We walk on over the swaying, bottomless earth of Treblinka and suddenly come to a stop. Thick wavy hair, gleaming like burnished copper, the delicate lovely hair of a young woman, trampled into the ground; and beside it, some equally fine blond hair; and then some heavy black plaits on the bright sand; and then more and more...
And the lupine pods keep popping open, and the tiny peas keep pattering down—and this really does all sound like a funeral knell rung by countless little bells from under the earth.
And it feels as if your heart must come to a stop now, gripped by more sorrow, more grief, more anguish than any human being can endure...
What had surfaced in my soul was the memory of Treblinka, though at first I had failed to realize this...
It was she, treading lightly on her little bare feet, who had walked over the swaying earth of Treblinka; it was she who had walked from the “station,” from where the transports were unloaded, to the gas chambers. I knew her by the expression on her face, by the look in her eyes. I saw her son and recognized him by the strange, unchildlike look on his own face. This was how mothers and children looked, this was how they were in their souls when they saw, against the dark green of the pine trees, the white walls of the Treblinka gas chambers.
How many times had I stared through darkness at the people getting out of the freight wagons, but their faces had never been clear to me. Sometimes their faces had seemed distorted by extreme horror, and everything had dissolved in a terrible scream. Sometimes despair and exhaustion, physical and spiritual, had obscured their faces with a look of blank, sullen indifference. Sometimes the carefree smile of insanity had veiled their faces as they left the transport and walked toward the gas chambers.
And now at last I had seen these faces truly and clearly. Raphael had painted them four centuries earlier. This is how someone goes to meet their fate. The Sistine Chapel...The Treblinka gas chambers...In our days a young woman brings a child into the world. It is terrifying to be holding a child against one’s heart and hear the roar of the crowds welcoming Adolf Hitler. The mother gazes into the face of her newborn son and hears the ringing and crunching of breaking glass, and the howling of car horns. On the streets of Berlin a wolfish choir is singing the Horst Wessel song. From the Moabit prison comes the dull thud of an ax.
The mother breast-feeds her baby, and thousands of thousands of men build walls, lay barbed wire, and construct barracks. And in quiet offices men design gas chambers, mobile gassing vans, and cremation ovens.
A wolfish time had come, the time of Fascism. It was a time when people led wolfish lives and wolves lived like people.
During this time the young mother was raising her child. And a painter by the name of Adolf Hitler stood before her in the Dresden Art Gallery; he was deciding her fate. But the ruler of Europe could not look into her eyes, nor could he meet the gaze of her son. Both she and her son, after all, were people.
Their human strength triumphed over his violence. The Madonna walked toward the gas chamber, treading lightly on her small bare feet. She carried her son over the swaying earth of Treblinka.
German Fascism was destroyed. The war carried away tens of millions of people. Huge cities were reduced to ruins.
In the spring of 1945 this Madonna first saw our northern sky. She came to us not as a guest, not as a foreign tourist, but in the company of soldiers and drivers, along the smashed roads of the war. She is a part of our life; she is our contemporary.
She has seen everything before: our snow, the cold autumn mud, soldiers’ dented mess tins with their murky gruel, a limp onion with a crust of black bread.
She has walked alongside us; she has traveled for six weeks in a screeching train, picking lice out of her son’s soft, unwashed hair.
She is a contemporary of the total collectivization of agriculture.
Here she is, barefoot, carrying her little son, boarding a transport train. What a long path lies ahead of her—from Oboyan near Kursk, from the black-earth region of Voronezh, to the taiga, to marshy forests beyond the Urals, to the sands of Kazakhstan.
And where is your father, little one? Where did he perish? In some bomb crater? Felling logs in the taiga? In some dysentery barrack?
Vanya, Vanya, why are you looking so sad? Fate took you away from the hut where you were born, nailing a wooden cross over its windows. What long journey lies ahead of you? Will you reach its end? Or will you come to the end of your strength and die somewhere along the way, in a station on a narrow-gauge railway, on the swampy bank of some little river beyond the Urals?
