Thanks to Mike for the great previous post! Just a heads up: Life & Fate is a difficult novel to summarize in a single post. So what I will do with this review is derive noteworthy observations that shed light on both the novel’s character and the novel’s present-day relevance. Enjoy!
Part 1: The Avatar of Chernobog and Belobog
“Can you guess what I felt, Vityenka, once I was behind the barbed wire? I’d expected to feel horror. But just imagine—I actually felt relieved to be inside this cattle-pen. Don’t think it’s because I’m a born slave. No. No. It’s because everyone around me shares my fate: now I no longer have to walk on the roadway like a horse, there are no more spiteful looks, and the people I know look me straight in the eye instead of trying to avoid me. Everyone in this cattle-pen bears the stamp branded on us by the Fascists and it no longer burns my soul so fiercely. Now I’m no longer a beast deprived of rights - simply an unfortunate human being. And that’s easier to bear.”
There’s a reason why I call myself a Slavophile. Among many reasons, it’s because almost all Slavic cultures share a very distinct perspective of the world found nowhere else, except in diasporas or in those places (usually former Soviet Republics) where a strong Slavic influence has left a mark. It comes in different flavors: few Poles or Russians, for instance, would feel inclined to acknowledge any such similarities. But it’s there.
Since 1945, it has been common to talk about the influence of the Jews among Slavic cultures. While that is indeed a fascinating and worthwhile discussion, I am often disappointed to find the discussion virtually never happens in reverse. I came to this realization at a seminar about Polish-Jewish poetess Irena Klebfisz. An element of her poetry reminded me of the tenacity expressed in the Polish national anthem. To me, it was perfectly natural that a citizen of Poland - even one who was Jewish - would be subconsciously influenced by elements of wider Polish culture. Perhaps that is why I was the only one to ask a question of that kind.
This, too, would be both natural and true of Vasily Grossman in the Soviet Union.
I want to begin this post with a similar observation made about Grossman and the novel regarded as his greatest triumph, Life & Fate, that follows in a similar vein. And I’d like to do so with one of the best-known (albeit weakly and pithily appropriated) legends associated with all Slavs: that of Chernobog and Belobog. The Black God and the White God respectively who, together, represent Darkness and Light, or Evil1 and Good.
(A quick PSA to anyone reading this who happens to be a sensitivity reader, a moron or both: when I say Black God and White God I am referring to actual colors, and NOT race.)
Precious little is known about these two deities who, from what we know, originated with the Polabian Slavs who once called the banks of the River Elbe their home. Indeed, there are two hills in Lusatia - a region still inhabited by the Sorbian Slavs - named after the two deities. It is not clear if Belobog was an actual Slavic deity, let alone if his function was indeed as we now commonly believe. But much like Grossman’s later novel Everything Flows and the unfinished works of Franz Kafka, unfinished or fragmented symbols transmogrify over time into something else completely.
In this case, a metric of darkness and lightness that, coincidentally or otherwise, informs the perspective of many Slavic cultures. Including the Russians. I will return to this dualism in a moment; first, I must pair it - much as the Ancient Slavs would pair Chernobog and Belobog - with Grossman’s better known literary dimension: Heraclitean philosophy.
Psychologist James Hillman made an important (albeit suspect) observation about Heraclitus in his introduction to his Fragments; in particular an historical process that also validates the Belobog/Chernobog dualism as a symbol: “because archetypal modes of thought transcend time and place, the insights of Heraclitus are strikingly postmodern. Although conceived five hundred years before our era in the Greek city of Ephesus, his poetic aphorisms show a deconstructive mind at work…Since moving forward and moving back are one and the same,2 the latest postmodern thinking completes the circle where Heraclitus began: ‘The beginning is the end.’”3
Whether Heraclitus was genuinely a precursor of postmodernism in fact is something we’ll never know for certain. But Hillman is also referring to the fragmented remnants of Heraclitus’ wisdom, and not just the wisdom itself. In doing so, Hillman begs the question: was Heraclitus himself a kind of postmodern phoenix of the pre-Socratic era, who before his philosophizing had “deconstructed” some previous ancient belief system?
