Life and Fate: P.2, Ch.32-63, free will, the questionnaire

1/ In the previous blog post, I had some complaint about Vasily Grossman’s depiction of German/ Nazi characters. As anyone who reads this blog regularly may expect, I have modified my opinion.

I’m still unsure about the character of Liss and his conversation with Mostovskoy, but later on Vasily Grossman gives us some sketches of a few men operating the gas chambers, and does so with such humanity. Having lost his own mother to the Nazis, he doesn’t see them all as heartless monsters. And the characters he depicts are all different.

“What did it matter what the two of them felt? If the job they did was the same, what did it matter if one felt happy and the other felt sad?” (P.2, ch.42)

From the portrayals of a few individuals, Grossman then raises bigger questions about the Holocaust, and about human beings and life in general. There’s a passage that seems to be a response to Tolstoy’s ideas in War and Peace: 

“If, on the day of judgment, Kaltluft had been called upon to justify himself, he could have explained quite truthfully how fate had led him to become the executioner of 590,000 people. What else could he have done in the face of such powerful forces – the war, fervent nationalism, the adamancy of the Party, the will of the State? How could he have swum against the current? He was a man like any other; all he had wanted was to live peacefully in his father’s house. He hadn’t walked – he had been pushed. Fate had led him by the hand . . .” (P.2, ch.43) 

Grossman goes on to argue against Tolstoy’s ideas: 

“There is divine judgment, there is the judgment of a State and the judgment of society, but there is one supreme judgment: the judgment of one sinner over another. A sinner can measure the power of the totalitarian State and find it limitless: through propaganda, hunger, loneliness, infamy, obscurity, labour camps and the threat of death, this terrible power can fetter a man’s will. But every step that a man takes under the threat of poverty, hunger, labour camps and death is at the same time an expression of his own will. Every step Kaltluft had taken – from the village to the trenches, from being a man-in-the-street to being a member of the National Socialist Party – bore the imprint of his will. A man may be led by fate, but he can refuse to follow. He may be a mere tool in the hands of destructive powers, but he knows it is in his interest to assent to this. Fate and the individual may have different ends, but they share the same path.” (ibid.)

The word “fate” from the title recurs throughout the novel, but now Vasily Grossman discusses the concept at length.

Personally I’m very curious about what Tolstoy would have thought about history, humanity, and free will, had he lived in the 20th century and seen what Vasily Grossman saw. The evils of the 20th century were much greater, much more horrible than anything he could have imagined.

2/ This is an interesting thought:  

“Before the war Sofya Levinton had once said to Yevgenia Nikolaevna Shaposhnikova, ‘If one man is fated to be killed by another, it would be interesting to trace the gradual convergence of their paths. At the start they might be miles away from one another – I might be in Pamir picking alpine roses and clicking my camera, while this other man, my death, might be eight thousand miles away, fishing for ruff in a little stream after school. I might be getting ready to go to a concert and he might be at the railway station buying a ticket to go and visit his mother-in-law – and yet eventually we are bound to meet, we can’t avoid it . . .’” (P.2, ch.47) 

In Part 1, we saw Sofya Levinton and the boy David and many other characters on the way to the extermination camp. In these chapters, they enter the gas chamber, and Vasily Grossman takes us into the gas chamber with them—till the very last moment. He doesn’t hold back. 

These are some of the bleakest, most haunting chapters in fiction, especially the relationship between Sofya Levinton and the boy.

“… with an intensity that burnt her fifty-year-old heart, she had felt ready to give up everything if only in some shabby, dark, low-ceilinged room she could be hugged by the arms of a child.

She had always loved children, but little David evoked some special tenderness in her that she had never felt before. In the goods-wagon she had given him some bread and he had turned his little face towards her in the half-light; she had wanted to weep, to hug him, to smother him with kisses like a mother kissing her child. In a whisper that no one else could hear, she had said:

‘Eat, my son, eat.’” (P.2, ch.46) 

3/ Here are some interesting images:   

“The transformers were still smoking. Little fangs of flame were playing lazily about them.” (P.2, ch.38) 

“The dim flames served more to obscure the way than to illuminate it. They seemed to be coming from the depths of the earth; or perhaps the earth itself had caught fire – the low flames were certainly heavy and damp enough.” (ibid.) 

4/ One of the depressing things about reading Life and Fate is seeing parallels not only between Soviet society and Vietnamese society under the communists, but also between Soviet practices and some aspects of life in the West now. 

For example, Viktor Shtrum has to complete a questionnaire. 

“The State was not concerned about the adequacy of Viktor’s mathematical equipment or the appropriateness of the laboratory apparatus for the complex experiments he was conducting; the State didn’t want to know whether the staff were properly protected from neutron radiation, whether Sokolov and Shtrum had a good working relationship, whether the junior researchers had received adequate training for their exhausting calculations…” (P.2, ch.43)

Instead, Viktor gets asked about his place of birth, his nationality, his social origin, his social position; he gets asked whether his relatives or his wife’s relatives have ever been arrested; he gets asked whether he has relatives living abroad and whether he keeps in touch with them, and so on and so forth. 

But why?

“It was all the same to him whether his future colleague was a Russian, a Jew, a Ukrainian or an Armenian, whether his grandfather had been a worker, a factory-owner or a kulak; his relationship with him would not depend on whether or not his brother had been arrested by the organs of the NKVD; it didn’t matter to him whether his future colleague’s sister lived in Geneva or Kostroma.” (ibid.)

I don’t need to say that the same thing happened in North Vietnam, and then in all of Vietnam after 1975. But I also see some parallels between that and the UK now: to apply for jobs in certain fields here (such as film and TV, journalism, university…), I get asked about my nationality and ethnicity; about my sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, and pronouns; about my religious views; I get asked whether I’m disabled; where I went to school; what professions my parents had when I was growing up…

Most of the time they state that it’s for equality monitoring, but sometimes my job applications ask if I’m happy to share these details with the hiring managers, and very often employers openly say they prioritise candidates from underrepresented groups. 

I’m with Viktor/ Vasily Grossman: 

“He would ask at what age someone had first become interested in theoretical physics, what he thought of the criticisms Einstein had made of Planck when the latter was an old man, whether he was interested only in mathematical theory or whether he also enjoyed experimental work, what he thought of Heisenberg, did he believe in the possibility of a unified field theory? What mattered was talent, fire, the divine spark . . .

He would like to know – but only if his future colleague were happy to say – whether he enjoyed long walks, whether he drank wine, whether he went to orchestral concerts, whether he liked Seton Thompson’s children’s books, whether he felt more drawn to Tolstoy or to Dostoyevsky, whether he enjoyed gardening, whether he went fishing, what he thought of Picasso, which was his favourite story of Chekhov’s.” (ibid.) 

5/ I do think Grossman’s depiction of the rift between Viktor and his wife Lyudmila is very good. Viktor finds more understanding and sympathy in Marya Ivanovna, the wife of his friend Sokolov, than in his own wife. There are a few scenes where Viktor and Lyudmila are talking to each other but each follows a different train of thought, and they both know they have drifted apart and it will never be the same, with Viktor blaming Lyumila for pushing away his mother and her blaming him for being hard on her son Tolya.

The depiction of Viktor’s feelings for his friend’s wife is also very good. 

At some point I should perhaps write about the relationship between Yevgenia and her former husband Krymov.