Response To War & Peace Assertion
In the last post about Life & Fate, I didn’t get around to accepting the challenge presented by Mike’s assertion that Life & Fate is better than Tolstoy. Or, at least, War & Peace.
As Vasily Grossman’s biographers, the Garrards, point out, Life & Fate is also an inversion of War & Peace in that Tolstoy was a proud Russian who wrote positively of Russia as both a country and a political entity; while Grossman, irrespective of his former patriotism, wrote critically about the system and how it treated its people. But with a love of the people themselves.
We have, here, another Belobog/Chernobog scenario: War & Peace, the more positive and patriotic novel of Count Tolstoy; and Life & Fate, the darker, more critical yet still people-loving novel of Comrade Grossman. And us living in a time where one has to be super critical all the time and if not, then we’re naïve or stupid. In other words: a Chernobogian society.
Even after accounting for the weird way the Internet has alienated people from the world of Tolstoy, I won’t say Life & Fate is better than Tolstoy on the whole because Anna Karenina is one of the best novels ever written. As in, top 5 in the world. But I will make these concessions.
Life & Fate is to War & Peace what contemporary 007 movies are to Sean Connery originals. (Assuming one actually thinks the Daniel Craig 007’s are good: but for the sake of this argument I will give the benefit of the doubt) In a certain sense, the original has that kind of total quality nobody today, it seems, knows how to replicate. Some things are no longer normal to us, like how normal it was to smoke cigarettes back then. But at the same time, we cannot imagine contemporary cinema without special effects and most of us can’t take the gadgets or Oddjob-style henchmen seriously anymore. (Though I would argue that taking him seriously was never the complete point) So while it is us who struggle to relate to a Belobogian novel, Life & Fate is also the next step in a tradition and is better insofar as successors in traditions are better. Though I don’t think this is an insult to Tolstoy; how many authors can be said to have generated actual traditions?
Life & Fate, if not number one, is certainly very high on the list. And where it is number one is in importance. Not only by virtue of the truths it communicates, but how it connects those truths to all that we hold dear. Unfortunately the West is being destroyed so who knows how long the “Great Books of the Western Canon” collection remains a thing. But if it does somehow survive, then Life & Fate will (or should, anyway) most certainly end up in that collection at some point.
In terms of the themes it encapsulates, it is the best novel thematically. It supersedes much of Holocaust lit and - when paired with Stalingrad - much of military lit, apart from those novels designed to please the uber-strategists. It challenges the foundations of the pedestal upon which we have placed dystopian fiction, including the classic dystopias. I cannot speak for literature of the Holodomor: if there’s more than a little of it, I haven’t gotten to it yet. But Life & Fate is the best when it comes to streamlining all of these currents. It is the master streamlining novel.
If Life & Fate doesn’t superseded the best of Gulag literature - Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales - it is because Grossman sets aside this “attempt” for his final literary word: Everything Flows.
Part 1: A Jewel In The Crown of Gulag Literature
“[Lev Mekler] was, essentially, a kind-hearted man. If a mosquito was sucking his blood, rather than crushing it with a slap of the hand, he would send it on its way with a delicate flick of his fingers…What distinguished his service to the Revolution and to the good of humanity was his lack of pity for suffering and his readiness to shed blood. In his revolutionary purity he imprisoned his father and testified against him before the Cheka. And when his sister begged him to defend her husband, who had been arrested as a saboteur, he turned his back on her cruelly and sullenly.”
Everything Flows (also translated into English as Forever Flowing) is the last work of 20th century literature that can measure to the legacy of Franz Kafka. In a way, it is the last of the best.