We know that Grossman was a traditionalist, literarily speaking: a loyal adherent to the great Russian literary tradition that also happens to be very conscious of its Slavicness. We also know, given well-placed references to Heraclitean philosophy in Grossman’s novels - including socialist realist Stalingrad - that Grossman was conscious of recording the flow of time as envisioned by Heraclitus. Together - with the themes comprising his eternal title, Life & Fate - Grossman, sensing a new river flowing over the old riverbed - namely, the Khrushchev River flowing over the Communism riverbed where the Stalin River once flowed - powered up his literary energies. His moment had arrived.
And - like a “super effective” move in a Pokémon battle - produced a novel simultaneously emotional and intellectual; philosophical and colloquial; of the present, past and the future all at once; of the Jews and of the Gentiles; of the Soviets and of humanity; and - most remarkable in the literary sense - both conservative in the traditional sense (following, as before, in Tolstoy’s great footsteps with boots of a similar size) and groundbreaking. A formula often seen with the world’s best literature, going back to Don Quixote.
So groundbreaking, in fact, that it made history as the first novel to be “arrested.” The KGB searched Grossman’s apartment and took everything they could find. Grossman had become a dissident; but though he hadn’t desired that, he embraced dissidence for the little time he had left on the Communist Party’s “green earth.”
To return to Chernobog and Belobog; Life & Fate manifests itself in this Slavic dualism in two different ways.
First: it completes the subversion that began with Stalingrad. One such scene evident of this is when Lieutenant-General Yeremenko walks past Red Army soldiers digging a pit and asks them two questions: who is the least effective worker? And who is the most effective worker? When everyone points without a semblance of doubt at an elderly worker named Troshnikov, Lt.-Gen Yeremenko hands him a gold watch. Everyone is amazed at this show of generosity.
I might have missed and quickly forgotten this part of the story had I not left off and resumed at that moment. It is a very sunny moment for a novel that - though not dark in the way we’d encounter in novels by, say, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Gustav Meyrink or even Franz Kafka - deals with some of the darkest material of the 20th century.
This bit almost feels like it belongs in Stalingrad: A top commander of the most decisive battle in Soviet history rewards the noble proletariat from the kindness of his heart. Which brings us to the second manifestation: the two novels that, like Chernobog and Belobog, are deeply related. Stalingrad being the lighter, more socially and politically approved novel. It is of the socialist realist genre and has been called “journalistic.” And unlike Life & Fate, Stalingrad isn’t about the Holocaust. After all, it is named after a battle and not a concentration camp.
Life & Fate, in contrast, sees Grossman shedding the socialist realism exterior completely, like a butterfly in its cocoon, in order to express himself with a “voice of the night,” if you will. The mask is off and so are those worn by his characters. The culture shock after reading Stalingrad is palpable.
Viktor Shtrum - Grossman’s alter ego - got a last letter from his mother, imprisoned in the Berdichev ghetto. The letter, literarily, functions as a kind of Chernobog statement while being one of the most powerful and moving chapters one can find anywhere in literature. As one excerpt recollects: “The caretaker’s wife was standing beneath my window and saying to the woman next door: ‘Well, that’s the end of the Jews. Thank God for that!’ What can have made her say that? Her son’s married to a Jew. She used to go and visit him and then come back and tell me all about her grandchildren.”
Another example: “I said goodbye to the house and garden. I sat for a few minutes under the tree. I said goodbye to my neighbours. Some people are very strange. Two women began arguing in front of me about which of them would have my chairs, and which my writing-desk. I said goodbye and both began to cry.” Here we see the Chernobog/Belobog function at work in the fabric of the novel itself.
The fact that we know with a bit more authority about the veneration of Chernobog vs. the veneration of Belobog adds a nice twist: Stalingrad, the novel in a style largely associated with fakery and propaganda, symbolizes the god who may well have never existed.
Part 2: Fate As Loss of Individuality
“The most fundamental change in people at this time was a weakening of their sense of individual identity; their sense of fate grew correspondingly stronger.”
