plunge into need, to reduce a man to labour-camp dust, nevertheless neither fate, nor history, nor 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 all the grandiose and inhuman forces that ever have been or ever will be...

First of all, I want to point out that Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate is almost 900 pages long. Truly, reading it, meeting its daunting challenge, made me feel a little like the heroes of the Battle of Stalingrad, that five-month siege against Russian forces by the Germans that is the background of Grossman's epic novel. I'm not saying I'm as heroic as they were in tackling this novel; I'm just saying I know a little know what it must have been like.

OK, kidding aside: Life and Fate is one of those novels that really earns the word "epic," and not just for its length, but its scope: Grossman's novel weaves together a couple dozen storylines about Russians during the Battle of Stalingrad, some of which are about the tank commanders, fighter pilots, commissars, and private grunts who are on the front lines of the battle, but also the stories of many other "ordinary" folks whose lives have been caught in the upheaval not just of war but of the process of collectivization and Stalinization that has transformed Russia since the Revolution. At the heart of the novel is the Shaposhnikov family: Zhenya, torn between her love for a general in Stalin's army and her duty to her ex-husband, soon to be denounced and thrown into prison; Lyudmila, whose son Tolya dies early in the fighting, leaving her heartbroken and hopeless; and especially Viktor, Lyudmila's husband and a renowned physicist who finds himself embroiled in political conflicts that batter his pride and his conscience. (And about ten other Shaposhnikovs and relatives, too.)

It's tempting to say that Life and Fate captures the breadth of a historical moment. That's true, one of the novel's great gifts is that it manages to cast a wide net over Stalingrad, and present a convincing portrait of the spirit of the country. But you can easily imagine how a project like this turns into propaganda, or jingoism, and in fact, the introduction by translator Robert Chandlers suggests that Grossman's previous 900-page juggernaut, Stalingrad, was exactly that. But there's something more subversive about Life and Fate, which is as dubious about Stalinization as it is about Nazism. Both Fascism and Totalitarianism are inhuman ideologies, systems which reduce the individual to a function of the State. The method and practice of Life and Fate, by contrast, is humanistic: only by giving a hundred portraits of individual people, rather than a mass representation of the spirit of the people in the Soviet style, can the dignity and importance of the human being be preserved in the face of the 20th century.

The conflict between the individual and the state is exemplified in Viktor, who apparently is something of a self-portrait. In exile from Moscow--everyone has escaped the capital, which has been besieged by fighting--he's made the discovery of his life. (Grossman, knowledgeable about particle physics, manages to make this discovery seem convincing without giving any particulars.) It should be a moment of triumph for Viktor, but his superiors are suddenly seized by the idea that Viktor's theories contradict a socialist understanding of the physical world, and should therefore be verboten. Viktor stubbornly believes that physical reality ought to dictate ideology and not vice versa, but this is not an acceptable belief in Stalinist Russia, and Viktor's inability to play along may have dangerous consequences, as it did for several imprisoned and executed scientists under Stalin.

One thing I liked about Viktor's character is that he's not a very good person: he's irascible, resentful, proud; he's even in love with his best friend's wife. But his inability to say what is expected of him is also a virtue; Viktor is incapable of subjecting his humanity to the whims of the state. In a twist late in the novel, Viktor receives a phone call from Stalin himself, who seems to have decided Viktor's discoveries are worthwhile. (Apparently Stalin, like Bill Murray, was known for these kind of unexpected intrusions into the lives of ordinary people.) But Viktor's ordeal isn't over: later, he's asked to sign a denunciation that he knows will lead to the imprisonment and execution of two other scientists. Even when the State favors you, it still sees you as an extension of itself.

Much of Life and Fate takes place in prisons or prison camps. There's the state prison in Moscow where Zhenya's ex-husband is imprisoned. There is a fenced-in Jewish ghetto in Poland, where Viktor's mother is imprisoned, and the letter she manages to have smuggled out to him is one of the novel's most effective and evocative moments:

They say that children are our own future, but how can one say that of these children? They aren't going to be come musicians, cobblers, or tailors. Last night I saw very clearly how this whole noisy world of bearded, anxious fathers and querulous grandmothers who bake honey-cakes and goose-necks--this whole world of marriage customs, proverbial sayings and Sabbaths will disappear for ever under the earth. After the war life will begin to stir once again, but we won't be here, we will have vanished--just as the Aztecs once vanished.

 There are Siberian gulags and German concentration camps. In true humanist fashion, Grossman gives us the stories of the German soldiers who are tasked to build the gas chambers, and the guards who operate it. The description of Sofya, a Jewish woman, and David, a young unattended boy she "adopts" during their transport to Auschwitz, during their last moments in the gas chamber is one of the most effective Holocaust narratives I've ever encountered in a culture that craves Holocaust narratives. In such a large book, the small details stand out: intuiting something he cannot articulate, David throws away a butterfly chrysalis he has found before being herded into the gas chamber, thinking, "Live!" The great machinery of death is unable to stop this impulse.

What's remarkable about these sections is the clear-eyed way they tackle the similarities and differences between Hitler's regime and that of Stalin, whose assault on Jews in the Soviet Union continued for decades after the fall of Nazi Germany. You couldn't call it equivocating; Life and Fate is clear in its belief that the good guys won at Stalingrad, and that the Nazi concentration camp system was unique in its genocidal fanaticism. But it's also unsparing toward the horrors of Stalinist collectivization, antisemitism, and political oppression, toward the political prison and the gulag. These are the enemy of the individual, and though they are powerful, the individual cannot be stamped out.

There's something in Life and Fate that feels outdated, though much needed and too easily discarded. It's a novel about the human spirit, written before that phrase was coopted and neutered by 21st century forces; it's like a message from a postwar past in which the phrase the "human spirit" actually meant something. It's a reminder to be guarded against forces which are anti-human, which--I regret to inform you--remain sadly in abundance.