THE WORLD WAR TWO GROUP discussion

Buddy read of Vasily Grossman's duology- Stalingrad & Life and Fate. Moderator - Jeff.

Hey all, shall we begin reading? There is a Kindle edition where you can post highlights from to GR. I have the NY Review of Books edition which is very nice.

Stalingrad by Vasily Grossman
Details:
Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate has been hailed as a twentieth-century War and Peace. However, Life and Fate is only the second half of a two-part work, the first half of which was published in 1952. Grossman wanted to call this earlier work Stalingrad—as it will be in this first English translation—but it was published as For a Just Cause. The characters in both novels are largely the same and so is the story line; Life and Fate picks up where Stalingrad ends, in late September 1942. The first novel is in no way inferior to Life and Fate; the chapters about the Shaposhnikov family are both tender and witty, and the battle scenes are vivid and moving. One of the most memorable chapters of Life and Fate is the last letter written from a Jewish ghetto by Viktor Shtrum’s mother—a powerful lament for East European Jewry. The words of this letter do not appear in Stalingrad, yet the letter’s presence makes itself powerfully felt and it is mentioned many times. We learn who carries it across the front lines, who passes it on to whom, and how it eventually reaches Viktor. Grossman describes the difficulty Viktor experiences in reading it and his inability to talk about it even to his family. The absence of the letter itself is eloquent—as if its contents are too awful for anyone to take in.

Reviews:
https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/all...

Here is a detailed review of Vasily Grossman’s “Stalingrad” by Philip Ó Ceallaigh (July 15, 2019):

"STALINGRAD, NOW APPEARING in English, was first published in Russian in 1952, the last year of Stalin’s life. Its more famous sequel, Life and Fate, Grossman’s masterpiece, was written after Stalin’s death and refused publication. The two novels are remarkably similar and utterly different. Life and Fate picks up chronologically where Stalingrad leaves off, at the peak of the battle for the city, and a number of key characters appear in both works. But Life and Fate confronts Stalinism directly and analyzes the many ways a totalitarian regime obtains the complicity of individuals in its lies and murder. Stalingrad is the same author, shackled in his expression.

In 1941, on the eve of war with Germany, the Soviet Union was a failure by any measure and a spectacular failure when measured against the proclaimed ideals of the Russian Revolution. The ending of capitalism was to have ushered in a benevolent dictatorship of the proletariat. Even with peace restored after the chaos of a civil war in which as many as 13 million died, the regime found an impediment on the road to paradise — the people themselves. Forced collectivization of agriculture and food requisitioning killed millions in the countryside, there were purges and mass executions and deportations and relocations of entire population groups, and a system of slave labor was instituted.

Grossman would depict the Soviet Union as a vast penitentiary in his later novels, Life and Fate and Everything Flows. In Stalingrad, however, we have passages of the following kind:

Scattered and annihilated by the Revolution, whole classes of people had disappeared. […] Workers and peasants had become the masters of life. […] Russia had attained an unprecedented level of literacy and general enlightenment, a sudden leap whose power can be compared only with that of some cosmic force; if there were an electromagnetic equivalent for Russia’s cultural explosion in 1917, astronomers in other galaxies would have registered the birth of a new star, a star growing ever brighter.

In this passage, Grossman is entering the consciousness of the old Bolshevik, Mostovskoy. Even so, examples of this kind of language are common throughout the almost 1,000 pages of Stalingrad.

But something more complex is going on in the novel because we know the author was not an ideologue, and in many cases he is gritting his teeth as he types. There is an underlying struggle on every page.

The phrase “Socialist Realism” was coined in 1932, and in 1934 the method it described was adopted as the obligatory house style of the newly established Soviet Writers’ Union. It was enough for Stalin to write “fool” and “bastard” in the margins of Andrei Platonov’s 1931 novel about collectivization, The Foundation Pit, to render him unpublishable. Isaac Babel stopped submitting work for publication in the 1930s, which smacked of sabotage; he was shot in 1940. Of the 2,000 writers arrested during the purges, only 500 survived.