Yes, it was she. I saw her in 1930, in Konotop, at the station. Swarthy from hunger and illness, she walked toward the express train, looked up at me with her wonderful eyes, and said with her lips, without any voice, “Bread...”
I saw her son, already thirty years old. He was wearing worn-out soldiers’ boots—so completely worn out that no one would even take the trouble to remove them from the feet of a corpse—and a padded jacket with a large hole exposing his milk-white shoulder. He was walking along a path through a bog. A huge cloud of midges was hanging above him, but he was unable to drive them away; he was unable to remove this living, flickering halo because he needed both of his hands to steady the damp heavy log on his shoulder. At one moment he raised his bowed head. I saw his fair curly beard, covering the whole of his face. I saw his half-open lips. I saw his eyes—and I knew them at once. They were the eyes that look out from Raphael’s painting.
We met his mother more than once in 1937. There she was—holding her son in her arms for the last time, saying goodbye to him, gazing into his face and then going down the deserted staircase of a mute, many-storied building. A black car was waiting for her below; a wax seal had already been affixed to the door of her room. How mute the tall buildings, how strange and watchful the silence of the ash-gray dawn...
And out of the half-light before dawn emerges her new life: a transport train, a transit prison, sentries looking down from wooden watchtowers, barbed wire, night shifts in the workshops, boiled water in place of tea, and bed boards, bed boards, bed boards...
With his slow soft stride, wearing his low-heeled kid-leather boots, Stalin went up to the painting and, stroking his gray mustache, gazed for a long, long time at the faces of mother and son.
Did he recognize her? He had met her during his own years of exile in eastern Siberia, in Novaya Uda, in Turukhansk and Kureisk. He had met her in transit prisons. He had met her when prisoners were being transferred from one place of exile to another. Did he think of her later, during the days of his grandeur?
But we, we people, we recognized her, and we recognized her son too. She is us; their fate is our own fate; mother and son are what is human in man. And if some future time takes the Madonna to China, or to the Sudan, people will recognize her everywhere just as we have recognized her today.
The painting speaks of the joy of being alive on this earth; this too is a source of its calm, miraculous power.
The whole world, the whole vast universe, is the submissive slavery of inanimate matter. Life alone is the miracle of freedom.
And the painting also tells us how precious, how splendid life has to be, and that no force in the world can compel life to change into some other thing that, however it may resemble life, is no longer life.
The power of life, the power of what is human in man, is very great, and even the mightiest and most perfect violence cannot enslave this power; it can only kill it. This is why the faces of the mother and child are so calm: they are invincible. Life’s destruction, even in our iron age, is not its defeat.
Young or gray-haired, we who live in Russia stand before Raphael’s Madonna. We live in a troubled time. Wounds have not yet healed, burned-out buildings still stand black. The mounds have not yet settled over the shared graves of millions of soldiers, our sons and brothers. Dead, blackened poplars and cherry trees still stand guard over partisan villages that were burned to the ground. Tall dreary grasses and we
eds grow over the bodies of people who were burned alive: grandfathers, mothers, young lads and lasses. Over the ditches that contain the bodies of murdered Jewish children and mothers the earth is still shifting, still settling into place. In countless Russian, Belorussian, and Ukrainian huts widows are still weeping at night. The Madonna has suffered all this together with us—for she is us, and her son is us.
And all this is frightening, and shaming, and painful. Why has life been so terrible? Are you and I not to blame? Why are we alive? A difficult and terrible question—only the dead can ask it. Yet the dead are silent; they ask nothing.
Every now and again the postwar silence is disrupted by the thunder of explosions, and a radioactive cloud spreads across the sky.
And then the earth on which we live shudders; the atom bomb has been replaced by the hydrogen bomb. Soon we must see The Sistine Madonna on her way. She has lived with us; she has lived our life. Judge us then, judge us all—along with the Madonna and her son. Soon we will leave life; our hair is already white. But she, a young mother carrying her son in her arms, will go forward to meet her fate. Along with a new generation of people, she will see in the sky a blinding, powerful light: the first explosion of a thermonuclear bomb, a superpowerful bomb heralding the start of a new, global war.
