One such instance that I particularly love and admire is the silence in the iconic Soviet spy-series “Seventeen Moments of Spring” (or Semnadtsat’ mgnovenii vesny). (big leap I know, but it only struck me recently how silent the film is) This miniseries is something that every Russian knows of and has seen. I remember its theme as a constant melancholy background in my childhood that made me wonder who this Shtirlitz is and what happened in those dark days of World War II. My father’s absolute love for the series also made me think that there must be something utterly exquisite about it. I also found that he was strikingly alike my grandfather, whom I never had the pleasure to meet but whose albums I used to spend hours looking through, seeing photos of him in his uniform on various marine missions. (My favourite one was a picture of him holding a huge bunch of bananas, now that was exotic!) It is only recently that I managed to watch the entire series and see the scene that everyone I know says is one of the most powerful cinematic moments. It is heart-breaking. The whole series is full of silence as Shtirlitz is a spy and thus carries an unspeakable secret; silence is at the centre of the story. In this scene however, Shtirlitz meets his wife in a cafe and cannot speak to her, due to the fact that he is a spy and cannot have any contact with his family. The two sit and look at each other across the room, like true “star-crossed lovers”. It is a very powerful scene that is made all the more moving due to the emotive and beautiful music that accompanies the scene. The music oddly highlights the silence in the scene. I also find it quite curious how the cafe in which they meet is called Elephant, and although there is no saying in Russian, there is one in English about “the elephant in the room”. So, it may only make sense to the English, but there is definitely an elephant in the room in this scene that creates the silence. Enjoy…

I have been thinking a lot about how history is depicted and embraced by creative narratives. History informs many novels. Sometimes it is a backdrop and other times it is the very subject of the novel. As shown in the previous post, it can also be a subject of music, or an inspiration in music. Creativity does not happen in a vacuum but is a direct response to experience or knowledge. Our present becomes the future’s history and therefore responding to it may be rather complex. Does one make it personal or general, could it be both? How exactly does one depict events that are horrific or even traumatic? And how does one respond to events without becoming too dogmatic and judgemental but at the same time respond to them from a moral position? The recent investigations into the riots in London attempt to understand or explain history as it is happening. Perhaps, we are hoping to understand the present so as to make sure it will be remembered in a certain way, that it will fit in with some kind of a master narrative of Britain’s “lost decade”.

I believe that sometimes creativity allows for a different kind of memory. This year PJ Harvey was the first woman to win the Mercury Prize for a second time. I listened to her album before this was announced and I was very pleased to see something rather difficult being recognized as an outstanding contribution. By difficult I mean that the subject of the record is difficult, rather than than the music itself. Harvey deals with the darkest aspects of our present lives in sometimes rather horrific depictions. I was listening to the album on my way to the Grossman events in Oxford in September and the words: “death was everywhere, in the air and in the sounds coming off the mounds” took me straight to Stalingrad. BUT this was not written about a safely distant past but about our present. It made me wonder, what will people think of our era when they look back on this album?

What most fascinates me about this album is how listenable it is. Harvey explains this very well and I think her observations are very representative of a lot of art and fiction. I can both see Iurii Dombrovskii’s approach to literature where he depicts the Great Terror of 1937 through a very creative and uplifting language (more on that later). And the work of Grossman who depicts war through the “human emotional perspective” (Harvey’s words). In the interview with The Guardian below, Harvey explains the need to make the music on the album rather uplifting to support the heavy and dark lyrics. The interview is very interesting and it makes me happy to see such wonderful artists out there who respond to the traumas in our world by giving this suffering a voice.

I love the way that she suggests that the album belongs to the times and not to her. I think that shows the elusive nature of creativity, which is born within an individual but exists independently outside that individual.

I thought I would also attach a song from the album as an example and it is so hard to choose one. I’ve decided on the clip below as it is a performance in front of David Cameron and involves a little confrontation. Go Polly!

Sometimes it seems one can be influenced by something or refer to something of which one is unaware. I wonder whether the band Beirut were aware of what exactly they meant by the title to their album “Gulag Orkestar”. But then, does it really matter? One can go down an endless route of titles, especially as controversial as Joy Division, or perhaps as intellectually challenging as The Fall.

Here is the song that narrates the story of a Red Army soldier. It reminds me of Serezha in  Grossman’s two novels, as he is also a 17 year old boy at war. I chose the clip that includes the lyrics, however, please ignore the exclamation marks, the song obviously aroused a lot of emotion in the person who wrote the lyrics down.

