If Life and Fate has something in common with a Shostakovich symphony, Everything Flows, Good Wishes, and the stories he wrote during his last three years are more like Shostakovich’s quartets. Stylistically, structurally, and even philosophically, these works are more daring than Life and Fate. Their qualities show up especially clearly if we compare them with two stories from the mid-1950s. “Abel” (1953) is about the crew of the plane that dropped the first atom bomb on Hiroshima; “Tiergarten” (1955) is about a misanthropic Berlin zookeeper during the last days of the war. Important as these stories are in the development of Grossman’s political and philosophical thought, both are somewhat labored. A little like the caged animals he describes in “Tiergarten,” Grossman repeatedly goes over the same ground, asserting the value of freedom but failing to attain it himself. In his last works, however, Grossman succeeds—as in the second part of “The Sistine Madonna”—in reconciling moral, artistic, and even factual truth. These last works not only extol freedom; they also embody freedom. The subject matter is mostly dark, but the liveliness of Grossman’s intelligence makes these works surprisingly heartening.
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The first story in this section is “The Elk,” which was probably written in 1954 or 1955. In February 1958 Grossman wrote in a letter, “I visited the Petropavlovsk Fortress, I went into the room where Andrey Zhelyabov was confined before his execution. I want to write about him.” Zhelyabov was an important figure in the terrorist organization known as The People’s Will, and he was executed, in 1881, for his role in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. Grossman never, in fact, wrote a story in which Zhelyabov plays a central role, but he is an important background presence in “The Elk.” Aleksandra Andreyevna, the story’s heroine, is obsessed with The People’s Will. As an archivist, she studies the various revolutionary organizations of the period, and a picture of Zhelyabov hangs on the wall of the room she shares with her husband. Grossman has even given her a name that brings together the first names of the assassinated tsar and the executed terrorist.
“The Elk” can be read in many ways. It is a truthful evocation of the misery of a terminal illness. It contains an implicit criticism of man’s violence against animals—a repeated theme in Grossman’s work. And it hints at ways in which violence repeats itself in complex cycles. Just as Zhelyabov helps to assassinate the tsar and is then executed himself, so Dmitry Petrovich watches the cow elk through his rifle sights only to be watched over by the cow elk’s glass eyes, many years later, as he himself lies dying. It is also possible that Aleksandra Andreyevna’s obsession with The People’s Will is about to lead to her own execution; the early Bolsheviks venerated the terrorist revolutionaries of the 1870s, but by the mid-1930s these terrorists had again become suspect figures. Afraid that The People’s Will might inspire a new generation of terrorists, and perhaps even alarmed by its mere name, Stalin gradually closed down the journals and museums associated with it and removed all mention of the organization and its members from public places. The renaming of a Volga steamboat—previously the Sofya Perovskaya (after a famous revolutionary), the boat is renamed the Valeriya Barsova (after a famous singer)—is just one instance of this second silencing of The People’s Will. It is characteristic of Aleksandra Andreyevna to complain about the steamboat’s new name—and it is significant that a younger colleague, who may well be working for the NKVD, publicly criticizes Aleksandra Andreyevna for her excessive interest in the 1870s. At the end of the story Aleksandra Andreyevna fails to return home when expected. Neither her husband nor the reader ever learn what has happened to her.
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“Mama”—the next story in this section—is also set in the 1930s. It is based on the true story of an orphaned girl who was adopted by Nikolay Yezhov and his wife, Yevgenia; Yezhov was the head of the NKVD between 1936 and 1938, at the height of the Great Terror. The orphaned girl, Natalya Khayutina, is still alive as we complete this introduction, and during the last twenty years she has given a number of interviews to journalists. Her story is of interest in its own right, independently of Grossman’s treatment of it, and is discussed in an appendix. Her own account of her first twenty years, however, diverges little from Grossman’s. As with his articles and stories about the war and the Shoah, Grossman seems to have done all he could to ascertain the historical truth, employing his imaginative powers not to create an alternative reality but to enter more deeply into the historical reality.
