Life and Fate: P.3, Ch.28-61, control, hunger, final thoughts

1/ Viktor, who isn’t prominent in Part 1, becomes the main character in Parts 2 and 3.

In some ways he’s a type, so that we know what it feels like to live in a society where the government tries to control not only the actions but also the thoughts of its citizens, what it feels like to make significant contribution to one’s field only to be on the verge of losing everything over a trifle, what it feels like to live in constant fear and paranoia and be betrayed by one’s friends and colleagues. What saves Viktor from being merely a type is his marriage troubles and his love for Marya Ivanovna. These feelings give him more conflicts, and more dimensions. 

I also like the parallels between Viktor and Krymov. Whilst Viktor, during his downfall, thinks about all the conversations he has had, all the blunders he may have made, all the people who may have informed on him, Krymov discovers that nothing he does escapes the state: 

“An hour before, he had thought that his investigator knew nothing about him, that he had recently been promoted from some village. But time passed and the investigator kept on asking questions about the foreign Communists who had been Krymov’s comrades; he knew the familiar forms of their forenames, their nicknames, the names of their wives and lovers. There was something sinister in the extent of his knowledge. Even if Krymov had been a very great man, whose every word was important to history, it would still not have been worth gathering so many trifles, so much junk, into this great file.

[…] A mocking remark he had made about one of his comrades, a word or two about a book he had read, a comic toast he had made on someone’s birthday, a three-minute telephone conversation, an angry note he had addressed to the platform at a conference – everything had been gathered together into the file.” (P.3, ch.42) 

The interrogation scene is brilliant, especially when the investigator has a phone call with his wife in front of Krymov:

“There was something improbable about how very bourgeois and ordinary it all was: the more normal, the more human the conversation, the less the speaker seemed like a human being. There’s something ghastly about a monkey imitating the ways of a man . . . At the same time Krymov had a clear sense that he himself was no longer a human being – when had people ever had conversations like this in front of a third person . . . ? ‘Want a big fat kiss? No? Oh well . . .’” (ibid.) 

In an earlier blog post about Part 2, I mentioned Grossman arguing about free will. But in Part 3, he shows what tyranny does to a person.  

“Who else had signed the letter? […] He wanted to hide behind someone’s back. But it had been impossible for him to refuse. It would have been suicide. Nonsense, he could easily have refused. No, he had done the right thing. But then, no one had threatened him. It would have been all right if he had signed out of a feeling of animal fear. But he hadn’t signed out of fear. He had signed out of an obscure, almost nauseous, feeling of submissiveness.” (P.3, ch.54) 

I have seen many Westerners claim that they would have stood up against Nazis or slavery or tyranny, had they lived in such societies, but would they, really?   

2/ Vasily Grossman is very good at showing how hunger reduces all human beings to beasts. 

“All they ever spoke of was food and material things; the world they lived in had room only for objects. There were no human feelings in this world – nothing but boards, paint, millet, buckwheat, thirty-rouble notes. They were hard-working, honest people; the neighbours all said that neither of them would ever take a penny that didn’t belong to them. But somehow they were quite untouched by the wounded in hospital, by blind veterans, by homeless children on the streets, by the Volga famine of 1921.” (P.3, ch.30) 

These are the people who live in the same house with Alexandra Vladimirovna, mother of Lyudmila and Yevgenia. The whole chapter is excellent.

This is Stumpfe, a German soldier: 

“An enormous man with a vast appetite, he suffered more acutely from hunger than anyone else in the company. His constant hunger drove him out foraging early in the morning. He dug about in the ruins, begged, gathered up crumbs, hung around outside the kitchen. Bach had grown used to his tense, watchful face. Stumpfe thought about food incessantly; he searched for it even when they were fighting.” (P.3, ch.37) 

Grossman in fact writes a long passage about hunger: 

“Molecule by molecule, hunger squeezes out the fats and proteins from each cell. Hunger softens the bones, twists the legs of children with rickets, thins the blood, stiffens the muscles, makes the head spin, gnaws at the nerves. Hunger weighs down the soul, drives away joy and faith, destroys thought and engenders submissiveness, base cruelty, indifference and despair.

All that is human in a man can perish. He can turn into a savage animal that murders, commits acts of cannibalism and eats corpses.” (P.2, ch.50) 

That is a great passage. 

“Potato peelings, dogs, young frogs, snails, rotten cabbage leaves, stale beet, decayed horse-meat, cat-meat, the flesh of crows and jackdaws, damp rotting grain, leather from belts and shoes, glue, earth impregnated with slops from the officers’ kitchen – all this is food.” (ibid.) 

3/ How strange that I come across this passage at this time: 

“He had lived without her before. He could get over it! In a year or so he’d be able to walk straight past her without his heart so much as missing a beat. He needed her as much as a drunk needs a cork! But he understood all too quickly how vain these thoughts were. How can you tear something out of your heart? Your heart isn’t made out of paper and your life isn’t written down in ink. You can’t erase the imprint of years.

He had allowed her to share in his thoughts, in his work, in his troubles. He had allowed her to witness his strengths and his weaknesses . . .” (P.3, ch.50) 

You can’t accuse me of spoilers because I’m not saying who he and she are.

I like this passage about Viktor: 

“He felt quite shaken by the look on Lyudmila’s face. It was a look of utter exhaustion, touching helplessness, and shame – both on his behalf and on her own. On his way down the stairs, he thought that, if he were to break with Lyudmila and never see her again, he would remember that look until his dying day. He realized that something very important had just happened: his wife had informed him that she knew of his love for Marya Ivanovna and he had confirmed it.” (P.3, ch.53) 

These days I keep thinking about the same things: how do people fall in love? why do they fall out of love? why did Viktor fall for Lyudmila before that he now no longer loves her? 

4/ Life and Fate has a thesis about “senseless kindness”, written by Ikonnikov: 

“The private kindness of one individual towards another; a petty, thoughtless kindness; an unwitnessed kindness. Something we could call senseless kindness. A kindness outside any system of social or religious good.

[…] Even at the most terrible times, through all the mad acts carried out in the name of Universal Good and the glory of States, times when people were tossed about like branches in the wind, filling ditches and gullies like stones in an avalanche – even then this senseless, pathetic kindness remained scattered throughout life like atoms of radium.” (P.2, ch.15) 

Ikonnikov is the holy fool in the camp, who used to believe in God and used to be a Tolstoyan. 

“My faith has been tempered in Hell. My faith has emerged from the flames of the crematoria, from the concrete of the gas chamber. I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning.

Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.” (ibid.)

This is a piece by Ikonnikov, but Vasily Grossman demonstrates it over and over again throughout the novel: in battlefields, in the camps, on the way to a gas chamber… One of the memorable examples of kindness is Sofya Levinton’s love for the boy David. Another one, which I think will stay with me, is when a Russian woman gets to her feet and strides towards some German prisoner as though to attack him and “[n]ot understanding what was happening to her, governed by a power she had just now seemed to control”, gives him a piece of bread.

Amidst all the horrors, all the cruelty and madness, there’s kindness, there’s hope, there’s resilience.

And in the final chapters of the book, the central idea is clear: we must live; life must go on. 

I have now finished reading Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman (translated by Robert Chandler), after nearly a month.

It is a very good book, a very humane book. Despite having lived through and depicted some of the worst horrors of the 20th century, Vasily Grossman believed in dignity and strength and resilience and human kindness.

It’s a novel everyone should read.