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Vasily Grossman: The Human Scale in Totalitarian Infinity
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10976 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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6 / 1986 |
4,448 Words |
| Author
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Lev Navrozov
In 1972 Lev Navrozov emigrated from Russia, where he was an
underground writer and scholar who made a living as a
translator of classical Russian literature. His Education of
Lev Narozov was published by Harper & Row in 1975. He
contributes to several magazines and writes a column for the
New York City Tribune. |
LIFE AND FATE
Vasily Grossman
New York: Harper & Row, 1986
$22.50
Why did Khrushchev have Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich sent to all Soviet embassies abroad for immediate publications, while Grossman's novel was confiscated down to used typewriter ribbons? Stalin's persecution of Grossman as a Jew made the victim see the light of "kindness, morality, and mercy," even during the Soviet-Nazi war to the death.
When I am asked whether I knew Vasily (Vaseely) Grossman, I answer: "Why should I have?" Everything he published in Russia was pulp. The question as to which pulp is worse from the literary point of view, Soviet pulp or American pulp (as produced by John Updike, William Styron, the late Irwin Shaw, and hordes of lesser-known names), is beyond the scope of this essay. But in any case, from the sociopolitical and ethical point of view, Soviet pulp is usually part of totalitarian propaganda, which made it unbearable to me.
Now, here is Grossman's novel Life and Fate, which he finished in 1960. It was published posthumously in the West first in excerpts in our Russian-language émigré magazines in 1975, then in full in 1980 in Russian, and now in English. The novel has never been published inside Russia, since sociopolitically and ethically it is the opposite of totalitarian propaganda.
The Realistic Novel in Russia and in the West
Many Western-born reviewers drop the names of Tolstoy, Dostoyevski, or Chekhov, generally known in the West, whenever they review a "Russian book." It is the same as to believe that every portrait painted in Europe from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century is a Rembrandt, a Raphael, or a Titan. Actually, the realistic, and in particular historical, novel flourished prior to the twentieth century in all European or Europe-influence countries, just as portrait painting did. But Rembrandt's Lady with a Pink is not valued today because it "Caught a likeness" as well as Kodak photography. Similarly, Tolstoy's War and Peace is not valued today because it is as good as any university-level historical study. Indeed, War and Peace is not historical scholarship in the sense of the word is understood today, for the first requirement of such scholarship is a hierarchy of sources analyzed for reliability, while Tolstoy's piece does not contain
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