All the most prominent Soviet politicians of the time, including Stalin, used to visit the Yezhov household—as did many important artists, musicians, filmmakers, and writers, including Isaak Babel. We see these figures, however, only through the eyes of Nadya, as Grossman calls the orphaned girl, or of her good-natured peasant nanny. Grossman leads us into the darkest of worlds, but with compassion and from a perspective of peculiar innocence—the nanny is described as the only person in the apartment “with calm eyes.” Grossman’s evocation of Babel’s ambivalence, his uncertainty as to what world he belongs to, is especially moving. For the main part, Nadya has no difficulty in distinguishing between the politicians who visit her father and the artists who visit her mother. Babel, however, confuses her; on the face of it, he has come to see her mother, but he looks more like her father’s guests and Nadya perhaps senses that it is indeed her father who interests Babel more deeply.
Grossman wrote this story nearly twenty-five years after Babel had been shot. Grossman admired Babel, and he would probably have considered it wrong to make any public criticism of such a tragic figure. In conversation, however, Grossman was more forthright. Lipkin remembers telling Grossman how, in 1930, he had heard Babel say, “Believe me [...] I’ve now learned to watch calmly as people are shot.” Lipkin quotes Grossman’s response at length: “How I pity him, not because he died so young, not because they killed him, but because he—an intelligent, talented man, a lofty soul—pronounced those insane words. What had happened to his soul? Why did he celebrate the New Year with the Yezhovs? Why do such unusual people—him, Mayakovsky, your friend Bagritsky—feel so drawn to the OGPU? What is it—the lure of strength, of power? [...] This is something we really need to think about. It’s no laughing matter, it’s a terrible phenomenon.” There are no such criticisms in “Mama,” but Grossman delicately hints at Babel’s extreme curiosity in a sentence he deleted from one of his drafts: “[Marfa Domityevna’s] calm, just and straightforward mind noticed many things that the perceptive and sensitive Isaak Babel, who she thought was the kindest of Nikolay Ivanovich’s guests, would have been avid to know.”
In his earlier “In the Town of Berdichev” Grossman implicitly criticizes Babel; in “Mama” he evokes him with respect and affection. Nevertheless, the two stories have much in common. In “Mama,” as in the earlier story, Grossman juxtaposes the world of male violence with the world of motherhood. Korotkova has written with great sensitivity about this aspect of “Mama”: “There are so many mothers in the story that one begins to feel that, if one were to look more closely, one would find more, maybe even in the orphanage. The theme of ‘Mother’ washes through the whole story—sweet faces, kind eyes, seagulls, and the splash of waves that might be from a film or might be from the unknown depths known as the subconscious. It is very strange. A terrifying, hopeless story about loneliness, about talent that is crushed and people who are destroyed, gives off not only a breath of deathly cold but also the warming breath of motherly love.”
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Several of Grossman’s last stories can be read as a response to the work of Andrey Platonov, the one writer among his contemporaries whom Grossman admired wholeheartedly.
Platonov was six years older than Grossman, but Grossman was the more established figure and there was at least one occasion when he succeeded in being of real help to Platonov; in 1942 he asked David Ortenberg, the chief editor of Red Star, to take Platonov under his protection, saying that “this good writer” was “defenseless” and “without any settled position.” Ort
enberg duly took Platonov on as a war correspondent. Later Grossman invited Platonov to collaborate on The Black Book; at some point in 1945 Platonov was given responsibility for all the material relating to the Minsk ghetto. During Platonov’s final illness, Grossman visited him almost daily, and he gave one of the main speeches at Platonov’s funeral. In a 1960 radio broadcast based on this speech, Grossman described Platonov as “a writer who wanted to understand the most complicated—which really means the most simple—foundations of human existence.” Lipkin refers to this broadcast as “the first sensible and worthwhile word said in Russia about Platonov.”
