“A peasant leaving his village for the war does not dream of medals and glory. He knows he is probably on his way to die.”
Part 1: The City of Stalin
All roads in Vasily Grossman’s life lead to or from Stalingrad. It is both the zenith of his personal life and the nexus of electricity from where all currents fizzle with what Grossman would discover to be a raw form of Heraclitean fire. ‘It is better to be first in a village than second in Rome,’ spoke Caesar. Grossman didn’t need Moscow: that honor and achievement had already gone to his idol, Leo Tolstoy. But Stalingrad would suffice.
Suffice to say it did suffice. And more besides.
As is known, the Battle of Stalingrad was the costliest battle of the Second World War in terms of casualties. It was not the largest, as is sometimes thought - that “honor” would go to the Battle of Kursk, the largest tank battle in history and sometimes thought of as the actual battle that turned the tide.
Historians debate the greatness of Stalingrad vs. Kursk to this day. But Stalingrad was different. Tactically a debate may continue; but symbolically no new dialogue or pseudo-dialogue need venture forth from the mouths of extrovert or introvert alike to challenge its skyscraping height as a symbol. Grossman knew it. His commanding superiors knew it. His fellow correspondents knew it. The Red Army knew it. The Communist Party knew it. So too do we today; at least those of us who know our history.
But most of us in the West don’t know it. And precious few in literature knew it. Only one man “knew it:” Vasily Grossman.
Before the 1920s, the city along the mighty Volga River had been known as Tsaritsyn. Though its etymology is nuanced, its name roughly translates as “City of the Yellow Throne.” Yellow meaning golden. A glorious title for the stage of a glorious moment, albeit a different glory than that associated with the tsars. Or at least the tsars of olde.
Placed in charge of Red Army forces along the southwestern front, Joseph Stalin made Tsaritsyn his base of operations during the Russian Civil War. His successful commandeering of the Red Army in that position - far from the echoing whispers of the newly-established inhabitants of the Kremlin - helped Stalin quietly build his power while his fellow Bolsheviks, believing they had the last laugh, thought of Soso as the stupid one.
So when Tsaritsyn’s name was changed to Stalingrad in 1926, two years after the death of Communist dictator Vladimir Lenin, it was not a completely empty and fabricated form of megalomaniacal titular symbolism as was the case with the mining city of Stalino12 in Eastern Ukraine or the posthumous commemoration that was Leningrad.
Stalingrad was a believable symbol of Stalin’s power in a reality that did not offer all that much to believe in apart from a singular narrative. And most importantly: it was a symbol of Stalin’s victory. The beginning of his rise to power and the beginning of the eventual end of “the Trotskyites” and others “traitors” like Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin. A defeat at Stalingrad would have been not only a staggering defeat for the Red Army. They would have defeated Stalin himself.
But not of the corporeal man pulling strings from the Kremlin. It would have been Stalin the Tsar, Stalin the God, who was vanquished.
While the buzzing of bullets, the cacophonic velocity of incoming artillery shells and the rapidity of the German advance no doubt had Grossman thinking of more immediate concerns as per his job of war correspondent for Red Star, the world’s most famous moustache next to Adolf Hitler’s and its bearer can’t have been far from his mind. It certainly was not for the Red Army, who knew all too well that were they to desert their ranks as their fathers had done during the First World War, NKVD agents awaited them; armed not only with guns but with amnesia in the parts of their brain that may or may not have once understood the concept of mercy. They also knew that “being captured” was tantamount to treason in the eyes of that moustache’s beholder.3 A man and myth who held a gun to the back of every Red Army soldier’s head. A reality deeply alien to the American understanding of both life and the war.
But no matter how nutty the Stalinist dictatorship was in setting the stage for the events of 1942-43 - and however much us historians, professional dudes or armchair amateurs like myself, stare wide-eyed into the weird darkness that is the past - the story of Stalingrad is the story of ordinary people: peasants, soldiers, military officers, workers, farmer, families. People whose legacy and role in one of history’s greatest battles would have been totally silenced had it not been for one brave war correspondent who, unlike his fellow colleagues in journalism, ventured into the besieged city to interview, learn from and understand the soldiers whose existence history had put to the test.
It is the story of these people that Grossman recollects in his fourth novel,4 his second war novel (following the hastily yet impeccably written The People Immortal, the first Soviet novel of the war), his last socialist realist novel and his first major novel: Stalingrad. Published under the title For A Just Cause, nine years after the battle itself.
