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Stepsons in the Motherland: The Architectonics of Vasilii Grossman's Zhizn' i Sud'ba

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

John Garrard
John Garrard*
Affiliation:
University of Arizona and Merton College, Oxford University
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Extract

The question of freedom and slavery tormented Grossman all his life.

Semen Lipkin

Architectonics designates those compositional principles that define a novel's structural and thematic coherence. The Greek term arkhitektonike, as glossed by Sir Philip Sidney in The Defense of Poesy, has the additional merit of offering a useful shorthand for my eclectic approach to Vasilii Grossman's novel: a pre-Saussurean concern for referent, parole, and authorial intent, combined with a structuralist focus on design and pattern–a search for the binary oppositions and governing motifs that make the work an integrated linguistic construct. I argue that Zhizn' i sud'ba requires such an approach and that only through coming to grips with the novel's architectonics shall we understand its meaning and appreciate its artistic energy.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , Summer 1991 , pp. 336 - 346
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1991

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References

For constructive criticism of a previous draft of this paper I am grateful to Carol E. Garrard, University of Phoenix, and to the Slavic Review’s two anonymous referees. The paper was researched with valuable support from the Earhart Foundation. Earlier versions were read at the AAASS convention in Honolulu in 1988 and at the University of Toronto in 1989. The paper forms part of a critical biography of Vasilii Grossman to be published by the Free Press in 1993. The epigraph is from an interview with Semen Lipkin in Moscow (August 1989). Lipkin, poet and translator, was Grossman's closest friend from the time they met at Stalingrad. See his memoir, Stalingrad Vasiliia Grossmana (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1986); later published in Moscow as “Zhizn’ i sud’ba Vasiliia Grossmana,” in Literaturnoe obozrenie 7, 1988 with the valuable memoirs of Anna Berzer, “Proshchanie” (Moscow: Kniga, 1990).

1. Sidney argued that the “highest end of the mistress Knowledge, by the Greeks called arkhitektonike” is “the knowledge of a man's self, in the ethic and politique consideration, with the end of well doing and not of well knowing only.”

2. Zhizn’ i sud'ba is technically the continuation of an earlier novel, Za pravoe delo, which appeared in Aleksandr Tvardovskii's Novyi mir, nos. 7-10 (1952). Many of the characters and relationships in the earlier novel are further developed in Zhizn’ i sud'ba, but the latter work differs so profoundly in tone, theme, and structure that it may be treated in isolation.

3. Vasilii Grossman, Zhizri i sud'ba, 2nd. ed. (Moscow: Knizhnaia palata, 1989), 160. Future page references will be given in the text. This edition of the novel is based on a newly discovered typescript with Grossman's own corrections, revealed by the widow of one of Grossman's lifelong friends. It supercedes all previous editions: the first publication by L'Age d'Homme in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1980, based on two microfilm copies smuggled to the west, the first Soviet publication in Oktiabr’ (nos. 1 -4, 1988), and the first Knizhnaia palata edition published later that same year. Grossman's book had its own “fate,” as remarkable as any in the admittedly dramatic history of Russian literary texts in the Soviet period. In 1961 KGB officers invaded Grossman's apartment in Moscow and “arrested” all available copies, including carbon paper and typewriter ribbons. Grossman wrote a letter directly to Nikita Khrushchev pleading for the novel to be published but was merely granted an audience in July 1962 with the party's ideological watchdog, Mikhail Suslov. Counselled by the same Writers’ Union bureaucrats who had attacked Boris Pasternak earlier and would pounce on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn shortly thereafter, Suslov told Grossman he had not personally read his novel but assured him it could not be published for two hundred or three hundred years. Lipkin reproduces Grossman's letter to Khrushchev. For Grossman's account of his encounter with Suslov, see D. Fel'dman, “Do i posle aresta,” Literaturnaya Rossiia, 11 November 1988. Grossman was left untouched but was effectively denied the opportunity to make a living from his writings. Two years later Grossman died of cancer, exacerbated no doubt by his straitened financial circumstances and fear that the novel he had worked on for so many years might disappear forever. In a postscript to the Moscow edition of his memoirs Semen Lipkin explains how he enlisted Vladimir Voinovich's help in smuggling a copy of the manuscript to the west. This version of the novel first appeared in Moscow twenty-four years after Grossman's death, beating Suslov's deadline by a healthy margin.

