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The Captive Soul: Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate

2016; Hudson Review; Volume: 59; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

2325-5935

Tess Lewis,

Soviet and Russian History

THE WESTERN WORLD WAS GIVEN ITS FIRST GLIMPSE into the Soviet Union's vast and infernal system of penal camps in 1962 with the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Without First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev's express permission, of course, Solzhenitsyn's book would never have appeared in the main literary journal Novy Mir. Devastating as it was, the work fit Khrushchev's political agenda of controlled thaw, which he had set in motion six years earlier by denouncing Stalin's crimes and personality cult in his secret speech at the Twentieth Party Congress. One Day is relatively positive compared to the Gulag literature and memoirs that followed it, such as Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales, Gustaw Herling's A World Apart, or Evgenia Ginsburg's Within the Whirlwind. The day in question is a lucky one for political prisoner Ivan Denisovich Shukhov: he not only survives, but a few fortunate breaks greatly increase his chances of lasting through his ten-year sentence. He narrowly misses solitary confinement several times, avoids the almost certain death sentence of being assigned to work in an external settlement, steals an extra portion of watery gruel, and earns several hundred grams of bread. The novella was acceptable because it did not condemn the Soviet system in general but specifically targeted the labor camps. It drew attention away from Khrushchev's complicity in sending men like Denisovich to their deaths. He had, for example, presided over purges of the Ukrainian nomenklatura and the liquidation of thousands of kulaks in 1937. The fate of Vasily Grossman's more threatening novel about the battle of Stalingrad, the masterpiece Life and Fate,' however, was far different than that of Solzhenitsyn's book. Life and Fate is one of the most significant novels of the twentieth century. And yet, suppressed during the three decades it would have been most influential, it remains largely overlooked. In 1961, the KGB not only confiscated every manuscript copy and rough draft of Life and Fate they could find, they even took the ribbons from the copyists' typewriters. Grossman appealed the Party's decision to any authorities who would listen and to some who wouldn't. He did ' LIFE AND FATE, by Vasily Grossman. Trans. with introduction by Robert Chandler. New York Review Books. $22.95p. Chandler has slightly revised his original translation of Life and Fate, published by Collins Harvill in 1985.