And one year before the actual death of this city’s namesake, an event that would later lead to the city being renamed as Volgograd in 1962 by Nikita Khrushchev as part of his effort to bring this aberrational chapter of history even by Russian standards to a close.
"There's no shell shock that shocks like the truth," said Andreyev.
Part 2: A Just Literary Cause
Everything Flows and Life & Fate, Grossman’s two most famous novels, are the greatest monuments to be found along the road from Stalingrad. But what about the road to Stalingrad?
The young Vasily - his Jewish name Iosif was seldom used - must have no doubt read his share of great literature in the candlelight that was his murky childhood. But despite his family’s partial prosperity (through his uncle) and partial poverty (through his mother) in his hometown of Berdichev, we do not know as much about his early reading as we do with, say, the “bourgeois” upbringing of fellow Ukrainian-Jew-turned-Soviet Isaac Babel.
(Both of whom wrote in the Russian language and owed more to the tradition of Alexander Pushkin than that of Taras Shevchenko; though in his Armenian Sketchbook Grossman betrays an iceberg-tip knowledge of Ukrainian language poets, authors and philosophers though not, regrettably, elaborating more on what they meant to him)
So while we could be wrong, Grossman’s artistic life strikes us as that of a late bloomer much like Vincent van Gogh with painting. A chemical engineer who - following an unpleasant spell at the mines of Stalino during which he may or may not have gotten tuberculosis - turned to literature as his next (and possibly last) option, encouraged by his Comintern cousin Nadya whose connections with the upper echelons of Soviet society led to what was an ultimate inevitability for any and all legal Soviet writers: a judgment by (in Communist eyes) the one-and-only Maxim Gorky.
Gorky’s approval can be summed up as: passing the test, but with caveats. A big one being that he did not focus on ideology enough, and that he had to “choose his truth.” As much as that may sound like ideological dog whistling today given that we all know what “his truth” meant - and, in fact, it was exactly that - Gorky was also not a fool. He could see that Grossman would get into trouble down the road. (More on that later in this series)
If Grossman’s subsequent literary career can be summed up in a singular manner, it is that - much like Jorge Luis Borges’ observation of Mark Twain being “a genius who didn’t know he was a genius” - Grossman was a reactionary who didn’t know he was a reactionary. Or what he did know were a few of the trees, but not the breadth of the forest itself.
One early “tree” being his literary reaction and distancing of himself from Isaac Babel, ten years Grossman’s senior. Grossman simultaneously admired Babel while trying to outdo and distance himself from him.
Being Jews from Ukraine was their great commonality. But that - and quality - is where the similarities end. Babel’s specialty was short stories; though Grossman also authored short stories, his calling card was large, “maximalist” novels that shrink the ‘G’ in ‘Great American Novel’ to a lowercase letter. Babel was a Francophile who idolized Guy de Maupassant. Grossman was a traditionalist who carried the torch of the great Russian tradition and all it could accomplish, especially Tolstoy. Babel fused his Jewish heritage with the Soviet experience in a way where, like Siamese twins, neither one can be removed from the other; even if one side of this coin (such as the ‘Sovietness’ of Red Cavalry, or the ‘Jewishness’ of his Odessa Stories) is more shiny than the other. A chemical reaction created by Babel’s simultaneous consciousness of his Jewishness and his desire to escape it; an irreconcilability that psychologically cemented his devotion to the Soviet state until the end, an end that only came later due to Babel’s conscious attempt to befriend the very policemen carrying out Stalin’s purges.5
Grossman, in contrast, lived the reverse life: a childhood without a complicated relationship to Judaism6 and therefore an effortless relationship to the Soviet cause; but one that, due to the course set by his share of the Heraclitean fire, would lead Grossman away from the state and towards an unanticipated yet firm commitment to dissidence. In contrast, Babel, like a fly, would keep flying toward the light.
With all this in mind, translator Robert Chandler nonetheless cites two particular differences between Grossman and his immediate predecessor, two that would complete Grossman’s artistic individuality once work on Stalingrad had begun: first, Grossman rejected Babel’s pyromaniacal interest in violence. It wasn’t that violence wouldn’t show up in Grossman’s fiction; rather, he would let the violence speak for itself.
