In the Soviet Union, every literary work was a political statement, whether the writer liked it or not. Soviet censorship allowed some room for negotiation, but outside the USSR, official and dissident literature were perceived as polar opposites. This stark distinction imbued Soviet-era literature with a gratifyingly Manichaean quality, and Western readers became enamored of the stories of books that had escaped to liberty while their authors remained at the mercy of the Soviet authorities. The more strenuous the Soviet efforts to suppress a work, the greater its frisson of the forbidden. Meanwhile, literature that had been published in the Soviet Union was most often ignored. This left Western readers with an imperfect understanding of the many authors who resorted to illicit publication only at desperate moments.



STALINGRAD by Vasily Grossman, translated by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler NYRB Classics, 1,088 pp., $27.95

Vasily Grossman is best known in the West for his World War II novel Life and Fate, which he wrote in the 1950s. Grossman’s attempts to publish his novel in the Soviet Union ended with the manuscript’s famous “arrest” in 1961, one of the only cases when the KGB seized a manuscript but not its author. Fortunately, two of Grossman’s friends had hidden copies. Grossman died of cancer in 1964, in despair over the suppression of his masterpiece. The dissident satirist Vladimir Voinovich arranged to have microfilm of Life and Fate smuggled abroad in 1975, but it took years to find a publisher. By then, the Orthodox Russian nationalist Solzhenitsyn was the new big thing in Soviet dissidence; Grossman’s Jewish themes had a narrower appeal. The novel was published at last in 1980, in Switzerland, due to the tireless efforts of a handful of mostly Jewish Russophone writers and intellectuals, and it eventually became a classic.

Running to nearly 900 pages, this monumental work traces the wartime experiences of an extended family, the Shaposhnikovs, their spouses, lovers, friends, and colleagues, and figures from various spheres of Soviet life. Several key characters end up in Nazi concentration camps or in the Gulag; the novel’s juxtaposition of the German and Soviet systems brought Grossman admiration in the West, where he was cast as a visionary anti-totalitarian. This is a reductive understanding of an author who not only cherished individual subjectivity, but also valorized the transcendent power of collective action. Grossman’s anger at Soviet abuses was motivated in part by grief over the betrayal of revolutionary ideals. Nevertheless, his work has been touted as a warning against radical visions of all kinds, used to support the argument that communism and fascism are merely two sides of the same coin.

Yet Life and Fate was only the second half of an epic work that started with Stalingrad, written in the 1940s and all but forgotten until recently. Only now is the novel available in English for the first time, in a version edited by Robert Chandler and Yury Bit-Yunan and beautifully translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler. Its misfortunes are not difficult to explain: Unlike Life and Fate, Stalingrad was published in the Soviet Union under Stalin and gained a reputation as Stalinist hackwork. Even Grossman’s primary English-language translator, Robert Chandler, confesses that he resisted reading Stalingrad for many years, only taking the plunge at the urging of historian Jochen Hellbeck.

There is also the problem of subject matter. Life and Fate’s success reflects the insatiable Western appetite for literature about Soviet crimes; there is far less enthusiasm for stories of Soviet victory. The terrifying, astonishing source material for Stalingrad is the Battle of Stalingrad, in which between 1.25 million and 1.8 million people were killed. This sacrifice is still a point of pride in Russia today, where it is commemorated, rightly, as a turning point in World War II. Stalingrad documents horrors, but it also celebrates the choice to give up one’s life for Communist ideals and freedom from fascism, to consciously reject the natural impulse for self-preservation.