Life and Fate

Length is not a cost: the scale is compelled by the argument, that one law runs through every place the century put people, and that can be shown only by going to each place. Remove the German camp and Mostovskoy’s night with Liss, and the Soviet prison chapters lose their mirror; remove the gas chamber, and the Shtrum plot has no ground beneath the mother’s letter; remove Kazan, and the book loses the one man who capitulates without a gun to his head. The spine passes. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is a real margin of the assembled: figures carried from the first book for continuity, Vera and the pilot Viktorov and Spiridonov at the power station, given chapters the design does not need; essay chapters that say directly what the scenes have shown; and Darensky’s Kalmyk interlude, beautiful and loose. A tenth or so of the book could go without loss of anything it needs.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. The two states at war are one kind of state: each kills in the name of a future, and each needs the guilty in advance, Jew or kulak or enemy of the people. What survives them is not an idea of the good, which both possess, but “бессмысленная доброта”
(senseless kindness), one person’s to another, and the plain wish to be free. It is shown in action, not only argued: Liss tells Mostovskoy that they look into each other as into a mirror, and the book turns to Krymov, a believer, broken in the Lubyanka by men using the camp’s logic. Shtrum signs the letter. Grekov, asked what he wants, answers that he wants freedom. It was written inside the system, by a Soviet war correspondent, in 1960. Held off the top because the essay chapters assert part of what the scenes disclose.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Height is reached often, and in a plain register. The ceiling is two chapters. Anna Semyonovna’s letter from the ghetto, written to a son who will read it after her death, ends: “Живи, живи, живи вечно... Мама”
(Live, live, live forever... Mama). And Sofya Levinton, a childless woman, takes the boy David in her arms in the gas chamber and in the last moment becomes a mother. The dreadful: Krymov under interrogation; Lyudmila at her son Tolya’s grave in Saratov, speaking to him through the night. The heroic and the human at once: Novikov delaying the tank attack by eight minutes against orders so that fewer men die, and the book holding that delay as one of the great acts of the war; Zhenya at the Lubyanka window with her parcel, and Krymov in his cell knowing it came from her. Held below the top because the height thins in the institute chapters and the essays.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Built in part, evoked in part. The built structure is the title’s pairing: life, the particular and unrepeatable person, set against fate, the state and the history that would make the person a function; every plot in the book is that contest. Stalingrad is made a crossroads of the world, and the Volga a line on which the century turns. House 6/1, Grekov’s band of free men in the ruins, cut off and irregular, is a small republic of the kind myth makes, and the state that the battle saves destroys it afterwards. Sofya and David are a pietà made in the gas chamber. Shtrum is a Faust without a devil, whose discovery comes as a gift and whose soul is bargained for by telephone. Held a step down because the book’s realism keeps most of this implicit, spread across hundreds of figures: the archetype bears load in the great chapters and not through the whole.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The inheritance is plain and chosen: War and Peace, with its families, its battle and its essays on history, and behind it the Soviet war novel, which Grossman had himself written in For a Just Cause. The formal turn is modest: the rotation between front, camp and prison is Tolstoy’s rotation between drawing room and field. The turn in what the form is made to say is very great. Inside a Stalingrad epic the Soviet and Nazi states are set side by side; the Holocaust is given its own chapters at a time when Soviet writing folded the Jewish dead into “peaceful Soviet citizens”; the Ukrainian famine is named. The stake was total: the manuscript was seized, the author went unpublished until his death, and the novel could reach readers only through microfilm abroad. The stake is as high as any in its century; the modest formal turn holds the figure below the top.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Change the form and the knowledge goes. The book’s argument is the likeness of the two states, and the form makes it by juxtaposition rather than statement: a chapter in the German camp, then one in the Soviet prison; Eichmann and Liss inspecting the new gas chamber, then Soviet officers drinking after the encirclement; the heroism of House 6/1, then the commissar writing his denunciation of Grekov. Told as one life, it would be a dissident’s novel; told as a war chronicle, a patriotic one. Only the panorama, with its cuts, knows that the same law runs through the camp, the front and the institute. The plain free indirect voice that passes from a German officer to a Soviet one without changing tone is the instrument of the book’s justice. Held off the top because, where the essay chapters stand, the form becomes a container for what it elsewhere enacts.