Literature lost something after the war, and only those who had established themselves artistically before the war knew how to continue creating sublime art. We have never really recovered from the war, and the only country undamaged - the United States - chose instead to define its legacy as a superpower by adopting vacuous French “philosophies” and blending them with Marxist theories to compensate for the fact that - as a young country founded as an anti-intellectual reaction to the very European trains of thought that produced modern literature to begin with - the United States had precious little to offer the world in terms of cultural profundity relative to Europe. Even today, decades after Einstein and other German scientists were “collected” by American to create the A-bomb, the US strives to define itself not based upon the merit of its own people but on how well it can appropriate the merit of the countries it has brain-drained. But whatever one could say about Europe or America, nobody disagreed that Europe was a powerhouse of culture; they didn’t need others to justify themselves.
While I digress, I also do not. That is how history has progressed since the events that shaped and ultimately came to define Vasily Grossman’s life.
Everything Flows, like The Trial and The Castle, is complete in its incompleteness. Its Heraclitean foundations twinkle, starlike, in the darkness of today’s literary world with possibility. The possibility of literature freeing itself from the postmodern quagmire with a Heraclitean recharging of the generator. For those wondering what I’m talking about, feel free to read the previous article on Life & Fate.
But if we are to understand how Vasily Grossman accomplishes this, we must first make sense and wrestle with this anti-ubiquitous work of literature that, though qualifying as a novel, is a small yet amorphous mutt in terms of genre; one that, like Polygraf Polygrafovich, might have come off the streets of Moscow. The first thing to know about Everything Flows is that despite its mutt-like impurities, it is, paradoxically, the first and purest (though sadly the last) of Grossman’s dissident writing.
He was free. Every literary effort up to that point (including his Armenian Sketchbook) had been written with Soviet censor approval in mind. Not anymore!
In the Garrard couple’s magnificent biography of Grossman, the authors are understandably disturbed by the way Grossman has been ignored; so much so that Solzhenitsyn and, to a lesser extent, Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago, almost take the blame for his obscurity by virtue of fluke successes beyond their control, like the surprise publication of One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962. The Garrards even try to imply that Solzhenitsyn being a Russian nationalism somehow made him famous at the expense of Grossman, as if a country that had begun to turn Philip Roth, Arthur Miller, Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Jerzy Kosinski into household names would have somehow found Grossman anathema on the basis of being a Jew. If anything, people began to like Solzhenitsyn less because they learned he had Russian nationalist views; something the pro-Gulag left was more than ready to jump upon. Not that this has anything to do with either Ivan Denisovich or The Gulag Archipelago anyway.
That’s not to say I don’t sympathize with the Garrards. I do. But it would be more pertinent to the conversation to recognize that Grossman was simply unlucky. For instance, he didn’t know trustworthy people who could bring his novels abroad. That made a difference: only a handful of military readers completely oblivious to his literary reputation had heard Grossman’s name in the West due to the Soviets’ arranging for the translation of some of his war correspondence and Stepan Kolchugin in the 1940s. I don’t share the Garrards view that because of history, literary dissidence has to be this kind of duking-it-out contest where Grossman or Pasternak or Solzhenitsyn must be number one in a boxing match. Such an attitude trivializes everything all three of these authors went through.
Grossman died of cancer in 1964: unpersoned, mostly forgotten, despised by the system he had served. How he was buried is a curious tale in and of itself. But if Grossman felt tired and alone, he could at least die with the knowledge that his writing was safe.
On one hand, the original manuscript for Life & Fate was safe and sound, as far as Grossman knew; and, in fact, it was. He had foreseen the possibility of something bad happening to it; however many “contacts” he lacked abroad, there was no shortage in his home country. On the other hand, it is a miracle Everything Flows survived at all.
Before Grossman gave his lover Yekaterina Zabolotskaya his one-and-only manuscript, he told his friend Anna Berzer that she was its fourth reader. But there seems to have been more than four: the KGB was on to him. They caught word that he was writing “another anti-Soviet novel” and - despite Grossman’s discretion - came into the possession of several excerpts. Given how much they were in a position to learn, it is all the more remarkable that Zabolotskaya’s manuscript was never found.
