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The novel For a Just Cause by Vasily Semenovich Grossman is a duology with a later work, Life and Fate. It describes the events of the Battle of Stalingrad, which the author went through from the first to the last day. Farewell to the house and the bombardment of the city, the death of children and battles of local significance - everything is shown so convexly, so giftedly that the hand of a real master is easily recognized. The fate of the novel was not easy: it was not published for a long time, it was forced to be edited to please the party line. Despite everything, he went out to tell people the truth. The truth about the terrible days of 1942 in Stalingrad.
journalist, war correspondent, novelist
Biography
Vasily Grossman was born in an intelligent family. His father - Solomon Iosifovich (Semyon Osipovich) Grossman, a chemical engineer by profession - was a university graduate and came from a merchant family. Mother - Ekaterina (Malka) Savelievna Vitis, teacher - was educated in and came from a wealthy family. Vasily Grossman's parents divorced, and he was raised by his mother. Even in childhood, a diminutive form of his name Yosya evolved into Vasya, and later became his literary pseudonym.
Graduated from school.
In graduated. For three years he worked in a coal mine as a chemical engineer. He worked as an assistant chemist at the Regional Institute of Pathology and Occupational Health and as an assistant at the Department of General Chemistry at the Stalin Medical Institute. With constantly lived and worked in Moscow.
In published a story from the life of miners and the factory intelligentsia "Glyukauf", which met with support, and a story about "In the city of Berdichev". The success of these works strengthened Grossman's desire to become a professional writer.
In, collections of his stories were published, in 1937-
Vasily Grossman
FOR A JUST CAUSE
Part one
Pyotr Semyonovich Vavilov was brought a summons.
Something clenched in his soul when he saw Masha Balashova walking across the street straight to his yard, holding a white sheet in her hand. She passed under the window without looking into the house, and for a second it seemed that she would pass by, but then Vavilov remembered that there were no young men left in the neighboring house, and they don’t carry summonses for old people. And indeed, not for the old people: immediately there was a thunder in the hallway, apparently, Masha stumbled in the semi-darkness, and the yoke, falling, rattled on the bucket.
Masha Balashova sometimes came to the Vavilovs in the evenings, until recently she was in the same class as Nastya from Vavilov, and they had their own affairs. She called Vavilov "Uncle Peter", but this time she said:
Sign for the receipt of the summons, - and did not speak with her friend.
Vavilov sat down at the table and signed.
All right," he said as he stood up.
And this "everything" did not refer to the signature in the peddling book, but to the end of home, family life, cut short for him at that moment. And the house, which he was about to leave, appeared before him kind and good. The stove that smoked on damp March days, the stove with the brick exposed from under the whitewash, with its side bulging from old age, seemed to him glorious, like a living creature that had lived all his life nearby. In winter, entering the house and spreading out his frost-worn fingers in front of her, he inhaled her warmth, and at night he warmed himself on a sheepskin coat, knowing where the stove was hotter and where it was cooler. In the dark, getting ready for work, he got out of bed, went to the stove, habitually groped for a box of matches, footcloths that had dried up during the night. And everything, everything: a table and a small bench by the door, on which the wife was sitting peeling potatoes, and a gap between the floorboards by the threshold, where the children looked in to peep the mouse underground life, and white curtains on the windows, and cast iron, so black with soot, that in the morning you couldn’t distinguish him in the warm darkness of the stove, and the window sill, where there was a red indoor flower in a jar, and a towel on a carnation - all this became especially sweet and dear to him, so sweet, so expensive, as only sweet and dear can be living beings. Of his three children, the eldest son Alexei went to war, and his daughter Nastya and the four-year-old, at the same time reasonable and stupid son Vanya, whom Vavilov called "samovar", lived at home. Indeed, he looked like a samovar: ruddy-cheeked, pot-bellied, with a small faucet, always visible from his open pants, snoring busily and importantly.
Sixteen-year-old Nastya was already working on a collective farm and with her own money bought herself a dress, boots and a red cloth beret, which seemed to her very smart. Vavilov, looking at how his daughter, excited and cheerful, in the famous beret, went out for a walk, walked along the street among her friends, usually sadly thought that after the war there would be more girls than suitors.
Yes, this is where he lived his life. Aleksey, who was preparing for the agronomic technical school, sat at this table at night, solving problems in algebra, geometry, and physics together with his comrades. At this table, Nastya and her friends read the reader “Native Literature”. The neighbors' sons, who came to visit from Moscow and Gorky, sat at this table and talked about their life and work, and Vavilov's wife, Marya Nikolaevna, flushed from the heat of the oven and from excitement, treated the guests to pies, tea with honey and said:
Well, our people will also go to the city to study as professors and engineers.
Vavilov took out a red handkerchief from the chest, in which certificates and metrics were wrapped, and took out his military ID. When he again put the bundle with his wife's and daughter's certificates and Vanya's birth certificate in the chest, and put his documents in his jacket pocket, he felt that he was, as it were, separated from his family. And the daughter looked at him with a new, inquisitive look. In those moments, he became somehow different for her, as if an invisible veil lay between him and her. The wife had to return late, she was sent with other women to level the road to the station - military trucks hay and grain were transported along this road to the echelons.
Here, daughter, and my time has come, - he said.
She quietly answered him:
Don't worry about me and mom. We will work. If only you would return healthy, - and, looking at him from the bottom up, she added: - Maybe you will meet our Alyosha, it will be more fun for you both there too.
