Europe Central by William T. Vollmann

About this quartet the most fundamental thing which can be said is that it is too sad even to rise from a moan into a wail at death's uncompassed crescendo. To be sure, the danse macabre of the second movement glows sickeningly vivid as a sodium flare at night (so much for flamelessness!); it's as bright as the electric light which illuminates the gas chamber when it's time to ascertain whether all the Jews are dead; while the menace of the third remains more chilling than those screams of terror in Leningrad when the German bombs come down; they'll never stop coming down. Yet on the whole the effect is of somebody drowning, his most desperate convulsions already behind him; he's begun to inhale water; the green water he sees is going black; and he's settling down into the muck. Some listeners who close their eyes during the second movement claim to perceive a whirling red eye-ball or domino, and the more rapidly it speeds, the more balefully it glows. This eidetic image seems to symbolize the approach of something evil. I myself have never seen the red spot, perhaps because Opus 110 already threatens me so perfectly that no kinesthesia is needed to extend or refine the threat. While Shostakovich's music wriggles like the worming of black-gloved fingers behind a policeman's back, the Bronze Horseman sinks down under sandbags and planks. Leningrad strangles in a loop of barbed wire.

It's a time and a place we all know, though perhaps when we Americans think of it, we're more likely to think of the beaches of Normandy, or the Battle of the Bulge, than the enormous front between Germany and Russia that brought millions under conflagration during World War II. Stalingrad, that six month siege that killed two million, doesn't feature very highly in our American memories. William T. Vollmann's epic Europe Central is a book that presents fictionalized versions of some of the Germans and Russians who lived through those years of intensity and destruction. Some are military figures, like generals A. A. Vlasov and Friedrich Paulus, or the SS member Kurt Gerstein; many are creative types: German artist Kathe Kollwitz, Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, and the novel's protagonist, more or less, the Russian composer Shostakovich.

The central image that introduces the book is a black, octopus-like telephone--"Europe Central" evokes not just central Europe but a kind of immense telephone switchboard--that snakes into the lives of its characters, making orders and demands. The same black telephone that rings in Shostakovich's house to summon him to the Stalin's secret police is the same one that rings in the field tent of Field-Marshal Paulus to inform him that he is expected to commit suicide before retreating from where he is encircled by Soviet forces. I was most interested, perhaps, in the twin stories of Vlasov and Paulus, both generals who ended up being captured by the enemy, then recruited against their former masters. Vlasov led a regiment of Russians under the Nazi army; Paulus became a spokesman for an anti-fascist Germany under the auspices of the Soviet Union, though their "betrayals" came for different reasons and they came to--unsurprisingly, given the outcome of the war--very different ends.

I was also really taken by the story of Kurt Gerstein, who "infiltrated" the SS in an attempt to save as many people as he could. Gerstein's story, which I'd never heard, is one of a noble man who tries very hard, with limited results, to stave off a great cruelty. He pretends that shipments of Zyklon-B have gone bad, to give those condemned to death more time; he tries, mostly in vain, to alert authorities outside of Germany to the horrors of the concentration camp system. For these efforts, he is put on trial as a Nazi collaborator by his French captors, ultimately committing suicide. "I consider him a hero," Vollmann writes in the (characteristically compendious) footnotes, but Gerstein's story makes one question what a hero truly is--can one be a hero when what they accomplish is so minimal, because the forces allayed against them are so great? As Vollmann grimly notes, Gerstein's name is not one of those compiled in the "Righteous Among the Nations" for their efforts to save the Jews of Europe. For all that, he's a very Vollmann-like hero, something like the noble but ineffectual Chief Joseph of The Dying Grass.

I was less sure of what to make of the novel's focus on Shostakovich, whose story gives the book its backbone. Vollmann invents, seemingly out of whole cloth, a lovelorn Shostakovich, unable to get over his early lover Elena Konstantinovskaya, who later marries the famous Soviet filmmaker R. L. Karmen. Shostakovich obsesses over Elena, even as he marries a succession of other women. What's this got to do with the political themes of a book like Europe Central? Well, perhaps in one way it's merely an observation that what drives our innermost lives is not always, or even typically, questions of justice and struggle, like those that animate Vlasov, Paulus, Gerstein, Kollwitz, Akhmatova. Shostakovich, for all his genius, is an ordinary man unable to get over the one who got away; all the grand movements of the Soviets and Germans--he lives through the siege of Leningrad--count for less than Elena. But also, there's an interesting parallel in the way that Shostakovich debases himself for Elena and for the Soviet regime. Shostakovich, a "formalist" who loved dissonance and hated the mindless patriotism of Soviet realism, was constantly in trouble with the Soviet censors. But Vollmann depicts him as absolutely spineless, falling over himself to apologize and genuflect to the apparatchiks who want him to be more conformist, though he never seems to be able to actually constrain the shape of his genius in the way they desire. Eventually, Shostakovich does what he said he never would, joining the Communist Party, and alienating all of his more principled associates. Yet clearly Vollmann finds something heroic in him, too, though perhaps it is a kind of heroism that operates at a level beneath the conscious, in the place where creativity works.

The subject matter of Europe Central doesn't resonate with me like the Native American-European culture clashes of Vollmann's Seven Dreams books. And at a subconscious level, I think I had been suspicious of Europe Central because of a vague intuition that the Seven Dreams stuff was never taken all that seriously by critics until the publication of Europe Central, with its more familiar and shopworn settings. (Who needs another World War II novel?) But I am forced to admit that the later sections of Europe Central contain some of Vollmann's most accomplished writing: the strange chapter "Airlift Idylls," narrated by a German assassin targeting Shostakovich, who seems to be more of a metaphor than anything else--have you ever seen a chapter narrated by a metaphor?--and the freewheeling, associative horror-scape of "Opus 110," which details Shostakovich's spiraling instability and debasement with a prose to match. Ultimately, Europe Central struck me as an accomplishment on the level of Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, a novel from which it clearly takes some inspiration.