Grossman’s anti-postmodern credentials increase as the reader comes to learn that Life & Fate isn’t just about the future. It is about the loss of identity and replacing it with a trust in fate, as revealed by the quote above. The most familiar manifestation of this phenomenon are the Jews who, once individuals, become herded like sheep; first to the pits outside Berdichev, and later to the gas chambers. But we also see this among the Ukrainian collaborators, the prisoners of the gulag - divided as they are between zeks, bitches and thieves, to name a few - and the Soviet populace itself. A theme Grossman unleashed in his literary diptych from the very beginning, when the peasant Vavilov reflects upon his future in Stalingrad:
“The whirlwind had snatched him up and he no longer belonged either to himself or to his family. For a moment he forgot that his own fate and that of the children asleep on the bed were bound to the fate of the country and all its inhabitants, that the fate of his kolkhoz and the fate of the huge stone cities with their millions of citizens were one and the same. In this bitter hour his heart was gripped by a pain that neither knows nor wants consolation or understanding.”
While some will no doubt accuse me of confirmation bias, it is fascinating to see Grossman describe the phenomenon of mass formation psychosis at play. The simple explanation for this phenomenon of crowd psychology as described by Mattias Desmet is as follows: when certain underlying conditions are present in society, some kind of catalyst - a rising leader, for instance - sets off a form of “crowd” or society-wide hypnosis. Most of us will be familiar with such behavior firsthand due to the events of 2020-2022. (Which is why this phenomenon is more controversial than it ought to be)
“It was in such an atmosphere that the Germans carried out the extermination of the Ukrainian and Byelorussian Jews,” writes Grossman. “And at an earlier date, in the same regions, Stalin himself had mobilized the fury of the masses, whipping it up to point of frenzy during the campaigns to liquidate the kulaks as a class and during the extermination of Trotskyist-Bukharinite degenerates and saboteurs. Experience showed that such campaigns make the majority of the population obey every order of the authorities as though hypnotized…”
Grossman mentions a small minority that enacts this hypnosis; a reference, perhaps, to those like Hitler4 who captivated the German nation into this hypnosis. In the 1950s, many Germans claimed they had had nothing to do with Hitler, describing their experiences as akin to falling under a spell. Naturally they were complicit: Desmet makes this clear by explaining how hypnosis cannot make a person betray their own ethical foundation.5 (i.e., making someone fundamentally against murder go and murder someone) But given that mass formation psychosis is hypnosis and nobody knew about it back then, perhaps there was some merit to the “spell” argument. Grossman also writes: “The violence of a totalitarian state is so great as to be no longer a means to an end; it becomes an object of mystical worship and adoration.” This, from Grossman’s perspective, is why the Jews went sheepishly to their deaths and were even complicit in their fate. Incidentally, mass formation didn’t affect only the Germans but their victims too.
Ultimately, however, such debates are beside the point as far as Grossman is concerned. For even a brainwashed person or an ideologue (like the character Abarchuk) lives and breathes and has felt many of the same universal human feelings; we see that today with Woke ideologues who, despite their cognitive lobotomization, appear to have known feelings like love and sorrow, joy and pain and so on.
What’s important to Grossman is that we live through what he, his country and his people - both Jews and Soviets - lived through. We live through it psychologically. We live through it philosophically. We live through it emotionally. We live through it historically. And we live through it experientially. Life & Fate’s first publisher in the West, Vladimir Dimitrijevic, described Grossman as trying to portray “a world in three dimensions.” A reading experience this fully realized could only be realized with at least the aforementioned facets.
Part 3: The Holocaust and Blindness
“Another fact that allowed Fascism to gain power over men was their blindness. A man cannot believe that he is about to be destroyed.”
As Life & Fate was arrested, Holocaust literature in the West sought to stress the incommunicability of Auschwitz as a fundamental part of “understanding” what happened;6 a directive that sets the genre apart from historical and military fiction. Given that other authors - like Tadeusz Borowski - have been able to at least express Auschwitz in a comprehensible literary language, I’ve started to wonder if this is less of a “riddle” and more of a public disclaimer necessary for a society as unserious as ours. I can imagine Holocaust survivors in the 1950s, going through what they went through, seeing young Americans caring only about Elvis and thinking: “not a chance these kiddos will understand. Their minds are somewhere else.”