Vavilov did not yet think about what was ahead of him, his thoughts were occupied with the house and unfinished collective farm affairs, but these thoughts became new, different than a few minutes ago. First, it was necessary to do something that the wife herself could not handle. He began with the easiest: he planted an ax on a ready-made ax that lay in reserve. Then he replaced the thin rung in the stairs and started to repair the roof. He took with him several new boards, an ax, a hacksaw, a bag of nails. For a moment it seemed to him that he was not a forty-five-year-old man, the father of a family, but a boy who had climbed onto the roof for the sake of a mischievous game, now his mother would come out of the hut and, shielding his eyes from the sun with his palm, would look up and shout:
Petka, fuck you, get off! - and stamps his foot impatiently, annoyed that it is impossible to grab his ear. - Get off, they tell you!
And he involuntarily glanced at the hill beyond the village, overgrown with elder and mountain ash, where he could see rare crosses that had sunk into the ground. For a moment it seemed to him that he was to blame: both before the children, and before the deceased mother, now he would not have time to fix the cross on her grave, and before the land that he should not plow this autumn, and before his wife, he would put it on her shoulders the burden that he carried. He looked around the village, the wide street, the huts and courtyards, the forest darkening in the distance, the high clear sky - this was where his life went. The new school stood out like a white spot, the sun shone in its spacious windows, the long wall of the collective farm barnyard was white, the red roof of the hospital was visible from behind the distant trees.
He has worked hard here! It was he and his fellow villagers who erected a dam, built a mill, beat a stone for the construction of an inventory shed and a barnyard, carried timber for a new school, dug foundation pits. And how much he plowed the collective farm land, mowed hay, threshed grain! And how many bricks he and his comrades in the brigade molded! From this brick - and the hospital, and the school, and the club, and even brought bricks to his district. For two seasons he worked on peat - mosquitoes in the swamp make such a buzz that you can't hear a diesel engine. He beat a lot, a lot with a hammer, and chopped with an ax, and dug with a shovel, and carpenter, and inserted glasses, and sharpened tools, and did metalwork.
He looked at everything: the houses, the vegetable gardens, the street, the paths, he looked at the village, as one looks at life. Here two old men came to the board of the collective farm - the angry debater Pukhov and Vavilov's neighbor Kozlov, he was called Kozlik behind his back. Neighbor Natalya Degtyareva came out of the hut, went up to the gate, looked to the right, left, swung at the neighbor's chickens and returned back to the house.
Vasily Grossman
FOR A JUST CAUSE
LIFE AND FATE
Human life and the fate of mankind
“I don’t know if you feel how everyone expects a book about Stalingrad from you - after all, this thing will be about Stalingrad?” - either asked, or claimed Valentin Ovechkin in a letter sent on August 3, 1945. A. Tvardovsky also wrote about the same to Vasily Semenovich in 1944: “I am very happy for you that you are writing, and I look forward to what you write with great interest. Just to say, I don’t expect from anyone as much as from you, and I don’t bet on anyone as much as on you.
Indeed, there was every reason to expect from Grossman a big book about the battle on the Volga. Not only because the Stalingrad essays contained only a small part of the writer’s life impressions, but also because the events of the battle shook the artistic imagination of everyone who was there - let’s recall at least “In the trenches of Stalingrad” by V. Nekrasov, “Days and Nights” by K .Simonova; and, finally, because the description of this battle corresponded to the analytical direction of Vasily Grossman's talent: just as the Battle of Stalingrad pulled together all the fundamental problems of the confrontation between the two forces, absorbed all the previous events of the war and predetermined future ones, so the novel about it allowed not only to present an artistic picture battle in its entirety, but also to try to explain those historical patterns that predetermined the inevitability of our victory and those real circumstances due to which the decisive battle took place not on enemy soil, but in the depths of Russia.
The idea of the novel was dictated not only by the desire to preserve in the memory of people a great time - which in itself was already a huge and noble task - but also by the desire to get to the bottom of the movements of this critical time for the fate of mankind. ‹…›
‹…› The Dilogy “Life and Fate” (such a general name the author wanted to give it) ‹…› is closest to the Russian epic tradition, which was approved by L. Tolstoy in “War and Peace”. And if it is generally difficult to imagine that a prose writer, striving to truthfully reproduce the terrible everyday work of the war, could bypass the experience of a great novelist, then Grossman took these classical lessons quite consciously, consistently, purposefully. ‹…›
‹…› Using various weapons - philosophical reasoning, historical parallels, analysis of military campaigns - Tolstoy carries out his concept of war as a second plan of narration, and even more broadly - the concept of history.
‹…› In one of the drafts of the final part of the epilogue of War and Peace, Tolstoy wrote: “‹…› I began to write a book about the past. Describing this past, I found that not only is it unknown, but that it is known and described completely opposite to what was. And involuntarily, I felt the need to prove what I was saying and to express the views on the basis of which I wrote ... ‹ ... › If there were no these arguments, then there would be no descriptions. ‹…›
Here you are. Grossman openly and consistently relied on Tolstoy's experience. He could also say about his dilogy: were it not for these arguments, there would be no descriptions.
And in general, the strong influence of "War and Peace" is felt in the novel.
‹…› Just as Tolstoy’s epic was, with all the ramifications of the historical plot, “gathered” around the Bolkonsky-Rostov family, so the Shaposhnikov-Shtrum family is at the center of the dilogy, with various kinds of connections - friendly, related, simply by the fact of being in this place - connected with other acting persons. ‹…›
In addition to this fundamental principle, one can also note many other things close to L. Tolstoy: a rapid change in scale, the correlation of private destinies with the main historical event; dispersed "focus" on several characters.