Everything Flows without question counts as gulag literature, just as Stalingrad counts as WWII literature and socialist realism; Armenian Sketchbook counts among the genre of Armenian/Caucasian travelogues popular in Russia; and Life & Fate as both Holocaust and WWII literature. Like Cormac McCarthy, Grossman also knew how to hop between genres. But while McCarthy went from pond to pond, for Grossman it was enough to relocate or re-stir the waters in the Tolstoyan lake he inhabited without having to leave it. Even so, Everything Flows is the black sheep in that it’s not really Tolstoyan but something else entirely.
Once again, I think it petty to quarrel over whether or not Everything Flows is superior to the Gulag Archipelago. Though that is their commonality, both novels are very different creatures. For one: Solzhenitsyn had actually been in the gulag for eight years. Grossman had not. And second: knowing this and catering to his strengths, Everything Flows, upon closer examination, would more accurately fall into its own sub-category: post-Gulag. Much the same way that Polish dissident Tadeusz Konwicki’s novel A Minor Apocalypse is post-Orwellian. Both novels explore the state of inhabitants of totalitarian regimes once the initial conditions informing their respective experiences have faded.
Instead of bickering over favorites, I propose a triadic understanding of what we might call the Gulag Diadem: 1) The Gulag Archipelago, the primary gem (plus Ivan Denisovich); 2) Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales, stories that move beyond Solzhenitsyn’s political philosophizing and delve into the real nitty-gritty of the gulag experience; and 3) Everything Flows, the novel that makes sense of what comes next.
Together, these four works of literature guarantee that the gulag experience and all the horror it wrought upon its victims won’t be forgotten.
Part 2: Fairy Tales Of Lenin
“Lenin was fated by history. However bizarre this may sound, he was fated by Russian history to preserve Russia’s old curse: this link between progress and non-freedom.”
Those who understand the evil of Communism as well as its near-perfect synonymousness with Fascism don’t need to be told that Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was a ruthless dictator with a lot of blood on his hands. But because Stalin was worse, many of the proto-fascists of today…ahem, Marxists - like to tell the quaint fairy tale of a benevolent dictator named Lenin. His heart beat with the goodness of a child, his revolution was oh so noble and he could never, ever do anything wrong. It was only that big old meanie, Stalin, who ruined everything.
If that sounds like someone you know, then good news for you: I have a Christmas present I’d like to propose to them. A nice big copy of Everything Flows. Make sure it’s in big letters, to be on the safe side.
To many with a casual understanding of the history, it may seem like Grossman had already committed the greatest sin by proving, in Life & Fate, that Communism and Fascism were the same thing. But Grossman commits the worst one of all: he targets the moral authority of Lenin himself. This, ultimately, is why we can “forgive” Grossman his service to the Communist regime in retrospect: he redeemed himself and regained freedom over his mind. While his experience within the Party better primed him to assault its largest foundation.
With this segment’s quote in mind, it is worth remembering that fate, to Grossman, was the surrendering of individuality. The individual was the one who could resist, who didn’t succumb to “the spell.” Fate, in contrast, is the complete surrender of oneself. In order to be historically fated, Lenin had to surrender himself to fate just like his dictatorship’s victims. Philosophically, Grossman describes the process of Lenin succumbing to fate as follows: “The creators of this state had seen it as a means of realising their ideals. It turned out, however, that their dreams and ideals had been a means employed by a great and terrible State.” (Remember this observation every time you talk to a Woke ideologue; 99% of the time they aren’t original)
In practice, this would manifest itself as Lenin’s complete devotion to the seizure of power. But most important: Lenin had to become an ‘+ism” to realize the perpetuation of Russian non-freedom. As Grossman writes: “Stalin executed Lenin’s closest friends and comrades-in-arms because they were all, each in their own way, hindering the realisation of what was most important…the essence of Leninism.” What someone like Zinoviev, Kamenev or Bukharin brought to the Soviet State was completely irrelevant. As long as they had no intention of erecting Leninism, the best way they could “help” the Leninist state was by taking a bullet between the eyes.