And second: Grossman sought to supersede (or, perhaps, compliment) the man’s world of Babel with one that had a more maternal feeling to it. Were one to search for it, such dualisms are not without precedent in literature: an example being among the Great Bards of nearby Poland where Bard No. 2, Juliusz Słowacki, was influenced by a strong relationship to his mother; while Bard No. 3, Zygmunt Krasiński, lived his life with a patriarchal adherence to and respect for his father, albeit one immensely complicated by his father’s treasonous allegiance to the Tsar.
Unlike the Polish Bards - who together, even with the addition of Cyprian Norwid, comprise a unified and symbiotic canon despite squabbles over rank - Babel and Grossman struggle to form such a dualism. The failure is not due to the dissimilarities themselves but to a completeness of vision Babel could not achieve except in the small corners of the world where his literary vision dwelt. (Budyonny’s cavalry, wartime Petrograd, the Moldavanka district of Odessa)
Grossman, like Babel, lived in what we in the Anglosphere would be inclined to call a man’s world; a world of conflict, hardship and strife that favors the strengths of men more than those of women. (Though some will no doubt argue the opposite) But this “man’s world” had a lot of women in it too. While the use of women and/or femininity is rarely as subversive as is all too often claimed by ideologically lobotomized Anglosphere feminists, Grossman is an exception both in terms of anticipating subversion and executing subversion.
But he does not subvert what we expect him to subvert, any more than his Soviet readers did. Apart, perhaps, from what Gorky himself expected Grossman to subvert.
“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.”
Part 3: The Calm Before The Storm
When discussing classical music, I am - after accounting for the expected Polish bias - more or less an equal admirer of both Fryderyk Chopin and Franz Liszt. More or less. To set them apart I like to say that while Liszt could rally up a storm, Chopin knew how to convey the calm before the storm. Much harder to do than the storm itself.
While such comparisons between composers don’t always lend themselves well to writers, Grossman understood the need for both and succeeded at recreating both. It may therefore surprise the war fiction reader to find that unlike All Quiet on the Western Front - where Erich Maria Remarque need only have the teacher send the children to the front for the plot to exit Civilianville - Grossman is as interested in the calm as he is in the war itself.
A reason for this could be what his biographers, the Garrards, identified as the “liberation of war.” In the ruins of Stalingrad there were no NKVD agents behind your back; no secret police to arrest you; no neighbors to report your thought crimes; none of those totalitarian trappings. (Perhaps we should also use the term ‘the eye of the storm?’) This in large part explains why the battle was the first “day” of the rest of Grossman’s life. He had no idea what real freedom meant beforehand. Ergo, Stalingrad as nexus.
Stalingrad is both a war novel and something else entirely, as befitting a novel ambitious enough to follow in the footsteps of Leo Tolstoy’s War & Peace. The academics might call this relationship intertextual, but such a generic term clouds the key importance of Tolstoy to Grossman’s artistry.
While Grossman, no doubt, was more than happy to follow in his idol’s footsteps, Tolstoy himself was a fundamental part of the war given that War & Peace was broadcast to Red Army soldiers on the radio. While it’s true that American soldiers took American novels with them to war, the existential threat Operation Barbarossa presented to not just Stalin and the U.S.S.R. but to the Russian way of life gave Tolstoy - and, by default, literature itself - a greater power virtually none of us in the US of A are in a position to understand.7 In a way, Grossman didn’t really have a choice but to follow in Tolstoy’s footsteps if he was to present an accurate portrait of the war. Tolstoy, by virtue of being in the airwaves, was in the very air itself.
At the end of the day, however, Grossman owed more to himself than to the Master of Yasnaya Polyana when it came to what was then contemporary experiential accuracy and what is now historical accuracy. Much has been written about Grossman’s stupendous memory, but it is well worth repeating here.
As a war correspondent, Grossman had a way with the ordinary soldier that was nothing if not extraordinary in a society not only famed for emotionally cold people, but strongly incentivized to secrecy due to Stalin’s Purges. Grossman ingratiated himself with the ordinary soldier so well that they shared stories with him they wouldn’t have shared with any other journalist. This enabled Grossman’s writing to absorb and express a strong human touch that, in my view, remains unsurpassed to this day where novels are concerned.8 Grossman remembered it all; and in doing so created a style all his own that was simultaneously individual and collective.