As there the key scenes were connected with the battle for Moscow, so here with the battle for Stalingrad; in a similar way, the narrative is transferred from the rear to the active army and the enemy army. The figure of Hitler is introduced into the narrative, personifying, like Napoleon, the imaginary strength of a man who intends to control the course of history.
More than once, Tolstoy's dialectic in the construction of phrases, determined by the nature of artistic thinking, is also felt. She manifests herself both in philosophical reasoning - when the writer tries to prove that a so far inconspicuous phenomenon contains "a sign of a real, and not a false and imaginary course of historical forces", and in depicting the psychology of people - when Vera "knew that he was ugly, but so how much she liked him, then in this ugliness she saw the dignity of Viktorov, and not his shortcoming.
It is easy to detect many fairly characteristic private analogies: Platon Karataev - the Red Army soldier Vavilov, Natasha Rostova - Yevgeny Shaposhnikov, etc.; and in general, both the author and the characters often recall phrases and situations from "War and Peace" - apparently, Tolstoy's epic firmly owned the soul of the writer. ‹…›
But, following Tolstoy traditions, the dilogy did not so obediently echo the classic exemplary: it was a talented continuation of those main - and not only in "War and Peace" - conquests of Russian epic thinking, when an epoch-making reflection falls on the events depicted, and the social characters chosen by the author, retaining their individuality, become typologically significant. ‹…›
‹…› The dilogy “Life and Fate” is great not because it is an epic, but because it is deep in its historical and philosophical concept and perfect in artistic execution.
The composition of the dilogy resembles a system of "probes" directed to the most distant spheres of being and revealing historically significant events and destinies. As in any epic novel, especially a novel about war, some characters leave the stage or die, others appear. The author does not artificially bring the characters together, they move along their life orbits, but, as in the universe, they are linked by a single force of attraction that opposes the unceasing pressure of entropy.
Now long, then short signals of “probes” are intended to convey a feeling of the fullness of life: after all, in the events of reality themselves there is not always completeness, but some important particle of life and fate is always revealed: the life and fate of the people, life and human destiny. And what richness of intonation is created thanks to this vitality - sometimes unhurried reflection, sometimes the drama of events, sometimes a penetrating feeling, sometimes an almost unbearable intensity of dialogues ...
It is extremely difficult to keep such a huge epic building in the historically short period of several months of the Battle of Stalingrad. The novels of the dilogy seem to be based on spatial distribution: from Hitler's headquarters to the Kolyma camp, from the Jewish ghetto to the Ural tank forge, from the Lubyanka cell to the Kalmyk steppe, but in fact we have not only novels of space, but also novels of time. Artistically compressed time, which is fully justified not only by the swiftness of the war, where at the front a year of service was counted as three (or even a whole life!), but above all by the movement of the author's thought.
One of the author's direct arguments says that time either creates a feeling of a long life, or shrinks, wrinkles - depending on the events in which there is always "a simultaneous sense of duration and brevity ... There are an infinite number of terms here." So the author is trying to capture and convey this multitude of terms, forming a special novelistic rhythm, in which swiftness and unhurriedness are combined, which are just as essential for the epic movement of the dilogy as the change in spatial scales.
Since the epic novel is necessarily a narrative about the fate of the people in those dramatic epochs that turn the wheel of history, its framework is made up of true events. ‹…›
The basis of a large episode in the novel was a laconic message from the essay “Volga - Stalingrad” about how they stopped the enemy who had broken through at the Tractor Plant: “The name of the cheerful and fiery captain Sarkisyan, who was the first to meet German tanks with heavy mortars, will forever go down in the history of this war. The battery of Lieutenant Skakun will be remembered forever. Having lost contact with the command of the anti-aircraft regiment, she fought on her own for more than a day with the air and ground enemy ... "
Of course, all this appears in a romantic form, according to ordinary artistic logic, when certain real episodes give impetus to the writer's creative imagination: the commanders of the units in the reserve Sarkisyan, Svistun (this is how Skakun's surname is changed in the novel) and Morozov are going to drink beer in the city, conduct "everyday" conversations - and suddenly a battle begins with an enemy who has broken through, a battle in which Morozov is killed and Svistun is wounded. And yet, this episode remained a kind of essay chapter: Sarkisyan and Whistler were not included in the further narrative, their images did not receive development.
The example of Vasily Grossman vividly depicted the path that so many of us struggled to crawl through in Soviet times. The path is not only through the tenacious thorns of external censorship, but also through our own Soviet obscurity.
Grossman's latest novels, by comparison, show this lot.
Vasily Grossman in Schwerin (Germany), 1945
"For a Righteous Cause"
In the last Stalinist year, 1952, even in the last months of Stalin, Vasily Grossman’s voluminous military novel “For a Just Cause” was published in Novy Mir - the fruit of seven years of work (since 1943), based on the author’s abundant correspondent impressions in Stalingrad. (And for another three years, the novel stalled in the editorial office and was being finalized.)
After 40 years, you read it with a depressed feeling. You understand: Stalin was still alive and nothing had changed either in Soviet life or in the Soviet consciousness. (And from Grossman’s friend, Semyon Lipkin, you learn: they didn’t want to print it in such and such a form, they took it through the secretariat of the joint venture, and forced them to add a publicistic laudatory chapter about Stalin, and they put the Russian academician Chepyzhin over Shtrum.) However, the living feelings of the descendants do not want remember this: literature - there must be literature, even after 40 years, even after 80, printed - so printed. And with the image of Grossman as he appears today, many places are insultingly warped.
