A.When the monumental novel “Leben und Schicksal” by the Soviet writer Wassili Grossman first appeared in full German translation in 2007, there was talk of a sensational literary find, indeed a “novel of the century”. Why did the rediscovery of this capital work take so long? Partly because Grossman, born in 1905 in Berditschew in what is now the Ukraine, was a Jewish writer and ruthless realist who always sat between the chairs. When he died in 1964, his main works were either mutilated or not published at all, his papers were confiscated, and he himself, as a dissident, was declared a non-person. The 1948 publication-ready “Black Book” on the genocide of the Soviet Jews, whose editing Grossman had taken over from Ilya Ehrenburg, was suppressed on the train by Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaigns. The death of the Soviet Jews had long been hidden behind the falsified victim term “peaceful Soviet citizens”.
Only now can we see what censorship, prohibition and text mutilation on this scale mean. Because “Leben und Schicksal” has a hardly less important previous novel with the title “Stalingrad”, which has now been carefully translated and approximately complete in German: almost 1,300 pages long, translated on the basis of a text version created by Robert Chandler and published in 2019 published in English. Grossman, for his part, had begun the novel during the Nazi war of conquest in the east. Later he had to make numerous changes and, under pressure from the Stalinist cultural guardians, also accept a patriotic title: “For the just cause” – meaning the fight against fascism – only appeared in censored versions in the Soviet Union from 1950 onwards. Grossman received no reply to a personal letter to Stalin (“I beg you to help me solve the problems that affect the fate of the book. I consider it to be the most important work of my career”).
Scenes of fear, generosity and tenacity
But only both novels together, as a “dilogy”, as they were conceived, result in the highly ambitious work that the artist Wassili Grossman had in mind: an epic about the German war against the Soviet Union on all levels of society, about bombing and destruction German camps and the Soviet gulags. And with it an analysis of the totalitarianisms in Grossman’s time; a testimony to life destroyed a million times, but also of indomitable hope; and a tribute to the dead.
The best justification of the realistic novel lies in the realism of the catastrophe that provides it with the material. Stalingrad – the word suffices as a cipher – was one of the cruelest battles of the Second World War, with hundreds of thousands of victims on both sides, transfigured, cursed and evoked in countless books, because Stalingrad was the downfall for some and the turning point of the war for others. Grossman sees it all, the military maneuvers and the reactions of the civilian population, and he attests to it in haunting scenes of fear, magnanimity, tenacity, forlornness and loss.
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