Russian literature
CHARLES KEEN on the best book he’s ever read
Having finished its 855 pages, I shut the book, and uttered, quite involuntarily, ‘That was the best book I’ve ever read.’ Then I read it a second time… I’m 83, and I learnt to read at three, and I’ve never said that before – not even when, at seven, I finished Black Beauty for the third time. It was a gut reaction, not the result of a detailed comparison with runners up, like Bleak House or the Iliad. I felt ‘purged with pity and terror’, and conscious of having been conducted personally through some of the ghastliest events in European history.
Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate begins with the siege of Stalingrad in 1942, and ends with the repulse of the German armies and lifting of the siege. For every event recorded, the author occupies the mind and spirit of individual participants, so one is living their lives with them through plot and sub-plot. The damage inflicted by the two contestants, fascism and communism, on the lives and the integrity of their adherents is baldly stated, and we get a bird’s eye view of a world which had lost its moral compass.
We live life in the front line, in homes under siege and air raids, in lives of deprivation. We join a line-up for the gas chamber. There is a prevailing mood of resignation. The young men go off to the front, expecting to be killed. Their mothers hunger after them, but get on with the business of living in their evacuee quarters. The men go to work, hoping not to be denounced or sacked.
Vasily Grossman, a revolutionary in spirit, is disenchanted with totalitarianism. ‘The simple wish for people to live freely and happily and comfortably, for society to be ordered freely and justly – this simple desire determined the lives of many of the most remarkable revolutionary thinkers and fighters... And there were many other important Soviet figures… who were guided until their last days by an equally clear, childishly pure sense of purpose...’ Those words, from another of his books ( Stalingrad), seem to summarise his own approach to revolution.
Elsewhere he writes: ‘Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness...’
Perhaps it is his philosophy that appeals to an octogenarian like me. I could become a revolutionary on those terms. More, it is, as with any book, the sheer quality of the writing. The writing conveys the intensity of his own feelings, shared with his protagonists. It extends to the love passages, which are really about love, not voyeurism. And it excels in the descriptive passages, which lend beauty to parched steppes and bombed-out cities.
Grossman loves the Russian landscape, as he loves its citizens. He loves Russia, and his book dwells on the ‘kernel of human kindness’, which, throughout his life, has been under fierce assault from the ‘great evil’ of state oppression.
If I’m spared, I’ll read the book a third time. Then I can compare it with Black Beauty.