You open it - and it sprinkled: “The worker and the peasant became the rulers of life”, “for the first time in the history of Russia, the workers are the owners of factories and blast furnaces”, “the party admonished the sons with their words of truth”; “Let his friends envy him: he is a Russian communist”; and even directly from the catechism: "Marx's teaching is invincible because it is true"; and "labor Soviet brotherhood", and "our children, I think, are the best in the world"; "an honest forge of labor Soviet democracy", "the party, our party breathes, lives in all this." And even in the best scene - in the battle at the Stalingrad railway station: "Do not hesitate, we are all communists in the department."
Vasily Grossman. I realized that I was dead. video film
“Led by Stalin, Russia sprang forward a century” - canals, new seas ... (Canals! - we know what they cost. Can’t say about that? so don’t at least these declarative inserts.) - Chepyzhin is inserted like this: several in a row newspaper and journalistic dead pages. “What kind of spiritual ties unite science with the life of the people” (in the USSR it is just the opposite: complete separation); "I believe in the mighty life-giving force of the Bolsheviks"; "The issue of creating a communist society is the key to the continued existence of people on Earth." (Well, Shtrum also says: “faith in a happy and free future of his homeland”; “strength must be drawn from inextricable connection with the soul of the people,” is this a Moscow physicist? Stop sharpening your foxes.)
And Stalin, Stalin! His miserable speech on July 3, 1941 is given in the novel almost completely, but to strengthen its flimsy backbone, pieces of recitation from the author are heaped up. "In this conviction was faith in the power of the people's will." And now, “after Stalin's speech, Shtrum no longer experienced mental confusion; with mighty simplicity, Stalin expressed the people's faith in a just cause. And on November 7, "thousands who stood in line on Red Square knew what Stalin was thinking today." (No matter how it is...) And "people, reading the lines of his orders, exclaimed:" I thought so, and I want so! He "keeps in mind the work of factories and mines, and all divisions, and corps, and the thousand-year fate of the people." “People did not yet know, but Stalin already knew about the superiority of the Soviet force” (after the crushing retreat of 1942 ...).
And this bright personality, an underground worker of the tsarist time, Mostovskoy, also hangs out according to the novel. Symbol! - relay race of generations. It turns out that Mostovskoy, in his Siberian exile, once read the Communist Manifesto aloud to a local boy and thus moved the boy to tears (a unique case!), and now the political instructor Krymov, irreplaceable and beloved by the author, grew out of the boy. Currently, Mostovskoy lives in the best party house, on party supplies, lectures on philosophy and is seriously preparing to conduct underground work in Stalingrad under the Germans (and Grossman is also serious about this). But Mostovskoy stands before us just like a dunduk on cothurns. Being apparently engaged in the same political literacy for all Soviet 25 years, he experienced "the indefatigable happiness of work during the years of the creation of the Soviet Republic" and in "the years of great Soviet construction." Over a home-made pie at a party, he, without humor to himself, instructively repeats what everyone knows: how Stalin told the myth about Antey in a speech.
Distorting Soviet pathos seeps through the book not only through hot political spots, but also through social and everyday ones. - And partisanship as a continuous popular impulse (and not a centrally organized operation). Volunteers "believed that there was no higher rank than that of an ordinary fighter" and "eagerly learned the experience of the war." - In the factory shops, inspiration: "No, it's impossible to defeat us!" On any of the workers you look - "the eyes are burning", and even in the semi-darkness especially. In the open-hearth shop, the hard-wrenched workers experience "the happiness of inspiration fighting for freedom" and are especially inspired by Mostovsky's story about his meeting with Lenin (Part II, ch. 7-8). With all his might, the author seeks and blows out poetry in the useless night meeting of miners (II - 51) - to persuade them to work harder. (It’s a nice place to scold the damned tsarist regime; the Soviet one is lacquered flawless.) And next (II - 48) is a typical chase meeting, with (imaginary) reason supposedly invested in it: to break a clear work schedule for the sake of chaotic “overfulfillment”, and with In this case, of course, a simple worker turns out to be more ready for the call of the party than the head of the mine (negative), and at the same time, all the rest of the bosses are touchingly sweet. - And the collective farm activist Vavilov “always wanted a person’s life to be spacious, bright, like this sky. And it was not in vain that he and millions of them worked. Life went uphill”, “long-term hard work did not bend him and his wife, but straightened it out”, “his fate merged with the fate of the country; the fate of the collective farm and the fate of the huge stone cities were the same" (only the latter plundered the first), "that new thing that was brought into life by the scope of collective farm work" - the poetry of newspaper lines! (Only at the very end in passing: it happened that the women "plowed on cows and on themselves." Moreover: some unfinished fist was waiting for the arrival of the Germans.) - And how delightful the leading communists are! Here is the mighty district committee member Pryakhin, deservedly elevated to the regional committee without delay: “The party sends you to hard work - a Bolshevik!” And how humanly sensitive the party organizer of the Central Committee at Stalgres! And - the incomparable secretary of the regional committee. And who is the negative leader (Sukhov, we don’t hear from him anymore), “the Central Committee severely criticized the methods of work” of him. - And the style of work of people's commissars - well, exemplary calm, despite all the tension in the situation. And what a business meeting of directors of factories with the deputy people's commissar! (I - 53, touching Soviet lubok, all are enthusiasts, not bureaucrats, and there is no pressure on them.) There are other meetings at the top, many of them. (And each one describes the appearance of the participants, which we will never see again. )
But even more than is recited is hidden, hidden in the novel. In all pre-war memoirs (and there are many of them) - you will not see the true Soviet life, exorbitantly difficult and with flooded black spots. Academician Chepyzhin does not recall anyone's disappearances and, apparently, he himself was never afraid of arrest: "a simple feeling, I want society to be organized freely and fairly." Colonel Novikov's whole family died, and others had losses - and all died from natural causes or from the Germans, none from the NKVD. Here is the only Darensky (that’s why he is so nervous): he was “denounced” in 1937 by some spiteful critic, but no one, of course, imprisoned him, but sorted it out in a few years - and restored (III - 6). Suddenly, in the oppressed Stalingrad, a whole division of the "internal troops" (NKVD) opens up - "powerful, full-blooded" - but how has it survived to this day? Where is she from and why? As if they brought her into battle? - but immediately disappears (to know: brought out, saved). And there was nothing black on the collective farm: no empty workdays, no coercion, no self-interest of the authorities, but here - "machinery", their local "young people returned as agronomists, doctors, mechanics", and even one became a general. Some old man-old woman grumbled something about the 30th year (I - 60) - so the author is unfriendly about them.