“No exposition, no discursive form is intrinsically or essentially literary before and outside of the function it is assigned or recognized by a right, that is, a specific intentionality inscribed directly on the social body. The same exposition may be taken to be literary here, in one situation or according to given conventions, and non-literary there. This is the sign that literarity is not an intrinsic property of this or that discursive event. Even where it seems to reside [demeurer], literature remains an unstable function, and it depends on a precarious juridical status. Its passion consists in this – that it receives its determination from something other than itself. Even when it harbors the unconditional right to say anything, including the most savage antinomies, disobedience itself, its status is never assured or guaranteed permanently [à demeure], at home, in the inside of an ‘at home’. This contradiction is its very existence, its ecstatic process. Before coming to writing, literature depends on reading and the right conferred on it by an experience of reading. One can read the same text – which thus never exists ‘in itself’ – as a testimony that is said to be serious and authentic, or as an archive, or as a document, or as a symptom – or as a work of literary fiction, indeed the work of a literary  fiction that simulates all of the positions that we have just enumerated. For literature can say anything, accept anything, receive anything, suffer anything, and simulate everything; it can even feign a trap, the way modern armies know how to set false traps; these traps pass themselves off as real traps and trick the machines designed to detect simulations under even the most sophisticated camouflage.” ( Jacques Derrida “Testimony and Fiction” in Maurice Blanchot The Instant of My Death  and Jacques Derrida Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 28-29)

Yes, I’m not sure where he is going with the army metaphor (or any of it), but I like it nonetheless. I sense a complete love of literature in this passage and that is something I can relate to!

So, the first two-thirds of the novel are concerned with the war moving towards Stalingrad and the preparations for the possible battle, and the last third depicts the actual battle within Stalingrad. One of my favourite early passages is of Vera and Viktorov in the hospital.

Vera returns to her duty after the family gathering (described in the previous post) and looks over the city. To me this is one of the most potent descriptions of a city before the war. Vera leans on the window sill of the hospital and looks over the city, which is enveloped in an aura of death. The moon shines with a cold deathly light over the covered and dusty windows of houses. They no longer emit the warm light of a family home but now reflect the cold and brutal light of the moon. This light is fragile and one only has to look in another direction for all to be bathed in deathly darkness. The fresh air of Volga mixes with the stale air of the hospital, sometimes it wins over this air and sometimes it seemes as if the whole city is enveloped in the smell of carbolic acid and the clouds are cotton pads. Vera stands there and listens to the dying men in the hospital and sees new injured men enter. Here, by the window, Vera feels she is part of two worlds. One that consists of the beautiful stars, the fresh air and water of the Volga, and is timeless. The other world is filled with the smell of cigarettes and people dying, the boring forms she has to fill in and the arguments at home. These two worlds collide as Viktorov approaches her and everything seems united into one. It is this description of death everywhere and the love that is born at this moment that makes this scene so moving. Vera’s thoughts are both beautiful and also childishly deep, the mundane mixes with the real threat of war and death. Out of this presence of death life is born as well (as we find out at the end of the novel). It is this mixture of the grand and epic and the small and particular that I love in Grossman. This is what makes the war real to the reader.

The other aspect of war in For a Just Cause  is the one I found most tedious. This is purely due to my lack of interest in (and knowledge of) military matters. As the front moves to Stalingrad, Grossman depicts the exact movements of the various battalions. Some move across the Volga to the city and some retreat from the Don back to Stalingrad. This is all (in my mind) meticulously documented, and is something that is for me hard to understand. All the various numbers and names of Colonels and Sergeants are hard to follow. However, this is all saved by the fact that Grossman follows these battalions into war. As the German army approaches and starts to bomb Stalingrad, the descriptions turn to the individuals and the personal experience of war. Because Grossman explains the movement of all the various troops, and then return to the same troops it becomes clearer to the reader how many lives were sacrificed during the war. Many of the characters Grossman depicts die during these early battles in Stalingrad. One example is the battle that takes place in the Train Station, which is very engaging. The reader has followed these characters for some time and they all are murdered during this battle (including Kovalev who accompanies Tolia to the family party earlier in the novel).