1932 was also the year the 27-year-old Grossman’s first novel was rejected for its “counter-revolutionary tendencies.” Alexandra Popoff’s new biography of Grossman, Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century, is particularly good in illuminating his literary milieu, and she quotes a letter he wrote to Maxim Gorky at the time, asking for his opinion:

I wrote what I saw while working for three years in the mine Smolyanka-11. I wrote the truth. Perhaps, this is a bitter truth. However, truth cannot be counterrevolutionary. In our day truth and revolution cannot be separated. I fail to understand what’s counterrevolutionary about my book — is it that there’s drinking in the Donbass [sic], that there are frequent brawls there, that work in a coalmine is very hard or that people, coalminers […] don’t smile 24 hours a day?

Gorky replied that it was obtuse of Grossman to claim his naturalistic snapshots were “reality”: “The author can see well the truth of the past. […] He truthfully depicted the dull-wittedness of coalminers, their drunkenness, brawls. […] Of course, all this — is truth, but it’s a very bad and tormenting truth.”

Soviet truth was aspirational. Socialist Realism had to articulate the shining ideals of the workers’ paradise that was coming into being.

Grossman had developed a respiratory disease from his time as a safety inspector in an unventilated mine. Had he been a worker rather than a soon-to-be Soviet writer, he would have died. He wrote, privately, of laborers so weighed down by quotas and obligations that “you wouldn’t find even ten workers out of forty or fifty thousand going to work at 6 am willingly and freely,” but he was smart enough to take Gorky’s hint and put lipstick on the pig. He rewrote his novel, and it was published. The danger of the mines allowed him to portray the workers as heroic, a trick he repeats in Stalingrad, where at the insistence of the editors he added chapters on proletarian valor far from the front.

In Stalingrad, Grossman’s youthful exchange with Gorky is reprised: Marusya tells her sister Zhenya that collective labor is “a source of constant moral uplift” — “[t]he workers make jokes, their confidence never flags” — and recounts the moment a new gun was wheeled out of the workshop: “I felt such love of my country that I could have gone on working […] for another six days.” Zhenya counters that such language rings false — it turns people into figures on posters. Marusya retorts that there are two truths: “There is the truth of the reality forced on us by the accursed past. And there’s the truth of the reality which will defeat the past.”

Zhenya is Grossman; Marusya is a committee of editors and censors. This passage is the closest thing to Grossman saying, “Forgive my pen, but these are the people who are in charge.”

This English edition, the first ever, is a work of reconstitution by co-editors Robert Chandler and Yuri Bit-Yunan and co-translators Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, as there is no definitive Russian edition. The three versions published in Grossman’s lifetime differ greatly from one another. The first and most heavily censored was published in 1952, while Stalin still lived. Under Khrushchev’s relative liberalization, much censored material was reinstated in 1954 and 1956. The editors also consulted the 11 typescripts in the Russian state literary archives, drawing heavily on the third version, as that closest to Grossman’s original vision of the book. This has allowed them to reinstate several hundred ideologically motivated deletions, ranging in length between several words and several pages. Where entirely new chapters were added at a later stage, the editors have drawn on the earliest typescript in which they appear.

This Stalingrad is a colossal work of research and is an attempt at de-censoring the author. Valuable notes are given to each chapter, indicating which versions were drawn upon.

The easiest way to read Stalingrad as a novel is to disregard these notes and to skip Robert Chandler’s fine introduction and afterword. But that would be to miss the true story and the reward of an intensive tutorial on the experience of writing under a dictatorship.

The most vital writing is that from the third typescript, and we get to see the kinds of things Socialist Realism frowned on. Some of the omissions in 1952 concern politically sensitive subjects such as the existence of labor camps and discontent with collective agriculture. But also affected are references to petty theft, bedbugs, rats, fleas, poor food, and, in one instance, unwashed hands. There is also a deadening of tone where the censors strove for the heroic note by deleting passages of oddness, humor, or absurdity. The present editors have been able to save much fine writing that Grossman was never permitted to publish in his lifetime.