So, war. Some noble professor voluntarily joined the militia, but not a word: neither how cunningly they recruited into that militia, nor how senselessly they killed him. - And "what are the reasons for the retreat" of ours? So "Stalin called them" - and they are superficially repeated (I - 48). The general description of the first year of the war is full of deep concealments: not one of the famous "cauldrons"-environments, not the shameful failures near Kerch and Kharkov. Krymov gets to Moscow just on the eve of the panic on October 16 - what way out does the author have? Krymov fell ill for three weeks, did not see anything, did not know anything - only Stalin was at the parade right away. You can’t name General Vlasov as one of the saviors of Moscow, well, don’t list at all - no, he lists, but without Vlasov. - And the most important thing that is not in this military novel: tyranny and cruelty, starting from Stalin and down the general network, sending others to death without meaning, and the hourly jerking and chasing of the younger by the elders, and there are no detachments, and blurred - what is it about Stalin's order number 227? and only some kind of “penal department” under Kovalev’s company, however, on equal terms with the company, and once a tribunal officer puts the commander Chuikov to endorse the sentence to the officers who took their headquarters back - probably execution? but we don't know about it. And everything-everything-everything that is unsaid is covered with such a kumachevy curtain: "If historians want to understand the turning point of the war, let them imagine the eyes of a soldier under the Volga cliff." If only!
Yes, while Grossman spent 7 years with long efforts building his epic hulk in accordance with censorship "tolerances", and then for 2 more years, together with the editors and the head of the joint venture, brought them more precisely to these tolerances - and the young ones went ahead with small stories: Viktor Nekrasov with “The trenches of Stalingrad”, where talking about the war more naturally, and Kazakevich’s “Two in the Steppe” will already seem, in comparison, bold.
Of course, Grossman could not publish any complete truth in 1952. But if you know the truth, why would you want to publish without it? Twisted? - but the author had the same way: to refuse and not to publish. Or write right away - on the table, someday people will read it.
But to what extent did Grossman himself understand the truth, or did he allow himself to be understood?
The idea that guides Grossman in the construction of this book is "the great ties that determined the life of the country" under the leadership of the Bolsheviks, "the very heart of the idea of Soviet unity." And it seems to me that Grossman sincerely convinced himself of this, and without this confidence such a novel would not have been written. In many episodes, stories, he went to high ranks from the simplest bottoms, their “proletarian” origin is emphasized, the social tops retain family ties with the bottoms today. And the impoverished peasant woman confidently says about her little son: “Under the Soviet regime, he will become a big man for me.” And - not in all those declamatory quotations given above, but in this theory of an organically united, cohesive Soviet people - the main untruth of the book is laid down.
I think this is the key to understanding the author. His Maria Shaposhnikova "knew in herself a happy excitement when life merged with her idea of \u200b\u200bthe ideal", the author slightly laughs at her - and he himself is like that. He follows the assimilated ideal idea with tension throughout the book - and only this allowed him to realize what we see: the pinnacle of "socialist realism", as it is given from above - the most diligent, conscientious socialist realist novel that Soviet literature has succeeded in.
As I understand it, there is no cynicism in all the lies of this novel. Grossman worked on it for years and believed that in the highest (and not primitive private) understanding, the meaning of events is precisely this, and not that ugly, cruel, awkward thing that happens so often in Soviet life. (Tom should have been greatly helped by the fact that, as Lipkin writes, Grossman, the son of the Menshevik, had been a Marxist for a long time and was free from religious notions. touch on our analysis here: we consider the book as it was intended for readers under Stalin, as it appeared for the first time in the world and would have remained if Stalin had not died immediately. into the war through the "Red Star".) And it turned out - the flawless fulfillment of what the supreme customers expect from a Soviet writer. Except for the imposed war, the damned Germans and their bombings, life is not rude or ruthless to a person in anything. You experience a yearning over the book for the fullness of truth, but - there is none, only small fragments. From the concealment of so many sores and ulcers of Soviet life - the measure of people's grief is far, far from being revealed. Grief is open where it is not forbidden: here is the bitterness of evacuation, here is the orphanage, orphans, everything is from the damned German.