Not that I’m saying it was an easy thing to communicate to anyone. But Life & Fate, a serious book written for serious readers that comprise a serious society, disagrees with this incommunicability; or at the least, Grossman doesn’t seek to put a hand behind his back with preconceived conclusions about its potential communicability or lack of it. As far as Grossman is concerned, we must understand it. Or at least try. He is the Socrates of Holocaust fiction: for him, it is not enough for a “Platonic class of philosophers” to exclusively understand it by virtue of experience.
Of course, the choice of incommunicability may have also been cultural: the biggest reverse-culture shock I get around Americans is the whole “I worked in [insert job here] for 30 years; I one time did this thing at that time that gave me this unique knowledge; so therefore I know everything about the topic.” All of my American readers know what I am talking about; and we all know that these arguments are made precisely with the implication that “if you don’t have my experience, you aren’t worth listening to.” If this did indeed have something to do with it, then perhaps an understanding was never possible to begin with.
In any case, I’m inclined to agree with Grossman. Today in the West the Holocaust appears to have become something esoteric, and not in a good way; funnily, the fascination shown toward it isn’t too different from the mystical fascination of the totalitarian state shown by its victims. It’s either that or an historical ignorance that has taken many by surprise nowadays when stats show up citing huge numbers of younger Americans who had never heard of the Holocaust. While reasons for this are manifold, I suspect this exclusivity of understanding among those who went through it has something to do with it. We know from Ancient Irish history that the strict hesitation of the druid class to write down their secret wisdom meant that their wisdom is now a lost secret; should the future Christian generations of post-Patrician Ireland have been guilty for not knowing what the druids claimed to know? As Holocaust survivors pass away, they take this understanding with them much like the druids. These ominous stats, therefore, are less surprising.
In terms of making Grossman’s perspective on this clear, we can requisition the help of one of his characters, Sofya Osipovna: “Sofya now understood the difference between life and existence: her life had come to an end, but her existence could drag on indefinitely.” While Sofya’s Belobog/Chernobog context is that of the cattle-wagon, the same can be said of literature.
As the quote commencing the next segment indicates, it is difficult to love the children of a past age. They morph together, becoming - like the famous quote attributed to Stalin - a statistic. But literature is a different story. Grossman knew this. He knew that once no one was around to talk about his time, there was only one way he could transcend the limitations of our love: literature.
He had to try. He did try. And, in my view, I believe he succeeded.
Part 4: Our Great Alternative?
“Time loves only those it has given birth to itself: its own children, its own heroes, its own labourers. Never can it come to love the children of a past age, any more than a woman can love the heroes of a past age, or a stepmother love the children of another woman.”
Just because some psychologist called Heraclitus postmodern and Grossman was a Heraclitean author philosophically doesn’t mean that Grossman was postmodern. To call Grossman postmodern would project any number of characteristics onto his work that not only don’t apply, but are philosophically inconsistent with postmodernism itself. Grossman is a lot of things. But he is not banal. He is not fake. He is not superficial, given that his characters are derived from real people.
Grossman’s translator, Robert Chandler, calls Life & Fate the most threatening novel written during the Communist period. In the notes of the anthology The Road: Short Fiction and Essays by the author of Life and Fate, Chandler recollects the reactions to Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog and Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago. According to him, Bulgakov received his manuscripts back from the Cheka a few days later, though he was still prohibited from publishing it7; while Pasternak’s real crime was not Dr. Zhivago itself, but sending it to the West. Grossman’s biographers, the Garrards, agree when it comes to the idea that Dr. Zhivago wasn’t actually a threat.
I don’t know if this is the best metric to measure dissident literature as it is based entirely on circumstances that are difficult, if possible, to compare. Heart of a Dog was written before the socialist realist imposition, making the Soviet authorities less in a position to be threatened by it, especially as it would not make it to the West until 1967; had it (or Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, for that matter) come out at the same time as Life & Fate, it might have had a similar reaction. One need only go back in time and ask Andrei Sinyavsky if he felt like he’d been treated with kiddie gloves.
And while content-wise Dr. Zhivago may well have been less threatening and even nostalgic compared to Life & Fate, it is indisputable that the West’s promotion and celebration of the novel - followed by Pasternak’s Nobel Prize - was one of those St. Michael style strikes against the evil of Communism. If, as Chandler argues, Dr. Zhivago really wasn’t threatening, then they wouldn’t have behaved as they had when it was published and they would have let Pasternak receive his Nobel Prize in person.