Platonov and Grossman are in many respects very different. Platonov’s prose often moves close to poetry whereas Grossman’s is perhaps as close to journalism as great prose can be while remaining great prose. Nevertheless, the two writers evidently found much in common. Ortenberg writes in his wartime memoirs, “Grossman, like his friend Andrey Platonov, was not a talkative person. The two of them sometimes came to Red Star, settled on one of the sofas [...] and stayed there for an entire hour without saying a word. They seemed, without words, to be carrying on a conversation known only to them.” Lipkin, for his part, describes Platonov as “more independent in his judgments” and Grossman as a “more traditional” writer. He goes on to relate how he used to sit with Platonov and Grossman on the street opposite Platonov’s apartment. The three of them would take turns making up stories about passersby. Grossman’s were detailed and realistic; Platonov’s were “plotless,” more focused on the person’s inner life, which was “both unusual and simple, like the life of a plant.”
Still more interesting, however, is the extent to which Grossman, throughout the period from Platonov’s death in 1951 to his own death in 1964, seems to have absorbed something of Platonov’s idiosyncratic style and vision—almost as if he were trying to keep Platonov’s spirit alive. “The Dog” is about a mongrel by the name of Pestrushka—the first living creature to survive a journey in space. With her capacity for devotion, her past life as a homeless wanderer, and her quick understanding of technology, Pestrushka has much in common with Platonov’s peasant heroes. In another story, “The Road,” Grossman seems more Platonov-like than Platonov himself. Platonov often shows us uneducated people grappling with difficult philosophical questions; Grossman presents us with a mule who not only resolves Hamlet’s dilemma about whether to be or not to be but even arrives at the concept of infinity.
Like Platonov, Grossman moves freely between abstract ideas and an intense physicality. The account at the end of “In Kislovodsk” of a husband kissing his wife’s underwear and slippers is reminiscent of a passage from Platonov’s Happy Moscow: “She gave him her shoes to carry. Without her noticing, he sniffed them and even touched them with his tongue; now neither Moscow Chestnova herself, nor anything about her, however dirty, could have made Sartorius feel in the least squeamish, and he could have looked at the waste products of her body with the greatest of interest, since they too had not long ago formed part of a splendid person.” More Platonov-like still is the moment in “Tiergarten” when a misanthropic zookeeper kisses his beloved gorilla on the lips.
Grossman and Platonov share an admiration for simple, unintellectual working people. Lipkin has suggested that in Grossman’s case this sprang from the populist beliefs he had imbibed from his parents, whereas in Platonov’s case it was simply part of a pantheistic reverence for life in all its manifestations. By the end of Grossman’s career, however, this distinction has ceased to operate; his last stories are imbued with a pantheistic reverence very similar to Platonov’s.
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Like “The Dog,” “Living Space” (written in 1960) is a response to an important historical event—in this case, the release of hundreds of thousands of prisoners from the Gulag between 1953 and 1956. In 1956, on the anniversary of Stalin’s death, the poet Anna Akhmatova had said, “Now those who have been arrested will return, and two Russias will look each other in the eye—the Russia that sent people to the camps, and the Russia that was sent to the camps.” Grossman’s elderly heroine, however, returns to Moscow after nineteen years in the camps to meet with nothing more—nor less—than indifference. Soon after moving into a communal apartment with what the other tenants see as absurdly few belongings, she dies. Little is known about her except that she had once been someone important, and she is soon forgotten. One Sunday morning the tenants are playing cards when the postman brings a letter addressed to the old woman. Only one person, a teenage girl, even recognizes her name. It is an important official letter: the woman’s late husband, who died in prison in 1938, has been rehabilitated “due to the absence of a body of evidence.” At firsts no one knows what to do with this letter, but eventually the tenants agree that it should be handed in to the house management committee.