There is a very potent depiction of a female Senior Sergeant Lena Gnatyuk, who receives a parcel from the United States, as part of some form of charity. As she stands there covered in mud and dried blood she opens a parcel of silk stockings, a woollen patterned cardigan, a dress and some perfume. The uselessness of the items in the parcel seems offensive, but more than that, it is painful. Lena feels how she will never experience all that a young beautiful girl should, she will never wear that dress and go to dances. The contrast between the feminine content of the parcel and her masculine uniform and dirty appearance is painful not only to her but also to the soldiers watching her unwrap the parcel. She throws all the contents in the corner declaring their uselessness to her, and hours later she is killed by a German bomb. Whilst searching the shelter after the raid, a German soldier finds the package that Lena threw into the corner and is pleased with the find that he will send to his wife back home. It is through small episodes such as this, that Grossman depicts the brutality of war.

Through depicting, sometimes tediously, the movements of the troops and soldiers in these troops, Grossman actually manages to create an impression of the scale of loss during the war. Every soldier he depicts is accompanied by a small episode that makes him/her very human to reader. Having made the soldiers real to the reader Grossman then kills them, including Tolia Shaposhnikov. By luring the reader into the private life and emotions of the soldiers and them killing then off, Grossman shows the reader the unbearable and brutal losses of the war. In this sense the passages that I find so tedious become absolutely vital in order to understand the battle of Stalingrad. Sometimes, even reading comes with boring chores or “musts” that prove to be worth the effort.

After introducing the events as they unravel at the hands of people in power, Grossman narrates the impact that this has on normal people. Firstly we are introduced to Vavilov who is drafted and then the Shaposhnikov family, who gather together to say goodbye to Tolia who is on his way to the front. Vavilov is one of the last men in the village to be recruited and was therefore looked down upon, but now the villagers all look at him with compassion and sorrow. He spends his last night chopping wood, hoping to provide all he can for his wife and two children. Vavilov later days in battle in the Stalingrad train station. In Stalingrad, the Shaposhnikov’s gather for what may be their last meeting. This is where the reader is introduced to all the major characters that are at the centre of the two novels (Alexandra Vladimirovna, Marusya, Zhenia, Serezha, Vera, Spiridonov, Mostovskoy, Andreev and Sofya Levinton). Alexandra Vladimirovna is the head of the family (her husband died years ago), she is a chemist and mother of Marusya, Liudmila and Zhenia, as well as her son Dmitrii. Dmitrii is the father of Serzha. After being arrested he has now disappeared in a camp and it is assumed that he is dead. It is during this meeting that Tolia inspires Serezha to join the army, and the next day he is recruited. Alexandra Vladimirovna is devastated, as Serezha is only 17 and has lived with her throughout his childhood (his mother lives in another city and dies while Serezha is at the front). The reader finds out more about Serezha in Life and Fate.

Alexandra Vladimirovna and Sofya Osipovna Levinton are old friends. Sofya Osipovna is head of a surgical department and is depicted as a large woman of whom not only her department, but other doctors are scared of. Despite this, she is also sensitive to the horror around her and often bursts out in tears when describing the young soldiers she has to treat. She works all day and night and rarely sleeps. She and Alexandra Vladimirovna are separated during an air raid in a shelter, after which she is caught by Nazi soldiers together with Mostovskoy.

Marusya is Alexandra Vladimirovna’s middle daughter and is married to the StalGRES power plant engineer Spiridonov. They have the daughter Vera, who works for the military hospital in Stalingrad (they all live with Alexandra Vladimirovna). Marusya is supportive of the Communist regime and reprimands Zhenia for making art that doesn’t support the communist cause. However, Marusya is also shown to be trapped between the Party bureaucracy and her own felings and common sense. She is sent to an orphanage to reprimand the manager for not firing a worker, who has stolen shoes for her son. During the visit she sees a traumatised boy who refuses to speak.  Only one of the workers has been able to get the boy to speak and eat, and it turns out this is the same woman whom Marusya wants to see fired. In the end Marusya is highly confused and is pitied by the very person she had to reprimand. When the battlefront moves to Stalingrad Marusya follows the orphanage on its evacuation, and dies when crossing the Volga.