The real difference was: the Communists thought they could control Dr. Zhivago. But they knew they couldn’t control Life & Fate unless they took certain measures. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. It was that simple.
All in all, it is a tiring conversation: every work of anti-Communist dissident literature should be celebrated if it has the merit to justify celebration. I do not like this “best of” contest from either Chandler or the Garrards, much as I understand their position as Grossman advocates relative to the fame of Bulgakov, Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn. But that doesn’t mean they are wrong: Life & Fate was indeed the most threatening, at least equal to the Gulag Archipelago.
First: Life & Fate, paired with Stalingrad, consolidates the Communist Party’s failure to take all the credit for victory against the Germans. And none of them are reactionary.
Second: it was the start of Grossman writing about the Holodomor, a verboten topic.
Third: it questioned a particular form of what we today might call Holocaust denial where, in order to cover up the alliance of many Ukrainians with the Germans, Stalin ordered that one could only say “Soviets of all nationalities.”
Fourth - and this was its ultimate danger: Life & Fate recognizes zero differences between Fascism and Communism. It being the first work of literature to recognize and accept this 20th century truth when even today, ideologically lobotomized Americans - including those in influential positions - continually deny any such relationship even if the history is crystal clear.
In other words, Life & Fate remains dangerous to this day. While we can legally purchase and read it in public, Life & Fate will most probably be among the first books to be memory-holed once America’s present-day Marxists consolidate their currently-held power over American society. But if they do, they will do it quietly. If few make a fuss about this book, it’s because few want you to know about it.
With this in mind - as well as its fundamental Tolstoyan indifference to the existence of toilet paper postmodernism - I would like to propose to any author who wishes to participate in the counterculture: rather than follow in the footsteps of Gravity’s Rainbow or even Ulysses, let us follow in the footsteps of Grossman instead.
Not only would following him reconnect our severed connection to the Western tradition vis-à-vis the 19th century Russian overlap: Grossman, whether conscious of it or not, stumbled upon a literary formula that can encompass a modern society in its entirety without relying on unserious and vacuous literary strategies. Much of postmodernism’s success comes from its ability - to give credit where credit is due - to, in some way or another, create a portrayal of all society at a time when there’s too much to record.
This, too, is Grossman’s success. For as Heraclitus wrote: “the way forward is the way back.”
Conclusion
I chose not to dwell too much on Grossman’s need to address Ukrainian collaboration with the Germans. I do not have the appetite to write about it while this senseless war is going on, in a way that has probably guaranteed certain doom for the Ukrainian people. Not, incidentally, too different from the fated dooms of my characters in Calm Before an Earthquake.
But if indeed Grossman felt some kind of kinship with Ukrainian identity in any sense, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind me ending this segment with a quote from the great Ukrainian Kobzar, Taras Shevchenko:
In foreign lands the people
Are not quite the same—
It’s hard to live among them!
You’ll have none to shed a tear with,
You’ll have none to talk to.
(From A Thought)8
(We had to switch the order a bit. But stay tuned: tomorrow you’ll get to read my review of Everything Flows.)
Historical fiction aficionados will recognize Chernobog as a deity referenced in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, under the name Zernebock.
Hillman here refers to Heraclitus’ 69th fragment: “The way up is the way back.”
From Penguin’s 2001 translation of Heraclitus’ Fragments.
For what it’s worth, Hitler had read Gustave Le Bon’s pioneering work on crowd psychology.
This is a hard truth to accept about the war, as it would force the thinker to conclude that the Germans were fundamentally unethical as a nation.
An exception was Romanian-Jewish poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan, whose poetry by its very existence was a direct and successful rejection of Theodor Adorno’s claim that after Auschwitz there is no poetry.
Other sources don’t condone this story of Bulgakov retrieving his manuscripts with ease; according to another account, Bulgakov only got his manuscript back with help from Gorky.
Written in St. Petersburg, 1838.
A fascinating review...I definitely want to read that book.
Superior on all fronts, Felix! I can't imagine how many hours you put into this, given that reading the book alone can take more than two dozen hours. Your essay here is full of thought-provoking paragraphs, and I'm sure I'll be commenting in more detail over time, and its an essay that will stand the test of time.