Ghost Captures Soviet Imagination

When the Soviet literary monthly Oktyabr published Vasily Grossman’s novel, “Forever Flowing,” last month, Western news organizations jumped. “An official magazine has printed a vehement attack on Vladimir Ilych Lenin,” said one report. “A literary journal has shattered one of the last remaining taboos of Soviet political life,” said another.

For Soviets, the big news had come 18 months earlier when the same journal published another Grossman novel, “Life and Fate.” Since then, Grossman, whose work is barely known in the West, has become an immensely important writer for the Soviet people. Of all the so-called glasnost writers, Grossman is most often mentioned as the one who best describes the emotional conflicts of this new and uncertain period of Soviet history.

At first this may seem strange. For one thing, Grossman died 25 years ago, long before Gorbachev and glasnost burst upon the scene. He was a socialist realist of the old school, a protege of Maxim Gorky. He had made his name--and was even decorated by Stalin--as a popular writer of genre war novels.

How did Grossman the hero of Stalinist art become Grossman the slanderer of Lenin’s legacy? And why does his work appeal to the Soviet reader?

Westerners are used to thinking of the doctrine of socialist realism as an excuse for enforcing political conformity in art. But socialist realism is not just a technique employed to please censors; it is also a faith, a faith that by describing the world the way it ought to be, the ideal will become real. The heart of literature, to the socialist realist, is truth, the truth that is beyond mere reality.

Grossman was not just a technical socialist realist; he was a believer. If in his war novels the heroes--usually political commissars--had great courage and few weaknesses, it was because he believed that in wartime men grew in stature and wisdom.

It was his devotion to truth that guided Grossman’s transformation, especially after his experience as a war correspondent for the military newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda. Grossman noticed that when the Nazis killed thousands of Jews in the Ukraine, Soviet officials blandly termed them “victims of fascism,” ignoring their religion. He noticed that troops and officers were purged at the front for alleged political crimes, crippling the army’s ability to wage war. He noticed that the millions of political prisoners in camps in the Soviet Union outnumbered the millions in Nazi camps in Germany. These observations eventually led him to embrace a concept of truth at once larger and more dangerous than that preached by socialist realism.

After the war Grossman went to work on an epic novel that he hoped would chronicle the true personal and military history of the battle of Stalingrad (much as Tolstoy chronicled the battle of Borodino in “War and Peace”). He spent the decade from 1950 to 1960 writing “Life and Fate,” a long and complex work that describes not only the horrors inflicted on the Soviet people, but the horrors they inflicted upon themselves as well. Grossman also examines the political and historical forces at work during the war and damningly compares Stalinism to Nazism.

Grossman’s disillusionment was complete. He had come a long way from his veneration of the Party and the People. Instead of defining the world in terms of nations and ideologies, he now spoke of the struggle between freedom and repression.

Grossman didn’t consider himself a dissident, however, and it seems that he fully expected that “Life and Fate” could be published. He sent one copy to the editorial offices of the literary journal Znamya and another to Andrei Tarkovsky, the Novy Mir editor who one year later published Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” But, despite the post-Stalin thaw, “Life and Fate” was more than the cultural climate could bear. The Znamya editors turned the novel over to the authorities, and all copies of the work, including the typewriter ribbons used to type it, were confiscated and locked away.

Before he finished “Life and Fate,” Grossman started another novel, a strange and bitter work that became “Forever Flowing.” In this final effort, completed after his heartbreak over “Life and Fate” and just one year before his death, Grossman traces the blame for the terror of the Stalin years back through Lenin, to the roots of the Russian character, to the mystical national soul that Russians have always considered their greatest strength. “What hope is there for Russia,” Grossman wrote, “if even her greatest prophets (including Lenin) cannot tell freedom from slavery? What hope is there for Russia if her greatest geniuses see the bright and gentle beauty of her soul made manifest in her submissive acceptance of slavery?”

Grossman put his finger on the crux of the issue as today’s Russians see it: What responsibility do they bear for the horrors perpetrated in the course of Russian and Soviet history?

Twenty-five years ago, Grossman trod the same path of disillusion his later countrymen are traveling now. He, like them, was once a believer, and he, like them, had to come to grips with the moral uncertainty that follows the loss of faith. And because he never considered himself an outsider or a dissident but wrote from within the communal Soviet experience, his voice commands their attention.

“When will Russia ever be free?” he asks them in “Forever Flowing.” The Soviet people are trying to address such questions. They will also have to come to terms with Grossman’s answer: “Perhaps never.”