Before the war, Czech author Karel Čapek had accomplished something similar with his Talks With T.G. Masaryk; while he was the writer, he replicated Masaryk’s voice and character so that both Masaryk as narrator and Čapek as scribe are one and the same. Already, this is an exceptional accomplishment. But while Čapek did this with a single individual - albeit a truly exceptional individual and a head of state - Grossman does this with untold numbers of ordinary Soviet citizens met during the course of the war as well as civilian life. All of whom are individuals.
Stalingrad has been described as “socialist realism,” and aesthetically a case can be successfully made. Whether it is worth it is debatable: as future dissident Andrei Sinyavsky explained in his treatise on the subject: “A thousand critics, theoreticians, art experts, pedagogues [were] beating their heads and straining their voices to justify, explain and interpret its material existence and dialectical character.” Sinyavsky later refers to the official definition given by the Union of Soviet Writers (of which Grossman had been a member since the early 30s) which pinpoints two major characteristics: 1) a truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development; and 2) the above must be linked with the task of ideological transformation and education of workers in the spirit of socialism.”
It is also worth noting that from the Soviet point of view, Leo Tolstoy was viewed as what was called a “critical realist:” an “Old Realist” from before the Revolution because he criticized the “bourgeoisie.” Naturally, the use of “realism” had as much integrity as the use of the word Pravda (“truth”) in a journalistic context. But as today’s readers read Stalingrad, they will encounter a kind of honesty that will make them wonder how a book like this could have been published in a society as censorious and totalitarian as the Soviet Union in the first place.
This perceived lineage explains how - after a long process of censor analysis and haggling over the entirety of the 906-page novel, Stalingrad eventually came out in 1952 in military shops. Albeit a mutated version.
But circling back to the topic of subversion: while I certainly have no conflict with the understanding that Stalin was eager to have the Soviet populace forget the war while claiming all credit for Stalingrad due to his “unquestionable military genius” - a maniacal goal Stalingrad challenged by virtue of its very presence - I believe that Grossman’s novel posed another threat as well: to socialist realism itself.
Stalingrad is simultaneously an expression and a subversion of socialist realism. A motive that originated as a seed in part from Grossman’s original attempt to surpass Babel who, despite possessing a distinct craft and literary universe, has also been strongly compared to early Soviet socialist realists like Dmitry Furmanov, author of the socialist realist classic Chapayev.9 Seeking to reject Babel and his penchant for violence (acceptable in socialist realism if it “furthers the revolution”) while infusing the world he lived in with the maternal warmth he’d known earlier in life as the “freedom” of the Battle of Stalingrad, Grossman took what he knew as a now-seasoned author; what he knew about state-approved literary styles; what he knew about war itself; and, most importantly, what he knew about his fellow citizens; and, in the footsteps of Tolstoy and the great literary Russians he admired, created the greatest socialist realist novel of them all.
A novel too great for the state-approved guidelines and even the narrow worldview of Marxism-Leninism to handle. By integrating such a large volume of individuality from “the proletariat” itself, it would be impossible for such a novel to “be linked with the task of ideological transformation and education of workers in the spirit of socialism” by virtue of its divergent multiplicity. Even if the characters are not the most disagreeable to be found in literature.
On top of that: be it Grossman or the people whose lives are represented by the characters of Stalingrad, what did such literary banalities mean in the face of existential and even cosmic transformation in the ruins of Stalingrad? Not a whole lot.
It was the first of Grossman’s masterpieces to come out. But apart from a few preliminary chapters of Life & Fate, it was the last novel to be published in his lifetime. A life that wouldn’t end before socialist realist Grand Master post-Gorky, future Nobel Laureate Mikhail Sholokhov, called Grossman’s novel “spittle in the face of the Russian people.”
Mindless conformity to virtue signal to the Party? Or a butthurt attitude given that no socialist realist could surpass Grossman from that point on? I’m sure the jury has a lot to say about that!
“How many times do I have to tell you that there are two truths? There's the truth of the reality forced on us by the accursed past. And there's the truth of the reality that will defeat that past. It's this second truth, the truth of the future, that I want to live by."
Part 4: Stalingrad As Prequel
It would be unbecoming of me if I didn’t mention the story itself. Not only because Grossman creates such beautiful characters extraordinary in their ordinariness; but because future readers of Grossman will no doubt want to know if Stalingrad, the prequel to Life & Fate, is worth reading in “chronological” order.