In addition, “smart” dialogues are, if not propaganda (for the most part), then tortured; if philosophizing, then it glides over the surface layer of life. Here Shtrum is riding on a train, trying to grasp something with a thought - but there are no thoughts. Yes, no one in the novel has personal convictions, except for those generally binding for a Soviet person. How can you paint such a large canvas - and without your own author's ideas, but only - on generally accepted and state-owned ones? Yes, not a single serious military problem was discussed; and where, it seems, it will touch the scientific, something from physics, - no, only everything is nearby, but the essence is not. And there is too much industrial production, it would be better if it was less and more distinct in content.
Grossman knows the military theme - and it is the backbone of the book - at the headquarters level, explanatory; and – topographically detailed for Stalingrad. Chapters summarizing the military situation (for example, I - 21, I - 43, III - 1) are superior in importance and often crowd out individual combat cases. (But about the true catastrophic course of the war of 1941 and 1942, Grossman not only cannot say because of censorship - does he really understand the intention, the scope of German operations and the course of hostilities? From this, against the background of History, his reviews do not look voluminous.) In the review chapters, alas, Grossman also abuses phrases from military reports, the language - instead of a relaxed or literary one - begins to resemble an arrangement of the official one, like: "German attacks were repelled", "a furious counterattack stopped the Germans", "Red Army troops showed iron stamina ". But in the same chapters, he clearly conveys the disposition of forces necessary for the reader and even (entirely verbally!) A map of the area (Stalingrad, very good). Proximity to staff familiarity delays the author to describe the war as being waged according to a clever strategy. But he diligently develops his own perception of the war (how fresh: in the forests “troops bring with them the machine breath of the city”, and in the city they “bring a feeling of the spaciousness of fields, forests”) and very conscientiously fills in the gaps of his personal experience based on many meetings and observations in a military setting. - All the plot fuss with Commissar Krymov turned out to be completely losing for the book. Once he managed to "blow up" the tsarist army, then - a considerable Cominternist. (Grossman is drawn to this Comintern, and Kolchugin has risen to the Comintern with him.) Krymov’s 40-day exit from the Kiev encirclement is in incorporeal general words, and unbearably false, as he raised his party card above his head in front of his detachment: “I swear to you by the party of Lenin “Stalin, we will break through!” (And very easily, without interrogation, they accepted them from the environment.) Like Grossman’s military newspaper essays in general, these chapters carry the following phrases: “And those who made their way from the encirclement were not scattered, but collected by an iron will Supreme Commander-in-Chief, again became in service. But Krymov himself somehow won’t be able to join the ranks: for the second year of the war, he still walks alone through the fields and regions and goes to Moscow to look for the headquarters of the South-Western Front? We don’t see him as the commissar of the anti-tank brigade either - here, he senselessly rides in a passenger car through a bombed crossing in isolation from his brigade, to “reconnoiter” something in the steppe - this is not the commissar’s business (but it was so convenient for Grossman to beat the crossing instead of a major combat confusion). We learn with a ready-made phrase that Krymov “always talked for a long time with the Red Army, spent hours in conversations with the soldiers,” but we don’t even see half a page of a lively dialogue, and as soon as he heard a slight hesitation in one soldier’s voice, immediately - a delay: “You changed your mind about the Soviet homeland protect?" - and it is known what it smells like. Finally, from this useful work, Krymov is “recalled to the political department of the front” - now he is preparing reports on the international situation in the rear, and now, urgently needed by the Red Army, he is transported across the Volga to the suffering Stalingrad (end of the novel).
One would like to look for hidden irony in the tirade of the division commissar: “Aim the political staff for political work in an offensive battle,” and then they “conducted conversations about the facts of heroism” - but there is no clue to hear the irony. (By the way: there are still political officers in every company, but when it comes to a real battle, Grossman does not draw them for us.)
The magnificent chapter - the description of the first bombing of Stalingrad - is complete in itself (it was published separately in the newspapers). - The only concrete field battle is north of Stalingrad on September 5, where Tolya's battery is, it's quite lively. - And a very good raft of chapters about the extended battle of the battalion for the Stalingrad railway station (III, 37 - 45). Many details are clearly visible, the knocking out of a tank from armor-piercing, paragraphs about fragments, mines, bomb-projectile pressure on a soldier’s soul, “the law of resistance of spiritual materials”, the death of company commander Konanykin; and a semi-playful passage, as if in the development of Tolstoy’s captain Tushin: “the Germans ran askew, crumbly. It seemed that they were only pretending to run forward, and their real purpose was to run backward, not forward; someone pushed them from behind, and they ran to get rid of this invisible, and when they broke away, they began to wriggle. This - and not just a fantasy, it's true and in essence - and this loyalty should be directed to our encircled fighters, when every one of the commanders was killed. Of course, they are surrounded closely, this unites them to a hopeless defense, it seems that they have no way out, but this cannot but awaken thoughts of surrender? However, how can there be such an idea among the iron Soviet Red Army, and even the penalty box? - they all became higher than themselves, and even freed themselves from human shortcomings, in whom such were noticed earlier. And even directly from the author: they "would not want to retreat", in other words, they wanted to die. Nevertheless, this battle, from which there are no living witnesses left for the story, and therefore, largely imagined by the author, is good luck. It grows like an ancient tragedy, when everyone must perish. And "blood-glowing bursts" of tracer, and "black tears" on Vavilov's face.