Stalingrad depicts a struggle between the forces of Soviet good and Nazi evil, yet we know from Life and Fate that Grossman saw the two regimes as evil twins. Grossman had all the material he needed for the comparison, having been a frontline journalist from the early days of the retreat, through the Battle of Stalingrad, and all the way to Berlin. He encountered the reality of the Holocaust. He saw Treblinka and was the first journalist to give an account of the workings of an extermination camp. He was ceaselessly interviewing eyewitnesses and recording information, even if he could not publish all he heard. His status as journalist and later as a state-appointed Red Tolstoy gave him access to material on Nazism and the war written from the German perspective.

Superficially, Stalingrad looks like a capitulation to the censor, but the reality is more complex. Grossman was a successful Soviet writer, but behind the scenes he rarely missed an opportunity to present his editors, and himself, with problems. In the immediate postwar years, he was chief editor and contributor to The Black Book of Soviet Jewry, which documented the Holocaust on Soviet soil. In 1947, after several years of labor, and with Stalin becoming increasingly antisemitic, it was announced that The Black Book contained “grave political errors” and would not be published.

Considering the fate of this and other projects Grossman was involved in at the time, he showed extraordinary tenacity in struggling with the authorities. He pushed boundaries at great personal risk and was sometimes successful. There is much in Stalingrad that is categorically not the official line. Grossman wished for those who had perished anonymously to be remembered, and he emphasizes the bravery and suffering of people rather than the strategic genius of their supreme leader. He also wished his novel to speak to the ordinary soldier who had fought and survived. There are passages on Nazism, including Hitler’s contempt for the lives of his soldiers, which are coded attacks on Stalinism. There are references to the existence of punishment battalions and of dissatisfaction with the regime and allusions to taboo subjects such as the Holocaust. One of the main characters, Victor Shtrum, is recognizably Jewish, at a time when Jews were being purged from Soviet public life and executed.

Within months of its publication in late 1952, with antisemitic frenzy peaking, Stalingrad was being publicly denounced. Grossman would probably have been arrested and execute."

This is a great read. I loved the part about the Zekes sitting in the gulag talking about what they did in the Revolution and saying he’s a good Communist or that one’s a good Communist but they were forbidden to use the term comrade with one another as they served out their sentences. I hate Stalin and I hate Communists with every fiber of my being. Enjoy this masterpiece.

Aussie Rick, I much appreciate your detailed review, and all the background info on V. G. and the circumstances he navigated.

Bernice wrote: "Aussie Rick, I much appreciate your detailed review, and all the background info on V. G. and the circumstances he navigated."

I hope it helps with those going to read his book :)

I have read Life and Fate, and it is in my opinion a staggeringly good book, a masterpiece.

I'm happy to buddy read Leningrad. But I do need to get a copy, and that may be a couple of weeks off.

I don't know what edition of Life and Fate I read 3 years ago, but I was still astonished by its anti-Soviet nature. Grossman hid his mockery here and there in short commentaries, just two-three words that totally debunked Soviet times' myths.

My husband's grandmother, officially an orphan, given away in war time to orphanage because her mother couldn't feed two children, survived through Stalingrad.

I have both of these books. I'm not sure how much I will be able to read, because of all of my other books I am committed to. Right now I am readingRed Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine, 1921-1933.

I will definitely be following the discussion here.

Wait , are we discussing the book...

I'm new to this site and don't understand features to stuff like this >_< sorry

Galen wrote: "Wait , are we discussing the book...

I'm new to this site and don't understand features to stuff like this >_< sorry"

Hi Galen, this page is for a buddy read of the book and you can discuss it as you read with others in the group. Jeff with be the moderator and the buddy read starts on the 20th April if you would like to join in,

What Russia is doing against Ukraine is absolutely horrible,brutal and unpardonable. The Russian air force is not even sparing the maternity ward from destruction. It is so shameless. Even they are threatening to use nuclear weapons. I don't know whether it will turn into third world war. If this happens half of the world will turn into ashes. Russia is digging her own grave.

I'm joining; how apropos to the current Atrocities against Brave Ukraine. I've compiled a list of historical fiction and histories pertaining to Ukraine and to earlier Russian history, but these are "new" to me, so I really appreciate this.