Spiridonov stays in Stalingrad as he has to keep the StalGRES power plant running. His daughter Vera stays with him. She falls in love with one of her patients, Viktorov, who leaves the hospital soon after his recovery. Vera is another hero of the battle. When the hospital catches fire during one of air raids and she finds the strength to go into the burning hospital and save the soldiers. She is severely injured and is in danger of losing her sight. However, she recovers and stays with her father at StalGRES in Stalingrad. In a touching scene she tells her father that she is pregnant, to which he is silent at first, and then puts his arm around the skinny shoulders of his daughter and says: “Don’t worry, we won’t let anything happen to the little one”.

Zhenia is the youngest daughter and has moved back to her mother’s after leaving her husband Krymov. Nobody in her family understands why she left a man of such a good standing and see her as being whimsical and the black sheep of the family. Zhenia is greatly admired by men and is seen as the beauty of the family. She is also engaged in a romantic relationship with Colonel Novikov, whom she met whilst studying at the Arts Academy. Novikov and Zhenia’s romance is very touching. Years pass since their first meeting and Novikov accidentally sees Zhenia on a train and ends up travelling for miles in the wrong direction, only to spend time with her. He also visits the Shaposhnikov flat when the army is moving through Stalingrad, and awakens everyone in the middle of the night. This is the only meeting between the lovers in For a Just Cause, however, it consolidates their relationship for the future. Novikov has always admired and been in love with Zhenia, so his devotion to her is something that sustains him during the war. Zhenia on the other hand has a complex relationship to both Novikov, whom she is undoubtedly in love with, and  also spends a lot of time thinking about Krymov, and pondering their failed marriage.

There are a few parallels between Novikov and Krymov. Although they are very different characters, there is some similarity in their thought processes. Both ponder their personal/romantic life as much as the war or communism. Both have a brother that they look up to as someone who has succeeded with their lives, especially in terms of having a family. And obviously, both are in love with Zhenia. Novikov’s brother is depicted separately from Novikov in the book. He works in a mine in one of those villages that sprung up all around the Soviet Union only to provide a space for the  industry. This village is depicted as being part of the war effort and is something that is reinforced by Novikov’s complete devotion to work. Both brothers sacrifice their lives to the war (as do other characters). Colonel Novikov is sent to Moscow to await further instructions. He is also the one who takes a letter to Shtrum from the Shaposhnikov’s, which turns out to be the letter that his mother wrote to him. This letter is passed from person to person until it reaches Shtrum. In Moscow, Novikov is worried that he is neglected by the army, but is eventually sent to the front, which is one of the happiest moments of his life. The same happiness can be detected in Krymov when he is in battle and when he returns to Stalingrad at the end of the novel.

Liudmila Nikolaevna is the oldest daughter of the Shaposhnikov family, and is depicted as more of a mother to Marusya and Zhenia than a sister. She met Abarchuk at university where he was deeply involved in revolutionary and Party matters and thought that she was too bourgeois. After they married and had a son Tolia, Abarchuk left them as he believed that the Party mattered more than Liudmila and his son. Grossman depicts Abarchuk as the most staunch Communist, and so the Shaposhnikov family is even more surprised when he is arrested as an enemy of the people in 1937. At the same university Liudmila meets Viktor Shtrum, whom Abarchuk attempts to have expelled from the university. Liudmila and Viktor marry and have a daughter Nadia, who is a little bit spoilt but a typical 15 year-old. In For a Just Cause the family has already evacuated to Kazan from Moscow. At the beginning of the novel Tolia is only just travelling to the front, while at the end of the novel we see him dying in a heroic battle just outside Stalingrad. He is depicted as a shy young man, however he leads his troop to the outskirts of Stalingrad where the German Army doesn’t expect to see the Russian troops. It is in this battle that he manages a surprise assault on the German forces and is then fatally injured. Throughout the novel Liudmila ponders the fate of her son and it is only the reader that knows what is happening to him.

Although Shtrum is one of the major characters in Life and Fate, he is less present in For a Just Cause. He is summoned to his academy in Moscow for a meeting to discuss whether it is possible to get the metal that he needs for his experiment. During his time in Moscow Shtrum returns to his flat to see it covered in dust and abandoned. Here he spends a lot of time with his neighbour Nina, towards whom he develops some romantic feelings, however, this doesn’t develop into a relationship. Shtrum then goes to his dacha (summer-house) where he reads the letter from his mother, something that the reader is not privy to until Life and Fate. The story of Shtrum ends with his return to Kazan from Chelyabinsk, where he met Krymov’s brother, an engineer at the steel plant that Shtrum was visiting. In Kazan Liudmila and Shtrum are visited by Alexandra Vladimirovna who has escaped Stalingrad at the start of the battle. It is from here that Life and Fate picks up.