But when you get into the dugout of Commander Chuikov, you are waiting for something historically important. But Chuikov is stretched by the author's speculation, there is no character, and his conversation with a member of the Military Council, that is, the commissar of the army, slips into how many people joined the party under battle. Divisional Commander Rodimtsev will be immediately abandoned, but he is greatly missed: after all, he sent it on the offensive to death and did not support those surrounded. (But Grossman has almost no stupid cruel bosses: everyone is kind and intelligent, and no one shakes his skin in front of the higher ones.) The fact that our people are being destroyed, and they are being destroyed without meaning and without counting, is not in this book. read. The author observed a lot, yes, and correctly conveys many features of front-line psychology, but not once a front or a battle is seen through the eye of hopeless people's grief. A barge sank nearby with soldiers overloaded with grenades and cartridges, which means everything went to the bottom, and we - past, with those who landed on the shore, under a narrow strip of broken buildings and an almost surrendered city, - and suddenly: “Thousands immediately felt that now the key to their native land is falling into their soldier's hands," - yes, nonsense, they did not feel that at all. And how touchingly dispassionate the sappers of crossings under fire. Very natural feelings are rarely allowed: the communications officers at the headquarters of the front, scurrying dangerously across the Volga, should not forget about rations; or an army prodotedeltsu to drown in blessings - but this is quite a glimpse, without condemnation and without delaying thought on that.
Still remembered: the landscape of the bombed-out city at night; foot transfer of troops along the left bank of the Volga in the light of flying car headlights, in that light and refugees sleeping in the steppe, and “a fluttering blue colonnade of searchlights”. And how the wounded move their "arms and legs, as if valuable, objects that do not belong to them." This is where the pain of war pierces.
If we understand this war as a people's war, then the theme of Russian nationality should have taken a prominent place in the book. But this is not at all. Vavilov is introduced at the beginning and at the end as the only symbol of that, but in life he breathed a collective farm, and at the moment of death he thinks: “there is what, there is a dream” - quite Soviet, atheistic. And no one in this book showed at least a shred of faith in God, except for the old women being baptized in a bomb shelter. Well, one more thing: withered branches of camouflage around the steamship pipes - “as if on the Trinity”.
Only one bright breakthrough of the people's character succeeded, along with the people's humiliation. On a moonlit night, senior officers cross the Volga in a motorboat (III - 54, 55). Dangerous, how will it go? The restless lieutenant colonel holds out a cigarette case to an extremely calm minder, to whom the crossing is customary: “Light up, hero. From what year?" The minder took a cigarette and grinned: “Does it matter which one?” And it's true: they crossed safely, jumped out - and even forgot to say goodbye to the minder. Here is where the truth lies. And instead of it, extremely clumsy praises were expressed several times: “the most generous people in the world” (I - 46); “these were the kind and intelligent eyes of the Russian worker”; “the incomparable laughter of a Russian person”; Yes, at the Congress of the Comintern "nice Russian faces." The constant theme of "the unity of the Soviet people" in no way replaces the Russian theme, which is so important for this war.
No less than Russian (and any other truly important side of Soviet life) the Jewish theme is suppressed in the novel - but this, as we read in Lipkin, and it’s easy to guess, was forced. Grossman was on fire with the Jewish theme, especially after the Jewish Holocaust, even “obsessed with the Jewish theme,” as Natalya Roskina recalls. Even at the Nuremberg trials, his brochure “Treblin Hell” was distributed; immediately after the war, he was the initiator and compiler of the “Black Book”. But, just a few years later, he forces himself to be silent, but how? Almost deaf. He keeps the Jewish grief in his memory all the time, but he shows it extremely carefully - all the same effort to see his novel in print at all costs. We learn that somewhere unknown to us, Ida Semyonovna, Seryozha's mother, died from something. The death among the Germans of another Jewish mother, Shtrum, is not given in full sound, not in full concussion for the son, but is subdued, and at intervals; it is mentioned that the son received a suicide letter from her - but it is not explained to us. Directly, firsthand, only Dr. Sophia Levinton is shown, friendly-caricature and with a good soul, and the physicist Shtrum is the author’s favorite hero, even an alter ego, but, probably precisely because of this, he is rather incorporeal, imperceptible. The relief shows the Jewish theme only against a German background: in Hitler's office as a plan for extermination, and in the photograph of an SS man as a procession of Jews wandering into this destruction.
The German theme as an allegorical testing ground for the Soviet theme was used by more than one Grossman (of the most famous: journalist and translator Lev Ginzburg, film director Mikhail Romm). It is clear: it is quite safe, and something, something general, can be expressed. So Grossman, in Chepyzhin's deadly publicistic monologue, expressed the idea: the natural movement of the evil ones is up, and the good ones are down. (But did Grossman realize that this was also about the Soviet world? You can’t find evidence of this throughout the entire volume of the novel.) Based on meager attempts to describe the German rear or the army, the hopelessness of life, surveillance, the danger of letting it slip, someone’s silent loneliness, like Schmidt, - it is even clearer what layers of life are not even touched on the Soviet side. In general, the description of the German side is very pale. Hitler himself is intensely constructed from photographs and someone else's memories - but cardboard, without an internal spring. (Opening: “he spat his lips in his sleep” – so, maybe Stalin also spat?) Cardboard and a scene with Himmler. Cardboards and German generals, there is nothing actually German in them, and nothing individual. Cardboards and soldiers, and junior officers - they are made according to the stamps of Soviet newspapers. The whole idea - to describe the German side - in general was reduced to a satirical manner, to accusatory journalism. In this spirit, there is an implausible scene, about which Krymov was “reliably” told, as if a German tanker, for no reason at all, without any purpose, sent a tank to a column of Russian women and children, to crush them. If in a military novel the author wants to depict the enemy in some relief, then this must be done with elementary soldierly respect.