What can we, people of the epoch of Fascism, say before the court of the past and the future? Nothing can vindicate us.
We will say, “There has been no time crueler than ours, yet we did not allow what is human in man to perish.”
Seeing The Sistine Madonna go on her way, we preserve our faith that life and freedom are one, that there is nothing higher than what is human in man.
This will live forever and triumph.
Part Three *
Late Stories
Grosssman in Armenia, late 1961
During the second half of the 1950s Grossman enjoyed public success. Three separate editions of For a Just Cause were published— in 1954, 1955, and 1959—and he was awarded a prestigious decoration, the Red Banner of Labor. Meanwhile he was writing Life and Fate—the sequel to For a Just Cause and the work usually considered his masterpiece.
Grossman’s personal life, however, was troubled. He was growing estranged from his wife, Olga Mikhailovna, and he was deeply in love with Yekaterina Vasilievna Zabolotskaya, the wife of the poet Nikolay Zabolotsky. The Grossmans and the Zabolotksys were neighbors, and the two families—parents and children alike—saw a great deal of each other. The first stages of the relationship between Zabolotskaya and Grossman have been convincingly described by Nikita Zabolotsky, the Zabolotskys’ only son. After saying that Grossman’s political outspokenness often led him into awkward situations, Nikita Zabolotsky continues: “At such moments [Grossman] was particularly touched by Yekaterina’s innate sensitivity and sympathy, her readiness to come to his help every time he needed moral support. Their relations were for a long time limited to family gatherings, but then they sometimes started to take walks together in the Neskuchny Park or on the city streets. Zabolotsky saw that Grossman’s friendship with his wife was growing into a deeper feeling.”
The story of this relationship is complex. In late 1956 Grossman left Olga Mikhailovna and moved, with Zabolotskaya, first to a room he rented privately and then to a small room—officially “a study”—that he had obtained from the Literary Fund. For around two years Grossman and Zabolotskaya lived together most of the time in this small room in an apartment on Lomonosovsky Prospekt. In early September 1958, they both went back to their partners, probably intending this return to be permanent. On October 14, however, Nikolay Zabolotsky unexpectedly died, of a heart attack, and within a year Grossman and Zabolotskaya were once more living together; Yekaterina Korotkova remembers introducing her future husband to them in 1959, in the room on Lomonosovsky Prospekt. And in 1961 Grossman obtained a small apartment in a new Writers Union block near the Airport Metro Station; Zabolotskaya was a close neighbor, living in the same section of the building, and they saw each other every day for nearly all that remained of Grossman’s life.
***
The other sorrow that hung over Grossman’s last years was the “arrest”—as Russians still refer to it—of Life and Fate. In October 1960, against the advice of both Semyon Lipkin and Zabolotskaya, Grossman delivered the manuscript to the editors of Znamya. It was the height of Khrushchev’s “thaw” and Grossman seems to have believed that Life and Fate could be published, even though one of its central themes is the identity of Nazism and Stalinism. Grossman is generally thought to have behaved naively, but he was evidently clearheaded enough to take precautions. He himself censored about fifteen percent of the text he submitted. He left a copy of the complete typescript with Lipkin, and he entrusted his original manuscript to Lyolya Klestova, a friend from his student days who had no connection with the literary world.
In February 1961, three KGB officers came to Grossman’s apartment. They confiscated the typescript and everything bearing any relation to it, even carbon paper and typing ribbons. This is one of only two occasions when the Soviet authorities “arrested” a book while leaving the writer at liberty; no other book, apart from The Gulag Archipelago, was ever considered so dangerous. Grossman refused to sign an undertaking not to speak of this visit. He agreed to take the KGB officers to his two typists and to his cousin Viktor Sherentsis in order for them to confiscate other copies of the typescript, but he may well have done this in the hope of deflecting attention from the copies he had left with Lipkin and Klestova. The KGB, in any case, did not find the remaining copies, even though they evidently made considerable efforts. According to Tatiana Menaker, a distant younger relative of Grossman’s, they went to Viktor Sherentsis’s dacha and dug up the whole of his vegetable garden.