I also have Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine, 1921-1933 on my to-read list.

"Red Famine" is an excellent book, well worth the time to read!

Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine, 1921-1933 by Anne Applebaum

I'll second AR's recommendation of Red Famine

I really liked Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum as well.

If you want to truely go back in time, this is not considered as a Ukraine trilogy, but it begins with Bogdan Chmielnicki, leader of the Cossack and peasant uprising against Polish rule in the Ukraine in 1648. It is by the same author who wrote Quo Vadis
The trilogy is 3 long books, but I enjoyed them and you get a flavor of who the players were that far back.
The Trilogy: With Fire and Sword, The Deluge & Sir Michael
Think of it as the Original Game of Thrones.

Also Tolstoy's take on Russian and the taking of the Ukraine in his life time. He was there briefly as a soldier as had been his brother
Hadji Murád

Dipanjan wrote: "What Russia is doing against Ukraine is absolutely horrible,brutal and unpardonable. The Russian air force is not even sparing the maternity ward from destruction. It is so shameless. Even they are..."

We are doing a series of YouTube videos, one was on Putin. Look for Forgotten History, I did a special listing the war crimes Putin and his generals could be charged with under existing international law.

Just bought these on kindle and with 900+ pages I think I need to start before 20th April!

Looking forward to reading this! And, while we're giving Russia book recommendations, I think Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice is worth a mention - it describes the current state of corruption in modern Russia quite well.

Just read this Christian Science Monitor article on Scribd:
I'm reading "Lost In The Russia Scandal Maze? Read Your Way Out." on Scribd.

Check it out: https://www.scribd.com/article/387417312

Here’s an article written by Anne Applebaum last November.


https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/...

And pertinently from today's email:
The Scars of Ukraine’s War, Illuminated in Fiction https://nyti.ms/3JUo8Pl

SolidarityWithUkraine EldritchReadingReindeer wrote: "And pertinently from today's email:
The Scars of Ukraine’s War, Illuminated in Fiction https://nyti.ms/3JUo8Pl"

Thank you for this!

Positive Kate wrote: "Here’s an article written by Anne Applebaum last November.

Thanks! Anne Applebaum's writing and investigative reporting is so important.

Thanks Aussie Rick for that gripping summary.

With all of the interest, I am unsure if I want to read the paper version or just buy the kindle version so that I can share notes and highlights.

Anyone else enjoy sharing your highlights?

I have the NYRB ebook version for both books. For some reason, I am a bit hesitant to share highlights.

Jeff wrote: "Anyone else enjoy sharing your highlights?"

Once I get my copy, should be in the coming days according to my local independent bookshop, I will be reading a physical copy. This would mean typing out any highlights. I am not that worried about that, so will do my best. If anyone is ahead of my read they may have posted them anyway.

I might add that this is 1000 pages and with my present work load this will be a long read. I am presently reading the very good Towards The Flame by Dominic Lieven and due to that work load am only halfway through and will be finishing this before reading Stalingrad.

I think this buddy read needs no time constraints, considering the length and depth of the story.

I thought Life and Fate a masterpiece. I genuinely look forward to this read.

I have a copy of "Towards The Flame" that I am yet to read so I'm glad to hear you are enjoying the book 4ZZZ!

I got my copy of Stalingrad today. I will not be starting until I have finished the book I am presently reading. I am hopeful of finishing this over the next 4/5 days.

I also am going to need time as this is nearly 1000 pages long, and I have a bit on work wise. If anyone is going to make comment, can they use spoilers please?

Cheers all.

fourtriplezed wrote: "I got my copy of Stalingrad today. I will not be starting until I have finished the book I am presently reading. I am hopeful of finishing this over the next 4/5 days.

I also am going to need tim..."

The start date is not till the 20th so you have a bit of time to get ready. I may try and join in if I can.

I wanted to share a quote from the book, that I found rather ironic, from Part 1, chapter 9:(view spoiler)[ "Does Hitler really want to take everything from us? Our lives, our loved ones, even our memories?" This is truly what the Soviet regime did to all of their satellite holdings. I really enjoyed the Introduction (hide spoiler)]. The translation, to me is excellent.