Grossman continues: “It was Stalin - who was both a European Marxist and an Asian despot - who gave true expression to the nature of Soviet statehood. What was embodied in Lenin was a Russian national principle; what was embodied in Stalin was a statehood that was both Russian and Soviet.”
In other words: Grossman not only does not recognize the infantile “Stalin was a meanie who screwed up Lenin’s benevolent plans” argument: he explains why even deluding oneself into performing this mental gymnastic is intellectually fraudulent. Stalin didn’t ruin what Lenin started: Stalin completed what Lenin had begun. Just as Lenin, earlier on, was to reinvent the old serfdom into a newer and modern form.
In such a scenario, our little Marxist who could might counter by saying “that’s Russia, that’ll never happen in America.” But Grossman calls serfdom ‘Russian non-freedom’ in reference to the particularly Russian manifestation of non-freedom in Russian culture. Non-freedom exists all across the world. For Americans and other Westerners concerned about the rise of Neo-Marxism in its Woke incarnation, the question isn’t ‘how similar is it to Russia?’ Rather, the question to be asked is: ‘what is American non-freedom and are those who hate freedom unhealthily interested in it?’ Once the answer is clear, the psychopathic fixation the Woke ideologues have on chattel slavery suddenly makes a lot more sense.
Since that fateful (no pun intended) moment when Grossman felt what freedom was like in the ruins of Stalingrad, freedom had been on his mind a whole lot. We see it in Life & Fate. But while the difference is in iotas, Grossman is less willing to compromise in Everything Flows. As Grossman wrote: “The history of humanity is the history of human freedom…Freedom is not, as Engels claimed, ‘the recognition of necessity.’ Freedom is the direct opposite of necessity; freedom is necessity overcome.”
Despite his previous criticism of the kind of optimism the Internet today would call ‘hopium,’ Grossman is not a pessimist. Rather, he believes Stalin failed to destroy freedom: or, as he put it, “pull the wool over freedom’s eyes.”
As far as his century was concerned, Grossman, not Stalin, was right.
Part 3: Everything Flows In The 21st Century and The Last Man
“Freedom, after all, is life; to overcome freedom, Stalin had to kill life.”
More than his other work, Everything Flows reminds me of the present day the most. This is in large part due to quotes like this: they remind me of what I see in the world today. Only this time it isn’t a single man with a moustache killing life. We are doing it to ourselves.
In the previous post about Life & Fate, I mentioned mass formation psychosis. But Mattias Desmet’s book The Psychology of Totalitarianism is only partly about mass formation “in action;” at heart the book is about how, since the Enlightenment, the West has embraced a worldview that has led to the mechanization of humanity. Much of today’s behavior and attitude towards our bodies and our souls (or lack of them) resemble and reflect machine maintenance: we need x hours at the gym to maintain the body machine; we need y amount of calories to fill the tank with the requisite amount of fuel. We cannot consume z because it’s bad for our bodily machinery. And so on. Philip K. Dick’s androids make a lot more sense from this perspective.1
As Grossman wrote in Life & Fate: “It is not impossible to imagine the machine of future ages and millennia. It will be able to listen to music and appreciate art; it will even be able to compose melodies, paint pictures and write poems. Is there a limit to its perfection? Can it be compared to man? Will it surpass him?” Though Grossman refers here to the machinelike thinking of Fascism - and, by virtue of the novel’s goal, that of Communism - it isn’t a coincidence that out of context, he could be talking about AI. An invention created right when more people in the West have been “mechanized” than ever before.
