Life and Fate: P.1, Ch.26-42, language, a mother’s grief

1/ Each language—or your experience of each language—has its own associations. Two words that mean the same thing in different languages can never be completely the same. 

Reading Life and Fate in English (in Robert Chandler’s translation), I can’t help wondering how I would feel, were I to read it in a Vietnamese translation. Words such as “the Party”, “comrade”, or “bourgeois” may not evoke or provoke anything in English, but “Đảng”, “đồng chí”, or “tư sản” has lots of associations. I feel I’m at one remove from the Soviet slogans, rhetoric, and propaganda talking points in the novel as they’re filtered through English, but I know in Vietnamese they would make my skin crawl.

Perhaps it’s a good thing I’m reading it in English, the novel is already too relatable. 

(I actually have no idea if Life and Fate has been translated into Vietnamese—does anyone know?) 

Those of you who feel strongly about spoilers should be warned that I will discuss plot points in this blog post (but would you remember anything, in all honesty, unless you’re reading this book right now and/or have read Stalingrad?). 

2/ In my previous blog post, I wrote that Ikonnikov, after seeing the persecution of 20,000 Jews, “understood that God could not allow such a thing and that therefore he did not exist”—is Vasily Grossman the same? 

“As she was dying, she had crawled up to Viktor and cried, staring at him with wide, bright eyes. But who was there in this vast empty sky, on this pitiless, dusty earth – who was there to beg or entreat?” (P.1, ch.20)

The image of the empty sky recurs later, when Lyudmila’s on the way to visit her son Tolya in the hospital. 

“During the night Lyudmila walked up and down the deck. The river looked icy cold and there was a pitiless wind blowing from downstream out of the darkness. Up above shone the stars; there was neither comfort nor peace in the cruel sky, the sky of ice and fire, that arched over her unhappy head.” (P.1, ch.26)

I can’t pinpoint an exact moment, nor explain it, but there’s something about these passages that makes me think of Chekhov. 

3/ A prejudice one may have before picking up Life and Fate is that Vasily Grossman could just describe the horrific things he witnessed, as a WW2 reporter, a Jew, and a Soviet citizen, and it would already stir strong emotions. However, he’s better than that, and there’s lots of subtlety in the novel. 

“[Shimansky] felt sad about the dead lieutenant and sorry for his mother; for that very reason, he felt angry with both of them. What would happen to his nerves if he had to give interviews to every dead lieutenant’s mama?” (P.1, ch.30) 

Lyudmila’s meeting with the doctor is even more poignant. I especially like that Lyudmila notices his hands and thinks “they seemed to live a quite separate life from the man with mournful eyes”, then he takes his hands off the table, as though knowing her thoughts. It’s one of those irrational, seemingly trivial details that add life to a novel. 

“Everything he said, passionately though she had desired to hear it, had tortured and burnt her. But there was something else that had made the conversation difficult and painful: she sensed that the doctor had wanted this meeting not for her sake, but for his own. This made her feel a certain antagonism towards him.” (P.1, ch.31) 

And:

“All Lyudmila’s requests were met with military precision and correctness. But she could feel that the commissar, the nurse and the commandant also wanted something from her, that they too wanted some word of consolation or forgiveness.” (ibid.) 

That is so good. Grossman moves between the grieving mother’s perspective and other characters’. 

“… the sergeant-major felt guilty about his poor-quality timber as the lieutenant’s mother questioned him about the conduct of burials, asking how they dressed the corpses, whether they buried them together and whether a last word was spoken over the grave.

Another reason he felt awkward was that before the journey he had been to see a friend in the store; he had drunk a glass of diluted medical spirit and eaten some bread and onion. He was ashamed that his breath made the car stink of onions and alcohol – but he could hardly stop breathing.” (ibid.) 

That’s another great detail. 

The chapter of Lyudmila at the grave is heartbreaking—Vasily Grossman’s depiction of her grief is not at all inferior to Tolstoy’s depiction of Countess Rostova’s grief after the death of Petya. 

“The sky seemed somehow airless – as though all the air had been pumped out and there was nothing but dry dust over her head. And the pump was continuing its work: together with the air, faith and hope had now disappeared; nothing was left but a small mound of grey, frozen earth.” (P.1, ch.33) 

4/ The novel isn’t despair from beginning to end though. Sometimes there’s a moment like this: 

“Everything – the river, the fields, the forest – was so beautiful, so peaceful, that hatred, betrayal and old age seemed impossible; nothing could exist but love and happiness. The moon shone down through the grey mist that enveloped the earth. Few pilots spent the night in their bunkers. On the edge of the village you could glimpse white scarves and hear quiet laughter.” (P.1, ch.38) 

5/ The chapters about Abarchuk (Lyudmila’s first husband, Tolya’s father) in the Soviet prison camp are excellent. 

“[Stepanov] was proud of the fact that, unlike the majority of the political prisoners, he was there for a reason…” (P.1, ch.40) 

How ironic.

Grossman paints a vivid and horrifying picture of the camp and its politics, and also sketches the character of Abarchuk. But Grossman’s no cynic, and he doesn’t only give us despair: Abarchuk overcomes his fear and stands up for the truth and acts like a mensch. 

That’s what I like about Grossman. There’s still courage and goodness in the book. 

These chapters are also interesting because Abarchuk, despite everything that happened to him, continues clinging to his ideals, to his faith in the communist cause. That is something I recognise (not in myself, naturally). 

Relatability is not necessarily something I look for in fiction, but I can’t deny that Life and Fate is relatable, uncomfortably so. 

At some point I should compare Life and Fate and War and Peace. But not yet.