The short answer is: no. I put quotes around “chronological” because Life & Fate functions not just as a sequel, but as a kind of alter-ego to Stalingrad. If Stalingrad is Dr. Jekyll, then Life & Fate is Mr. Hyde. And it is Mr. Hyde, not Dr. Jekyll, who has motivated the lion’s share of us to read Robert Louis Stevenson’s legendary novella because without Mr. Hyde, Dr. Jekyll would just be another Victorian doctor, albeit one with an unusual name.
On top of that, Life & Fate is not a socialist realist novel stylistically. Grossman had, by this point, shed any and all stylistic pretensions.
This, of course, is how the two relate conceptually. But as a story, they are still prequel and sequel. This leaves two compelling reasons to read Stalingrad first: 1) the battle is split between both novels; and 2) character investment. Just as the two novels are alter egos, so too do recurring characters manifest themselves as such. Readers who want a maximal investment (no obscure pun intended) in Grossman’s characters do themselves an enormous disfavor by ignoring Stalingrad.
After what is essentially a prologue featuring a meeting between Hitler and Mussolini, Stalingrad begins with the peasant Vavilov who prepares to leave his village. Vavilov’s conscription paper is a death warrant, nothing more. Already, we can see the subversion here: while the depiction of Vavilov, his village and his kolkhoz community is positive on the whole, there is no sense that he will become this great Soviet hero like Chapayev. Of course this is only the very beginning of the story. But Grossman doesn’t hesitate when it comes to disinfecting socialist realism with the hand sanitizer of literary humanism.
The primary protagonists, however, are the Shaposhnikov family. It tickled me pink to see that Grossman left a little homage to War & Peace by naming one of the Shaposhnikov daughters Vera, in homage to Countess Vera Rostova. An immediate favorite of a character given how much her emotional experience as the oldest sibling resonates with yours truly, also an oldest sibling in experience at least.
Vera Shaposhnikova isn’t, of course, a countess. But neither are the Shaposhnikovs terribly poor: Stepan Spiridonov, husband to one of the sisters, is the director of a power plant. They are manifested in the beleaguered city in a way that allows for storytelling inroads to take us to people of all walks of life. Much like Stalingrad itself, the Shaposhnikovs are the center around which the battle orbits. Thereby making the city and its people synonymous.
Questions about authenticity no doubt will surface: one such person to bring them us is critic Marcel Theroux in his Guardian review, where he is understandably skeptical of Stalingrad’s merit. And he has every reason to be.
But like many who analyze the Soviet era - and I have gotten flack for saying this in the past - Theroux appears to forget that inhabitants of the Soviet Union, unfamiliar with the metrics of good life/bad life we possess, knew how to find moments of happiness, peace, calm, serenity, even - albeit rarely - glory in moments where we today, spoiled as we are, would struggle to find the same thing or see it in the past, and not just with Communist history. The Garrards identify a number of such moments in Grossman’s life even before he became a well-off writer, such as his memories of the Black Sea and the time he spent at a sanatorium in Abkhazia recovering from his possibly misdiagnosed tuberculosis. While we see a sunnier version of Grossman’s characters in Stalingrad vs. Life & Fate, they are not 2-D nor unbelievable. And in terms of Theroux’s complaint that Grossman doesn’t mention NKVD agents waiting with pistols, the Garrards give a plausible explanation for that absence in the novel:
“The freedom at Stalingrad was, first and foremost, freedom from the interference of party apparatchiks and the NKVD. Normally the security organs were in the rear, waiting to shoot anyone trying to flee the battlefield or retreat without authorization. But Stalingrad, a blazing inferno described by a Wehrmacht officer as “an enormous cloud of burning, blinding smoke” by day, with “scorching, howling [and] bleeding nights,” was too hot for the NKVD and their minions. They had decamped for the east bank of the River Volga very soon after the Germans first entered the city’s outskirts. The NKVD preferred the rear, and within Stalingrad there was no safe rear.”
There is clearly a sentimental connection between this brief experience of freedom and the motive for writing Stalingrad itself. While it depreciates somewhat from the historical accuracy of the novel, adding NKVD agents would have been untrue to Grossman’s experience of freedom and the need to communicate that. And given that his primary readership was Soviet readers - many of whom would have been Red Army veterans - it’s not like he needed to add the NKVD for the sake of factuality. Those readers were the last people who needed a reminder. And chances are, most of us history nerds who are most likely to find our way here do not need a reminder either.