The story ends with a chilling—and sadly untranslatable—play on words. One of the cardplayers asks, “Komu sdavat'?” This can be understood both as “Whose deal?” and as “Who should hand in the document?” The reply, “Kto ostalsya, tomu i sdavat',” can be understood either as “Whoever lost/ended up as ‘fool’ in the last round should deal” or as “Whoever is left alive should hand in the document to the house management committee.” Anatoly Bocharov has interpreted this dense bundle of disparate meanings as an expression of concern on Grossman’s part that “those who remain alive should not allow themselves to be fooled.”
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The three last stories in this collection, “The Road,” “The Dog,” and “In Kislovodsk,” all contain pointed repetitions of the phrase “life and fate.” The words are like markers—or like tolling bells, telling the reader how much the loss of his novel dominates Grossman’s thoughts.
“The Road” (1961–62) can be read as a distillation of Life and Fate, a re-creation of it in miniature. It may even represent an attempt on Grossman’s part to compensate for the novel’s “arrest,” to get the better of the despair this had occasioned him. Not even in Life and Fate itself does he so powerfully evoke the relentlessness of the long winter campaign that culminated in the Battle of Stalingrad. The evocations of the horror of war and the miracle of love appear all the more universal because of the unexpected point of view from which the story is told—that of a mule from an Italian artillery regiment.
“In Kislovodsk”—the last story Grossman wrote—is also set during the first year of the war. Nikolay Viktorovich, a highly placed Soviet doctor with a perhaps excessive love of comfort and beauty, is not an evil man, nor is he entirely selfish—but he has always been too ready to make compromises. The story ends on a note of redemption. Asked by the Nazis to facilitate the murder of the wounded Soviet soldiers who are his patients, Nikolay commits suicide. His wife joins him. In their last hours the usually impeccably tasteful husband and wife allow themselves to behave “vulgarly,” to dance to “vulgar” music, to kiss goodbye to their beloved porcelain and to kiss goodbye to each other as if they were young lovers.
An important source for this story is “The Germans in Kislovodsk,” an article in The Black Book based on the recollections of an elderly Jew, Moisey Samuilovich Yevenson, who, protected by his Russian wife, survived the German occupation. His recollections were prepared for The Black Book by the scholar and literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky. The article includes a brief mention of two Jewish doctors who commit suicide along with their wives— although they, unlike Nikolay Viktorovich, do this simply because they know they are about to be shot anyway. It is interesting that Grossman chose to return, during the last year of his life, to material from The Black Book, but it is no less interesting that he chose to excise from his story any reference to Jews and the Shoah. This casts at least some degree of doubt on the view held by Lipkin and John and Carol Garrard that Grossman, during his last years, was obsessed with questions of Jewish suffering and Jewish identity.
In response to the Nazis’ demands, Nikolay Viktorovich shows a moral strength he has never shown before. By most peo
ple’s standards, Grossman himself showed great moral strength throughout his life—but his own standards were severe and there is no doubt that he criticized himself for the various compromises he had made over the decades. Until the “arrest” of Life and Fate Grossman had tried to work within the system; only during his last three years did he cease to make compromises. This new intransigence cost him a great deal. In December 1962, for example, he chose not to publish Good Wishes in Novy mir rather than agree to the omission of a single short paragraph about the Shoah and Russian anti-Semitism. Lipkin, thinking that a new publication would greatly help Grossman, both financially and with regard to his public standing, pleaded with him to yield, but to no avail. Grossman seems to have thought it better to become a nonperson than to betray himself, his people, and his mother’s memory.
The intensity of Grossman’s determination to behave honorably, and his awareness of how hard it is to not to yield to pressure, are well illustrated by a passage from a memoir by Anna Berzer, the editor from Novy mir responsible for publishing several of his stories in the early 1960s. Berzer was one of Grossman’s most regular visitors during his last months in the hospital, and one of only four people to whom he showed Everything Flows. She relates how, on one occasion, Grossman awoke from sleep in her presence. Still half in the world of dreams, he said, “They took me off for interrogation during the night. I didn’t betray anyone, did I?”
The Elk*