Was busy yesterday, esterday was the D-Day for the group read! Not sure how these go but let's try to finish this 900 page monster in about 2 months.

Stalingrad is broken up into 3 parts.
Part 1 is 408 pages
Part 2 is 300 pages
Part 3 is another 300 pages.

Everyone's pacing will be different but probably 2 months for a book of this size should be a good pace for the average reader from this group. Let's aim for June 20th for completion of this book and the start of Life and Fate.

When putting discussion or quotes in this thread, please put the reference to the part/chapter outside of the spoilers so that people can decide if they want to view based on where they are. General commentary probably doesn't need spoiler tags

For example, in part 1, chapter 12, (view spoiler)[ a character called Mostovskoy has thoughts comparing Russia prior to the revolution and after the revolution, which isn't really a spoiler (hide spoiler)] In that chapter, Grossman uses the thoughts of a political theorist to praise the revolution, which is another example of whether he wrote this for the censors or whether he really believed it.

The idea is that Russia was a feudal society where most people were serfs but the revolution reorganized society overnight and people were suddenly scientists, pilots, agronomists and other educated peoples. It's easy to think that the Revolution was wrong, but on the other hand, the prior state of inequality was not good either. This is a common argument in defense of communism in China. I personally would have been better off since my family owned a lot of property in Guangzhou, but I'm also not sure if a society can transition from a feudal type of society to democracy without some kind of wealth/land redistribution. Is it naturally "right" that some people should have more property than others which is handed down to descendants in perpetuity?

I hope all the group members participating in this buddy read enjoy themselves and have a great time with Vasily Grossman and his books. Enjoy!

Part one Chapter 4.

Grossman is such a talented writer that even a fairly innocuous paragraph can have effect.

(view spoiler)[Vasilov helped Vanya up onto the high chair and sensed, through his rough calloused hand, the precious warmth of Vanya little body. The child's clear bright eyes looked at him with a trust that was pure and absolute - and the voice of a small human being who had never uttered a single coarse word, never smoked a single cigarette or even one drop of vodka, asked 'Papa, are you really going to the war tomorrow?'
Vavilov smiled, and his eyes moistened.
(hide spoiler)]

Part one - Ch 43
This resonated quite a bit due to the current climate:

(view spoiler)[ ‘No matter what is done to destroy it, energy is eternal. The energy of the sun, radiating out into space, passes through deserts of darkness to come to life again in the leaves of a poplar or the living sap of a birch tree. It lies hidden in a lump of coal, in the intramolecular tension of crystals. It is the leaven of life … And the spiritual energy of a people is no different. It too may lie hidden and dormant, but it cannot be destroyed. After a period of lying hidden it gathers again and again into massive clumps, radiating light and heat, giving meaning to human life. And do you know? One of the proofs of the indestructibility of this spiritual energy is the fact that even the most evil of fascist leaders feel obliged to pose as the champions of justice and the greater good. They commit their greatest crimes in secret. They know from experience that evil does not only engender evil; they know that, although it may sometimes suppress what is good, evil can also call good into being. (hide spoiler)]

I've reached page 238 Chapter 46 of Part one. I have read a fair bit more than I expected to at this point in time.

It has been an easy read so far. As apposed to Life and Fate, there have been very few passages that I could stay have stood out that made me sit back and take note. That is not to say that it is not a good read so far. Chapter 35 has certainly been the most poignant.

There has been one use of the F word and that was to very good effect, Chapter 44. Just shows how once it had literary effect, think 1984.

I actually have enjoyed the chapters that are about the commissar Nikolay Grigorevich Krymov who was also a character I enjoyed in Life and Fate.

I now regret passing my copy of Life and Fate on, as I think I would have reread it if I had known that I would eventually read Stalingrad.

In Part Two, Chapter 46, Victor Shturm mourns his mother’s death (Anna Semyonovna). Did she actually die in some chapter? Or was it just written about after the fact?

I’ve been reading late nights before bed and my memory must be losing the last few pages before I fall asleep.