This has been a lengthy but not at all exhaustive summary of the main characters and their fates in Za pravoe delo. I imagine it may make some boring reading, however I shall return to the many aspects of the novel in the future. There are so many reasons that this novel is great (and some that make it hard-going) that I really would like to share all the various facets of it. What I think I like most about the novel is that there is a sense of unease or inconsistency (possibly because I know the history of the novel) but there is something that makes it indefinable that I absolutely love and will return to in later posts.

The advert highlights the arrest of the novel, literally....

Grossman died from stomach cancer not knowing what would happen to his two novels damning the Soviet state. Life and Fate was arrested in 1961 and lying on his deathbed in 1964 Grossman was rewriting his last novel Everything Flows. In a way it may be seen as a last desperate attempt to expose the awful truth of the Stalinist era, however, there is no repetition of the themes in Life and Fate, instead he develops the idea of Russia as a slave soul. I try to imagine what Grossman felt those last days when he was writing, knowing that all his work would be suppressed. He evidently felt the need to write no matter what the outcome would be. However, the fact that there are no parallels between the two novels, and no repetitions,makes it evident that Grossman must have felt that his novel would be published in the end.

The BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Life and Fate brings forth the unbelievable fact that the novel was arrested while the writer remained untouched. This is an incredible story, and the  anger of the authorities about the novel blatantly expose the importance of the novel. A ban of 250 years is perhaps one of the greatest compliments a writer or a novel may get. The brilliant TV advert dy Devilfish for the  BBC  dramatisation concludes: “A novel so dangerous it was arrested”.  It makes the novel’s history sound positively Hollywood-like. Of course, it is very hard  not to focus on this, especially as it highlights to us now how important fiction can be. It is hard to imagine a book being arrested in our time. However, it makes a great marketing tool, as it makes the novel stand out among all the lost masterpieces of the past century. Grossman’s personal tragedy was the arrest of the novel, ironically it also became his greatest selling point.

Many works were banned by Soviet censorship, Grossman’s however is the only known one to be arrested. This fact kept being brought up at the little Grossman festival that the BBC organised in Oxford, and everyone was puzzled by why Grossman submitted the manuscript to the publishers at Znamia. Many suggested that he was naive or that perhaps it was the early days of the Thaw that made him believe it would be published. However, one of the more recent research into the subject by a Russian scholar Yury Bit-Yyunan shows that Grossman was very far from naive. He hid copies of the draft with people who had nothing to do with literature and broke off all ties with them, knowing that he might lead the authorities back to them and the novel would disappear forever. This may explain the profound difference of Everything Flows to Life and Fate, Grossman knew that his novel was alive and did not have to repeat any of the material mentioned in it.

So, it is perhaps Grossman’s cunning way of hiding the novel for posterity that needs to be brought forward… But there is something even more incredible than all of that. It is the courage and the daring of Grossman in submitting the manuscript at all that is significant. Grossman was aware of the bomb that he was giving to Znamia and although he cut pieces of the novel, it was still a damning piece of work and by submitting it to the magazine he managed to get the greatest readership that he could during his lifetime. It is almost as if Grossman lulled the authorities into a sense of security by first producing the relatively “Soviet” For a Just Cause and publishing the safe parts of Life and Fate before submitting the whole manuscript. He put himself in great danger by doing so and perhaps it was a reckless move on his part, but at the same time he must have felt it to be his duty.

His letter to Khrushchev begging for the release of the manuscript shows how strongly Grossman felt about the truth of his novel, and how much it pained him that it was arrested. However, it could not have been a surprise to him that it would at least be banned. Grossman would fight for his novel, but not by keeping it secret – he didn’t write “for the drawer” – he was ready to confront the authorities face on and prepared for the consequences, and for that he should be admired. The fact that BBC are dramatising the novel and that it has been #1 on the Amazon “Movers and Shakers” list and is now #2 on Bestseller list and #3 on the “Most Wished For” list, is a triumph beyond any. I can’t help but feel incredible joy on Grossman’s behalf, finally he gets the recognition he deserves. His daring actions in submitting the manuscript, having it arrested and having saved copies, have all allowed for the novel to become the best seller it is now.