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Evidence over a short span, and growing. In forty-six years since its first publication the book has drawn sustained reading, critical and biographical. Its questions stay open. Is senseless kindness a politics, or the refusal of one? Are Shtrum’s capitulation and his recovered shame the book’s answer or its wound? How far does the likeness of the two states hold, and in what respects does the book itself limit it? The reading has been large but recent, and the book’s meanings lie nearer its surface than those of the Tolstoy it follows. The axis is held where its evidence is.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The field is the Russian novel of the twentieth century and, as the book reached readers, the European novel of the war and the camps. The intrinsic force is high: the book reopened the Tolstoyan epic to the truth the Soviet novel had closed, and made the Holocaust and the Soviet camps one subject, which no novel had done at that scale. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is delayed and discounted. Written by 1960, the book reached no reader until 1980 and Soviet readers until 1988, when it arrived in the glasnost years as one revelation among many, beside Solzhenitsyn, who had already moved the field. Its reach since has been real, in France from the 1980s and in English from the 2000s, but it did not redirect the novel of its own time, because its time never read it. That delay holds the axis a tenth below the bar.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Survival over forty-six years from first publication, weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is charged: the text survived its seizure only because copies escaped, it was first published from microfilm with gaps, and it has been made good since rather than read whole from the start. Presence is charged too: for most of its life the book was read by émigrés and specialists, and its wide presence is recent, in France, then in Britain after the BBC radio adaptation of 2011, and in Russia after Sergei Ursulyak’s television serial of 2012. The fabric is not fixed to its moment: its subject is the century’s two states, and it has outlived both. The present strength of its presence is real but young, and the figure stands at the foot of the band for its age, where text and presence are both charged.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Judged on the Russian as far as a close translation carries it; the music of the Russian sentence is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged. The construction is sure: dozens of strands kept in rotation across three parts and timed so that the encirclement, Shtrum’s discovery and his fall, and Krymov’s arrest answer one another, the whole held in a plain voice earned at Stalingrad itself. The scene is Grossman’s strength: the interrogation, the gas chamber, the telephone call from Stalin that changes the institute in an hour, the German dugouts. Characters are made by a habit or a phrase and then deepened. Charged: a prose that by the report of Russian readers is clear more than distinguished; many secondary figures drawn thin; and the essays, which break the made surface. The making bears the load in the great chapters and serves elsewhere.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: Shtrum at his blackboard, finding the equation that will make his name, and Sofya in the gas chamber; or Hitler at his headquarters and an old Kalmyk on the steppe. One law governs them: the state’s claim to own the person, against the person’s freedom, and the kindness that slips between. Shtrum’s discovery comes in the freedom of his own mind, and his fall is the state’s claim on it; Sofya’s last act is the one freedom the chamber leaves. The range is as wide as any novel’s, and the law holds across it, German and Soviet alike, without a change of tone. Charged: the book is the second of two, and some figures and threads carried from For a Just Cause, Vera, Spiridonov, Tolya’s death, are left hanging; and the chapter on Stalin is thinner than those on Hitler.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Held, not listed, and joined by the title’s question. Consciousness: Shtrum’s fear and shame, Krymov’s faith breaking, Lyudmila’s grief. The family: the Shaposhnikovs over three generations, a mother dead in a ghetto, a son dead in a hospital. Labour: the front as work, the laboratory, the power station, the labour of the camp. The state, twice: the Soviet apparatus from the commissar to Stalin, the German from the camp guard to Hitler. History: Stalingrad, the famine, the purges, the Holocaust. Science: a theory of matter, and what the state asks of it. The sacred: Ikonnikov, the Tolstoyan holy fool, refusing to dig the gas chamber; the old Bolshevik’s faith. The natural order: the steppe, the winter, the Volga. All pass through one family and its neighbours. Held a step below the top only because the hold loosens where the essays stand.

Score: 9.3 / 10