On Stalingrad: Vassily Grossman’s “astonishingly, disturbingly different” account of World War 2
Tuesday, September 22nd, 2020
Peter Hitchens has a fascinating discussion of Vassily Grossman‘s Stalingrad over at First Things here. An excerpt:
Now comes the rather curious publication of a wholly new English edition of Grossman’s Stalingrad, a book that, unlike Life and Fate, was officially published in the U.S.S.R., but in several different formats. One of the most fascinating things about it—and this is not meant to denigrate the book itself—is the explanation at the end of the text of how it changed from edition to edition, reflecting the several different eras of repression, thaw, and renewed freeze in the Kremlin. As a novel, it is a great mess. It has even less structure than Life and Fate. It often seems to be a collection of distantly related short stories, dodging about from character to character in a way that often left me in need of an index. It is also quite obviously an incomplete version of the events of Life and Fate, viewed from another direction.
Nonetheless, the book is very much worth reading. Grossman was a brave and—where possible—honest reporter of a terrible war about which we in the English-speaking countries know far too little. Take these words of his about Stalingrad that (without attribution to him, because he was a Jew and his talent could not be admitted) are incised on the furious, ugly memorial to that terrible battle. They say of the soldiers of the Red Army:
An iron wind lashed their faces but still they marched forward. And once more a feeling of superstitious terror gripped their foe. “They are attacking us again. Can they be mortal?” Yes, we were mortal indeed and few of us survived. But we all carried out our patriotic duty before Holy Mother Russia.
If you have any feeling for this sort of thing, you cannot fail to be moved by these words. And they are a good sample of Grossman’s emotive description of war. We have our version of the vast 1939–45 conflict that convulsed Europe and later the world. The Russians have theirs, and it is astonishingly, disturbingly different. American readers might need to imagine a huge and victorious German Army pouring eastward from California, thrusting the snouts of its tanks right up to the western bank of the Mississippi—and then being broken at the last possible moment by a berserk American stand at Minneapolis, at enormous cost. British readers have no such possibility. For if the Germans had got ashore in our small island, that would have been that, whatever we might like to boast.
In fact, if the Germans had won at Stalingrad, Britain would almost certainly have had to make terms with Hitler, a prospect so dismal most of us cannot even contemplate it. No wonder the British reader holds his breath and hopes for a Soviet triumph as he reads Grossman’s account of the Stalingrad battle. We cannot begin to conceive of having had the people and riches of a great part of our homeland under a bigoted and merciless foreign conqueror, while we still fought on in the land that was left to us, retreating and retreating and retreating until we had to stand or die. This was the case for the Russians.
Grossman said of his work as a war correspondent that he spoke “on behalf of those that lie in the earth,” and there is no doubt that he performs that duty.
Read the rest here.