At the end of the day, Grossman doesn’t need Everything Flows to be like the Gulag Archipelago because whether he knew it or not, he had a greater vision of the future. Of the death of humanity. The death of life. Solzhenitsyn wrote about the “how.” Grossman wrote about the “why.”2 The Gulag, for Grossman - along with the Holodomor in its own way - is the path to the “why.” It’s not like Grossman had a shortage of historical themes to use: the war, the Holocaust, and so on. But out of all of them, he chose the Gulag and the Holodomor.
Unlike his other novels, Everything Flows is almost depopulated. If Grossman meant to add more characters, it doesn’t really matter: its depopulation is an artistic plus. Not only does it convey a feeling of emptiness in the cities to complement the missing population. It also enhances Ivan Grigorievich’s status as The Last Man. Someone whose story we encountered in 1984.
During Winston’s torture, O’Brien asks Winston to look into the mirror. A second earlier, Winston had said that the thing that would vanquish the IngSoc Party was the Spirit of Man. In the mirror, Winston saw how degraded he had become physically, after which O’Brien said: “Do you see that thing facing you? That is the last man. If you are human, that is humanity.”
Maybe it’s because they’re afraid that saying the word ‘Mankind’ will make them look like a sexist. But I never hear all the vocal Orwell fans mention this moment, which is a pity because it’s one of the most important; more than Syme talking about Newspeak, more than the Hour of Hate. Not only because of its place in the novel’s climax: but because so many narratives today are primed to liquidate the Spirit of Man within us in a way that would have made Stalin proud.
And not only in a moralistic manner, but by reaching that in-between grey zone of the psyche Grossman referred to in this quote: “In this state there is no such thing as society. Society is founded upon people’s free intimacy and free antagonism—and in a State without freedom free intimacy and free hostility are unthinkable.” Orwell appears to understand this as well as Stalin’s crushing of life when O’Brien dictates the following to Winston: “We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”
O’Brien, as the novel’s representative of the Inner Party, represents those who, along with Big Brother, have replaced God. What Winston sees in the mirror isn’t wrong: that is who we are without grace, essentially what O’Brien is trying to give Winston. But O’Brien showing The Last Man to Winston has another purpose: it is part of the offer of uplifting. O’Brien and the Inner Party believe they have transcended Man. Much the same way we - for some reason - hope AI will transcend us. In Everything Flows, we see this in the beginning: Ivan’s cousin, Nikolai Andreyevich, starts to feel bad and awkward for how he, as a scientist, has benefitted from the Party while his cousin wasted away in the gulags. As has been observed, Nikolai and his wife reflect one side of Grossman himself: he, the state-approved writer, who failed certain people at certain moments, including his cousin Nadya.
Grossman, usually not one for writer’s tricks as most of us tend to understand them in the Anglosphere, does something unusual here: by exposing us to Nikolai Andreyevich’s anxieties, Grossman guilt-trips the reader into feeling that same kind of feeling. “My cousin who’s a thought criminal is out of the gulag. What will we do about it?” Here, Grossman is speaking to that part in all of us ready to be complicit with the banality of evil.
But it is, of course, a trick. More optimistic than Orwell even after living in the Soviet Union, Grossman has preserved Ivan Grigorievich’s personality. He is the same man as before, and thirty years in the gulag couldn’t destroy him. Whether Solzhenitsyn of Shalamov would agree with that is a good point to bring up, but literarily irrelevant: Grossman could read people, and evidently he had run into enough unbroken people to give him hope. The fact that Solzhenitsyn wasn’t robbed of his courage attests to that, ironically enough.
Ivan Grigorievich, like Winston, is The Last Man. But he is not broken. With any luck, the last of them still walk the Earth today.
Conclusion
My thanks to all of you for tagging along and reading these long reviews. Since I didn’t address it before, I want to quickly end by mentioning reading order as I often tend to do here at Timeless.
