Bookplanet: the writer of Life and Fate

Westward Into War With the Soviet Novelist and Reporter Vasily Grossman – by VERLYN KLINKENBORG

It is easier to picture the Soviet writer Vasily Grossman in May 1945, at the end of World War II, than it is at the war's outset. The flesh has dropped away. His eyes have grown larger, his face sharper. He is 39. The photographs show him always in his owlish glasses, and there is sometimes more to be read in his posture or the way he holds a cigarette than there is in his eyes, which have none of the grimness but all of the experience of the generals he interviewed.

Grossman spent four years in and around the front lines as a war correspondent for Red Star, the Soviet Army newspaper, and the job — which became a passion — altered him almost beyond recognition. Gone was the plump, urbane and relatively conventional writer of fiction. What the war gave Grossman were the materials and the mind to write "Life and Fate," arguably the greatest Russian novel of the 20th century.

What is striking about Grossman's war reporting, as gathered in a new book called "A Writer at War" (Pantheon Books), is the tension between the moral arc of his storytelling and the poetic isolation of the details contained in his notebooks. On any day, he might experience a massive and impelling movement of humans — civilians fleeing a city about to be overrun by Germans, for instance — only to find himself caught up in the chaos of the front itself, where even the instinct of self-preservation seemed to break down.

There is really no guessing what numbing went on inside him, but he never seems to have numbed to the particularity of what lay around him. To notice any detail — "a stove made from a helmet," the sickles of women shining "dully in the grey autumn light" — is to risk both poignancy and triviality, to give it either too much meaning or too little. But what Grossman notices never vanishes under the burden of typicality. It has no allegory to serve — not even the allegory of the Soviet state.

Grossman is a juggler that way. He is caught somewhere between the killing clichés of Soviet propaganda and the rhetoric of open weeping, both antithetical to the writer's purpose. He gives due weight to what he notices around him, especially death, which is ubiquitous. He carries a sense of his own predicament, but it surfaces only in private letters. He is a Jew and an intellectual, yet fiercely proud of the soldiers of the Red Army, at least until they cross into Poland and Germany.

As a journalist, he is not embedded — to use the contemporary phrase — among soldiers as a representative of a free press in a civilian society. There is no free press. Civilians are only those who will be killed without weapons in their hands, and who have already been brutalized by Stalin before the war. Grossman is not free himself. He is all but a soldier under orders. Yet he is forced to sustain the consciousness needed to record everything he sees around him. His survival, after four years of war, is as miraculous as the survival of Kuznechik, the Bactrian camel that accompanied the 308th Rifle Division from Stalingrad to Berlin, where it spat on the Reichstag.

Particularity is the soul of the writer's work, but it creates an inherently political problem. You can hear an unaccustomed freedom in the voices of some of the soldiers Grossman interviews, if only because they believe their death is certain and all too imaginable. Grossman's own instincts — and, as the editors of this book argue, his political naïveté — incline him to honor the candor he hears at the front, even if it is politically dangerous. He is protected, essentially, by his willingness to listen and to witness and by the fact that his readers are the very soldiers he is talking to. He writes within a surpassingly strange moment — surrounded by the pure, apolitical violence of war, temporarily sheltered from the brutality of Stalinist politics by his understanding of the Red Army soldier.

Grossman is among the first to come to the concentration camps, Treblinka especially, in the Soviet push westward. He is not prevented as a Jew from writing about Treblinka, but he is prevented from writing for Red Star — an arm of state propaganda, after all — about the humans who died there because they were Jews. Official policy was to deny the particularity of every victim of the Germans, to submerge identity in the mass of the dead, which is the way of nature, the minuteness of life vanishing in death, and yet another kind of holocaust.

To read, now, Grossman's "The Hell of Treblinka" — knowing how far he had come to be there, across how many front lines, and how fresh in his imagination the shock of the camp must have been — is to be stunned by the care with which he tells the story, holding it apart from himself, submerging everything of himself except his ability to gather information, organize it and elicit suffering from it.

Near the end, he allows himself a "lunatic hope" that this might merely be a dream. It is a rhetorical gesture, whose only purpose is to be denied. Four years at war, surely an eternity in Grossman's mind, have persuaded him that feeling and even morality arise from the particulars in the case.