I read Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate on my holidays (incidentally, reading a lengthy novel about Stalingrad and the Holocaust while swanning around the Languedoc did make me think of this cartoon), and I was incredibly impressed. I had already read around half of it but had to start again in order to remember who everyone was.


This was a wonderful, enormous, human book: like War and Peace, it depicts a vast network of people connected by marriage and friendship, all affected by the Holocaust, the war, and Stalin's repression in the Soviet Union. The central character, Viktor Shtrum, is a Jewish physicist, working on nuclear reactions: after being denounced by his colleagues for expressing internationalist views on the importance of science, and when he is expecting imminent arrest and imprisonment, he receives a phone call from Stalin wishing him well with his work. With Stalin's awareness of the importance of nuclear physics Grossman gives us a small reminder of what the next horror of world history will be.

Viktor's mother Anna Semyonovna is a Jew living in the Ukraine who is deported to the death camps. Her letter to her son, written with a clear awareness of her own fate, is one of the most moving and beautiful pieces in the book. I also liked the way Grossman discusses the differences between Stalin and Hitler's repression: it's a monstrous concentration camp Kommandant who equates the two systems, and other reviewers have suggested that this is Grossman's view as well, but I thought the emphasis on Stalin's caprice - in Viktor's case, benevolent caprice - suggested that the oppression in the two countries was more systemic in Fascist Germany but a terrible result of one man's ultimate power in the USSR (although that is too simplistic a way of putting it: who knows whether the Third Reich could have continued after Hitler's death? The Soviet Union's repression didn't end with Stalin's.). [45]

I must now read A writer at war: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941-1945, which is a collection of Grossman's notebooks and articles from when he was a war correspondent. Anthony Beevor used them in his book Berlin: the downfall which I wrote about here, and I though his observations were wonderful. One of the wonderful things aboiuth Life and fate was how real the scenes of battle and the concentration camps were: it seems that Grossman was at the battle of Stalingrad and the liberation of Auschwitz, and also that many of the soldiers and incidents he describes in Life and fate come from real life and are written about in his diaries of the time.

From 1848 to 1945

Finally, I have some books to report.

The age of capital was splendid, a marvellous drawing together of the prevailing historical themess of the 1848-1875 period, the first mad flush of the capitalist world. Hobsbawm writes exceptionally well, lucidly and with some pleasantly acerbic asides (the passage on the arts is particularly amusing), and his connections between the worlds of science, arts, philosophy and economics are brilliant - the connections between activities in the various fields and the economic climate as well as the philosophies of capitalist, democratic liberalism are made clear, so that one feels an enormous light has been turned on, illuminating the wholeness of historical, literary, economic and philosophical events where previously one saw them as isolated bits of history knowledge. [1]

It made me want to read more Marx. I might have a bash at The eighteenth brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, which my da says is his favourite of Marx's writings. (I wish I'd read enough Marx to have a favourite of his writings.)

Antony Beevor's Berlin: the downfall was rather less splendid. It's a rollicking, novelistic history of the war in Europe from around 1944 to definitive German defeat, and it reads tremendously easily (one can see why it made it on to so many 'books of the year' lists: books that read easily but sound worthy always do). Novelistic, perhaps even filmic, in that it's very chronological so it cuts between the goings on in Moscow and the court politics surrounding Stalin, to the frenzied terror and hubris of Hitler's bunker, from Vasily Grossman's diaries as he advances with the frontoviki to the diaries of terrified Berliners, from the Yalta conference to the refugees returning to Germany from the eastern parts of the Reich. However he has a rather distasteful obsession with rape - I am not in any way denying that an awful lot of rape did happen on the Eastern front, but Beevor's focus is more on the most horrific of personal accounts rather than in trying to establish, for example, exactly how prevalent rape was. There was also some rather cheap speculation on Hitler's sexuality - he 'suppressed his homoerotic side' for the relationship with Eva Braun, for example - an assertion which is not backed up by anything at all. Later in a description of Hitler's last public appearance where he met some Hitler youth members, he describes Hitler as displaying 'the intensity of a repressed paedophile'. Now, I'm not springing hotly to Hitler's defence here, but it seems to me there's plenty to accuse him of without unfounded insinuations of paedophilia. It leaves one wondering how much historical evidence he bases the rest of the book on, which seems rather unfortunate. [2]

Vasily Grossman's diaries of his experiences on the Eastern front were recently published, edited by Antony Beevor (A writer at war: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941-1945). I'll probably buy them when they're out in paperback. Before then I want to try reading his enormous novel centered around the battle of Stalingrad, Life and fate, conveniently available at a library near me.