My Stalingrad, My Reckoning

In 2018, gripped by a restless literary hunger for something that could match the philosophical depth and vast human canvas of Leo Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace,’ I reached for Vasily Grossman’s monumental ‘Life and Fate.’

What I found was something bleaker, more shattering and more honest. Grossman’s magnum opus is not just the greatest novel of the Second World War but mirror held up to the soul, mine included.

That year, I had been struggling quietly with a myriad of personal and emotional crises. My body was failing in small ways. So was love. I turned to literature in search of something deep in its moral and emotional reach. Grossman gave me that and more. He offered no comfort, but he taught me acceptance.

Finished in 1960, ‘Life and Fate’ was (unsurprisingly) banned by Soviet censors. Mikhail Suslov, the Kremlin’s high priest of ideology, had the KGB raid Grossman’s apartment and seize everything pertaining to the book - carbon copies, draft manuscripts, typewriter ribbons. Suslov is reported to have told Grossman that his book could not be published for the next two hundred years! That a novel could so terrify the oppressive Soviet state reveals just how clearly Grossman’s truths cut through the fog of toxic ideological propaganda.

Historian Antony Beevor put it succinctly when he observed that Grossman was the first to draw an explicit moral equivalence between Nazism and Stalinism, the similarities between the gas chambers of Auschwitz and the interrogations of the Lubyanka. In both systems, the individual is ground down under the heel of totalitarianism.

Grossman also had that rarest of combinations: physical and moral courage. A nearsighted, middle-aged Ukrainian Jewish intellectual, Grossman embedded himself with Red Army troops at the front lines, from Stalingrad to Berlin. He never took notes during conversations with soldiers, fearing it would alienate them. Instead, he would sit quietly, listen deeply and write everything down by night. His work for Red Star, the Soviet army newspaper, stood out for its honesty. Soldiers trusted him. He was, they said, the only one telling the truth.

That truth is what pulses through ‘Life and Fate.’ Its sprawling canvas is set amid the backdrop of the brutal Nazi invasion of Soviet Russia. Around it unfurls a panorama of Soviet life under siege: from the Shaposhnikov family scattered across frontlines and rear to physicists in state laboratories walking a tightrope of ideology and survival to soldiers on the steppe and prisoners in gulags and Nazi death camps alike. The novel’s moral centre is Viktor Shtrum, a physicist and surrogate for Grossman himself, who bears witness to the suffocating compromises required to survive under Stalin. In an unbelievably grim moment of history, Grossman finds redemption in the smallest acts of decency - a woman sharing her bread in a death camp, a soldier refusing to denounce a comrade.

The book does not preach. It observes. And it does so with a Tolstoyan eye for the tragic contradictions of history. The title is no accident as ‘Life and Fate’ was intended as a 20th-century homage to ‘War and Peace.’ But where Tolstoy saw providence, Grossman saw absurdity and the deep loneliness of freedom.

For me, that was the revelation. The only victory Grossman offers is the capacity to endure. That acceptance, oddly, helped me come to terms with my own condition, to deal with the uncertainty of tomorrow and the fragility of relationships. As Grossman 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.”

That kernel, somehow, survives. So do we.

(The writer is a Technology VP in an investment bank.)