4. Grossman's article “Treblinskii ad,” Znamia, no. 10 (1944) was one of the first published accounts in any language of a Nazi death camp. It “was based on the testimony taken by Grossman from about forty survivors of the Treblinka uprising in 1943.

5. Man's Search for Meaning, revised and updated (New York: Washington Square Press, 1985), 86. It is possible that Grossman knew of Frankl's book, which was first published in 1946 in Austria under the title, Ein Psycholog erlebt das Konzentrationslager. Although I am not concerned in this paper with the possible sources of Grossman's notion of “inner freedom,” my initial research suggests that it may well owe something to Benedictus Spinoza's Ethics, which stresses the importance of “inner mental freedom” and recommends avoidance of compulsion as a guide to moral behavior. During the 1920s and 1930s, Grossman's formative years, Spinoza's works were published and discussed extensively in the Soviet Union—see George L. Kline, ed., Spinoza in Soviet Philosophy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952). It would have been natural for Grossman to feel a sense of kinship with Spinoza; they were both non-practicing Jews in alien ideological environments.

6. In fact, as Grossman must have known, the term otechestvo had begun to decline in official usage after 1934, when Stalin promoted the term rodina and the phrase russkii patriotizm. See Aleksey E. Levin, “Anatomy of a Public Campaign: ‘Academician Luzin's Case’ in Soviet Political History,” Slavic Review 49 (Spring 1990): 103-106.

7. Grossman's motifs and themes often recall the Gospels, but he was not a practicing believer in any revealed religion. Rather he appears to follow a long-standing tradition in Russian literature of drawing quite consciously upon Judeo-Christian ethics as a universal intellectual and spiritual context in which to both judge and inspire his characters.

8. This broadly based concept underlies parts 3, 4, and 5 of Spinoza's Ethics, particularly the first eighteen propositions of the section significantly entitled “Of Human Bondage.”

9. Significantly, although the scene is set in a German concentration camp, Ikonnikov's main target is not Nazi racism, but the equally vicious class warfare espoused by the Marxist-Leninists.

10. Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1969), 263.

11. Except, that is, in the shouts of “Hi, Mom!” from giant football players on television.

12. There can be little doubt that some of Vasilii Grossman's anguish at the terrible death of his own mother, murdered along with the other Jews of Berdichev by the Wehrmacht in September 1941, lay behind these lines. The newly discovered manuscript of Zhizn’ i sud'ba shows that Grossman dedicated the book to his mother—directly to her, not to her memory, as would have been customary, as though he thought of her as still a living presence. We know that Grossman wrote at least two letters to his mother on the tenth and twentieth anniversaries of her death, as a way of seeking the moral strength to face sometimes very harsh criticism and official threats. The letters, part of the Grossman archive owned by his stepson Fedor Guber, have been published: “Pis'ma materi, pis'ma k materi,” Nedelia, no. 41 (1988). The incident of Shtrum's signing an official letter and then his regret at this weakness comes directly from Grossman's personal experience, according to Lipkin (personal interview in Moscow, August 1989).

13. The names do not appear to be selected at random. Sofia, the Greek for “(divine) wisdom,” entered Kievan Rus’ (and hence the Russian consciousness) with the acceptance of Christianity from Byzantium. The name David was probably chosen as a symbolic name (as in Star of David) for all the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, male and female.

14. On this extraordinary work, written in response to a two-month stay in Armenia during the winter of 1961-1962, see John and Carol Garrard, “Vasilii Grossman's Hail and Farewell: Dobro Vam!” forthcoming in a collection of articles by American scholars, edited by Boris Averin and Elizabeth Neatrour (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’). The first complete edition of Dobro Vam! was published in Znamia, 11 (1988).

15. Biblia (Chicago: SGP, 1989), 672 (chap. 9, verse 11).