Instead of creating my little charts, I will propose two different reading orders based on what I’ve read thus far. While it’ll only contain those that I have read, it is worth mentioning that two other Grossman novels - Stepan Kolchugin and The People Immortal - are also in English translation. As his translator Robert Chandler said: “Grossman got better over time;” but Mike has read The People Immortal and said it was excellent, good news for all you war fiction aficionados eager to read the very first novel ever written about the Eastern Front. Stepan Kolchugin is out of print, however; so tread with caution. There is also a collection of his war correspondence available in English, titled Writer At War. Another essential for all you WWII historians out there, armchair or otherwise.
I call the first reading sequence the multigenre journey. It is chronological and would go as follows: Stalingrad, Life & Fate, Armenian Sketchbook and Everything Flows, accompanied and supplemented here and there by the short stories and essays collected in The Road: Short Fiction and Essays From the Author of Life & Fate. It is debatable whether Everything Flows or Armenian Sketchbook actually comes last. But as the unfinished work, it’s only too fitting that Everything Flows is read in a way that completes the Grossman experience. Even so, the reader can end with Armenian Sketchbook if they prefer; it also functions as a great closer.
The Road includes such important pieces as Grossman’s first published fiction, ‘In the Town of Berdichev;’ his famous ‘The Hell of Treblinka;’ and his take on art, ‘The Sistine Madonna.’
The second sequence is for those who, for understandable reasons, don’t want to read anything that smells too State-approved. In which case, the reading list is simple: Life & Fate, Armenian Sketchbook and Everything Flows. Short stories optional, but recommended.
That’s all from me. Stay tuned for Mike’s concluding post! And for all you good people who’ve subscribed to Timeless: next post will be on Thursday. Time for a nice reading break. :-)
If this reminds readers of Philip K. Dick’s interest in androids, it’s no coincidence; not only do his androids reflect specific science fiction themes, but reckon with this post-Enlightenment state of being. This is why Dick digresses in his novel We Can Build You.
Grossman’s advocates may take this as a one-up against Solzhenitsyn if they like. I think it only confirms their complementary value.
I might give Tolstoy a fourth try. I respect his genius, as I do Dostoevsky's. Dostoevsky is 700 pages of darkness for three pages of light, in my experience; so I won't give him a fourth round of reading. But Tolstoy, okay, I'll read him again next year. I do regard the great pre-Modernist / pre-WWI novelists to be Austen, Balzac, Eliot, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and James. The Big Seven. (I have a mixed view of James but recognize his greatness and genius.) And I don't think we've had another big seven since the onset of the First World War and Modernism. (Obviously, taste in literature is very subjective.) Perhaps I would add Grossman and Solzhenitsyn and call them the Big Nine -- the nine best novelists of all time.
So much to unpack here. We agree about freedom. I'm more split on "Wokeness" and perhaps we define it differently. Briefly, to me, the best of the West involves Greco-Roman notions of nobility and excellence including Platonic love of the Good and the True and the Beautiful, Judeo-Christian theism and spirituality and saintly exemplars, Italian Renaissance art, German and Austrian music in the 1700s and 1800s, British literature from the 1600s to 1800s, democracy since 1776, essential science since the Enlightenment, some understanding of the best of Western psychology, and universal human rights since about 1945. To some, "Wokeism" means abandoning all that or most of it, and I'd push back by advocating for what I regard as "the best of the West". But at the same time, from the year 325 to 1688, Western civilization was one big coercive theocracy. And from the 16th to the 20th Century, it was widely assumed by White heterosexual Male Protestant men in northwestern Europe that they were superior to all other people on Earth -- and from this superiority they committed a massive range of abuses toward other people. Then with the two world wars and genocides, Western civilization went off the rails, causing all of us to have to carefully consider what went wrong and what was missing. To the extent that being "Woke" means being sensitive to all of this -- and of actively, consciously advancing universal spiritual, social, and legal equality in a pluralistic West -- I see this as truthful and of immense value. Understanding at the same time "the best of the West" and the disasters in Western history, together, provides us the compass, in my view, for moving forward in this century and future centuries as a civilization.