There is little point in debating whether Grossman will be free of accusations of trying to ingratiate himself too much with the Party. He won’t: any more than Isaac Babel, or the lion’s share of present-day Americans blind to the rising Marxist tyranny of today who, I’m sure, will always be flawless dissidents who always do everything 100% right. But to create Mr. Hyde, Grossman needed Dr. Jekyll. To enact the darkness of Life & Fate, he needed the light and the twilight. Life & Fate, even by Theroux’s admission, is not dragged down by Stalingrad: rather, it is enhanced by backstory that, while not absolutely crucial, is very enriching. And does not fail to invest us in their fates.
Short Conclusion
Stalingrad didn’t last long on the shelves. The panic over Dr. Zhivago, followed by the arrest of Life & Fate, meant that Grossman’s memory had been successfully memory-holed by the time he died. Stalingrad would also take the longest to resurface in terms of international awareness. Given that its stylistic loyalty makes it the lesser of his other two masterpieces, this later emergence makes sense.
Stalingrad might be number one chronologically, but is number three in terms of quality: Grossman, as Chandler noted, only ever improved from start to finish. But that’s not to say it lacks quality; Grossman had come a long way beforehand. While many Grossman readers will be able to content themselves with just Life & Fate and Everything Flows, their experience will be a lot richer if they include Stalingrad. And if curious readers had to choose at least one socialist realism novel to read in their lifetimes, Stalingrad is, hands down, the best choice. After all, it was not Party-approved. And this way, we can deny Sholokhov the last laugh.
Stay tuned for Mike’s post on Grossman and the Holocaust, coming up next!
Today’s Donetsk: though if it was true that the relatively young mining town had been briefly known as Trotsk for a time - after Leon Trotsky - that would also provide an understandable motive, albeit a petty one.
Though in keeping with symbolic patterns of his life, Grossman also worked in Stalino for a spell in the 1920s. Places named after Stalin certainly seemed to feature in his life.
A status Stalin didn’t even hesitate to give to his oldest son, Yakov, who as an artillery officer was captured by the Germans. Later dying at Sachsenhausen, Stalin refused to regard him as a high-status captive due to his ‘treason.’
His first three being Glyukauf (1936), Stepan Kolchugin (or Kolchugin’s Youth: 1937-40) and The People Immortal (1943).
According to legend, Babel even slept with the sister of NKVD chief Yagoda.
Unlike most Jewish families, the Grossmans spoke Russian at home; most agree that Grossman had a weak grasp on Yiddish, if indeed he had a grasp to begin with.
This is why my generation pissed me the fuck off some time ago when, online, they started yapping in a reductionist manner about how Dostoyevsky was nothing but an emo author. Maybe you’ve grown a bit wiser, my fellow Millennials: but that cheap and moronic insult remains unforgiven.
With journalism, a case can certainly be made for Ryszard Kapuściński who, like Grossman, had a special eye for the extraordinary. But comparing an ‘international’ journalist like Kapuściński to a ‘domestic’ war correspondent like Grossman has its limits.
The novel, incidentally, is about a superior commander who cuckolded Furmanov when Chapayev and Furmanov’s wife had an affair.
My blog, This Day in History, unlike yours is a more scratch the surface look back, with the intent being trying to create intrigue.
Wonderful, engaging, wide ranging essay! How wonderful to see not just the publishing breadth of Grossman but also comparison with other authors such as Babel (that genius of punctuation)! It makes me want to respond, oohs and ahhs, to every paragraph, but my clumsy thumb typing trips me. Also appreciate the measurement with social realism. I am reading L&F; so good! Also this worthy observation: "But like many who analyze the Soviet era - and I have gotten flack for saying this in the past - Theroux appears to forget that inhabitants of the Soviet Union, unfamiliar with the metrics of good life/bad life we possess, knew how to find moments of happiness, peace, calm, serenity, even - albeit rarely - glory in moments where we today, spoiled as we are, would struggle to find the same thing..." About the battle of Stalingrad, also remember the White Rose Dissident movement in Munich, their last pamphlet in 1943: "The dead of Stalingrad demand it of us!" Finally on a lighter note I became intrigued with a detail of a Grossman L&F character's reminisce of civilian food, pickle soup -- perhaps enjoyed by my own ancestors --I looked it up and am making it this weekend -- talk about Concrete History!