In 1975, more than ten years after Grossman’s death, Lipkin asked the writer Vladimir Voinovich to help get Life and Fate published in the West. After making what turned out to be an inadequate microfilm, Voinovich asked Andrey Sakharov to make a second microfilm; Voinovich then sent this abroad. The microfilm reached Vladimir Maksimov, the chief editor of the émigré journal Kontinent, but Maksimov published only a few somewhat randomly chosen chapters; his lack of interest probably stemmed from his anti-Semitism. In 1977 Voinovich made a third microfilm, which he entrusted—along with his first, poor-quality microfilm—to an Austrian professor, Rosemarie Ziegler. These two microfilms reached Yefim Etkind, a writer and scholar then living in Paris. With the help of a colleague, Shimon Markish, Etkind established an almost complete text; this was not easy, since both microfilms were flawed. Several émigré publishing houses then turned the novel down. Vladimir Dimitrijevic—a Serb working for the publishers Éditions L’ge d’Homme in Lausanne—eventually accepted the novel and in 1980 published an almost-complete Russian text. At a conference about Vasily Grossman in 2003 in Turin, Dimitrijevic said how he had sensed at once that Grossman was portraying “a world in three dimensions” and that he was one of those rare writers whose aim was “not to prove something but to make people live something.”
Grossman, however, did not live to see any of this; he did not know that his manuscripts would be preserved, let alone published. According to Lipkin: “Grossman aged before our eyes. His curly hair turned grayer and a bald patch appeared. His asthma [...] returned. His walk became a shuffle.” Grossman himself said, “They strangled me in a dark corner.”
Menaker has provided us with another glimpse of Grossman during these years—although the first of her memories, in fact, dates back to 1959, two years before the “arrest” of Life and Fate:
A mysterious stone wall of unsaid things and secrecy always surrounded him. My first memory of this sadness and secrecy belongs to the year 1959, when I spent a winter vacation in Viktor Sherentsis’s house in Moscow. Grossman came to visit every day and I was constantly being kicked out into the corridor stuffed with books. No wonder: as my grandma was always repeating, “Even the cat reports to the OGPU.” I knew that Grossman was a
famous writer. We had his huge novels, which were published in millions of copies, but the aura of sadness and tragedy was never explained to me in his lifetime. Later I realized that the people who came to our apartment had been sharing with Grossman their prison camp memories. I vividly recall that I felt in their presence the truth of Grossman’s observation that these people are “frozen in time.”
From late 1961 Grossman was often seriously ill. He did not realize this, but he was suffering from the first stages of cancer. A doctor ascribed his symptoms to eating too much spicy food during his journey to Armenia in November and December 1961. Lipkin also remembers Grossman telling him in late 1962 that there was blood in his urine; he seems to have failed to act on a doctor’s advice to visit a urologist. In May 1963 Grossman underwent an operation to remove one of his kidneys—the initial site of his cancer.
Late on September 14, 1964, after a period of several months in the hospital, Grossman died of lung cancer.
***
For all Grossman’s trials, the three and a half years from the “arrest” of Life and Fate to his death constitute a remarkably creative period. As well as Good Wishes—a vivid account of his two months in Armenia—he wrote the finest of his short stories and around half of Everything Flows, including the trial of the four Judases, the account of the Terror Famine, and the chapters about Lenin, Russian history, and the Russian soul that arguably constitute the greatest passage of historico-political writing in the Russian language. This degree of creativity casts doubt on the widely held view that Grossman was severely depressed throughout his last years. Grossman himself wrote to his wife in October 1963, “I’m in good spirits, and I’m working eagerly. This greatly surprises me—where do these good spirits come from? I feel I should have thrown up my hands in despair long ago, but they keep stupidly reaching out for more work.”