And it would seem: having written such a conscientious Soviet novel, rising to such a pinnacle of socialist realism and glorifying Stalin - could Grossman wait - and for what? - a blow from Stalin? Lipkin writes: Grossman confidently waited for the Stalin Prize for himself even for "Stepan Kolchugin", the orthodox one (but did not receive it). And now something?! Yes, an enthusiastic discussion of the "Just Cause" took place in the Writers' Union, they have already proclaimed it both "Soviet "War and Peace"" and "an encyclopedia of Soviet life." And suddenly?? - the seemingly most good socialist realist novel received a crushing blow: an article (by Doldon Bubennov) in Pravda, February 13, 1953. Surely, the Soviet furious criticism will not find something to hit? Of course: “the ideological weakness of the novel”, “non-historical reactionary views”, “a perverted interpretation of fascism”, “not a single bright living image of a communist”, “a gallery of small people”, there is not a single “big, bright typical hero of Stalingrad” who “struck readers with the richness and colors of their feelings”, instead of this “the motives of doom and sacrifice in episodes of battles”, and “where are the pictures of the mass labor heroism of the workers?” (as he does not notice either the Stalingrad factories or the Ural mines). Only ... the image of the German army was praised (precisely because it is caricatured, according to the accepted template ...). And here's what: "to the unremarkable Shtrum" why are all the arguments given "instead of the thoughts of genuine representatives of the people"? (Already here - a hint of Jewishness, for February 1953 - very serious. It can be seen that in the months of the "doctors' case" Stalin had to hit the Jewish author with his hand?) The blows continued further: Shaginyan in Izvestia and the faithful watchdog Fadeev. And - Tvardovsky had to repent for having published in his journal. And - Grossman had to repent, he did not fail either. Yes, in these weeks he also signed the appeal of prominent Jews condemning the "poisoning doctors" ... As Lipkin writes, he himself expected to be arrested. Take Stalin and die. And now how to wipe everything?
For great literature, even this book cannot be saved by any alteration. Today, no one will read it seriously. Her narrative is largely languid (in the first two parts); there are almost no exciting scenes, except for the aforementioned battle for the Stalingrad railway station, and above that, the artless, cordial, unrevealed meeting between Major Berezkin and his wife; alas, there is no lexical freshness either. However, despite all this, the book has significant merits and will not be erased from the literature of its era. That war - she breathes, no doubt. And it has great scenery. Accurate and subtle observations - material and psychological. And a lot of work on the variety of appearances of so many characters. (More on all of this in Epic Techniques.)
One can imagine what a burning and quick remorse pierced through Grossman! So he agreed to this shameful signature under a letter about doctors - and then Stalin disappeared, and the "poisoners" scattered. And the novel “For a Just Cause” remained, already unbearable to the author himself with exaggerations and official lies - but you can’t remove it from literature and people’s memory?! (Lipkin writes: in the libraries there were queues for the novel, there was public enthusiasm - so much the worse, it means that it entered the human consciousness, accumulated in it.)
And Grossman already had the idea of the second volume of the dilogy even then, and it seems that it had already begun, in parallel with two years of efforts to “punch” the first volume into print. And now there was only one outcome for the artistic conscience: not to renounce the 1st volume (which would have been disastrous even in Khrushchev’s time) - but in the 2nd one to have time to catch up with the truth, and even that little Khrushchev’s publicity, when hidden in 1- m ulcers of Soviet life appeared - no, not yet in print, but in the minds of people and in their conversations among themselves.
The second volume will be written for 8 years, will be completed in 1960 - and, never known to anyone, captured by the KGB in 1961 - and for the first time fully published only in the West in 1980 (copy saved by S. I. Lipkin). So he entered a completely different era, very late.
The battle of Stalingrad through the eyes of military journalist Vasily Grossman appears before the reader from the very beginning. From the first pages, events begin to unfold with the plans of the heads of the German and Italian states discussing an attack on the Soviet Union. Grossman is so detailed that he fishes thoughts out of the heads of Hitler and Mussolini, finding many unflattering impressions on both sides. Behind the screen of political fuss, the author's corrosive desire to deal with absolutely everything related to the Second World War is not immediately visible. And then there was no stopping him. The flow of information hit the reader. The reader sees himself on the battlefields among the soldiers, in the basements of houses along with the locals. And Vasily Grossman is always nearby, arranging the story chronologically correctly.
The war is far away. Nothing disturbs the peaceful life of the Soviet people. They go about their business. Study, work, think about the present. Their thoughts float by, occasionally stirring the soul. Physicists do physics while thinking about the physical. Students are trying to gnaw at the granite of science, working out the right to do so on the collective farm. This kind of slowness will not accelerate. The news of the war will slowly come, everyday life will slowly stretch, everyone will find something to do and no one will be bored. Grossman is able to make a rich picture out of an ordinary train ride, albeit not always purposefully applying paint, smearing reflections on the harbingers of current events across the canvas.
Grossman does not have white and black. For Vasily, a person is a person who has adopted certain views as a result of events happening to him as he grows older. If someone was born on the eve of the October Revolution or consciously accepted the demolition of the Empire to suit the needs of the working class, he will have to praise the ruling regime, because if you take off the blinders, he effectively influenced people, changing them beyond recognition. And if someone was born in the Weimar Republic, vegetated from hyperinflation and wanted to throw off the yoke of the capitalist powers, he similarly praised the leaders of the Third Reich, who promised him quick changes. Grossman himself is inclined to praise the merits of the Soviet Union, according to the above reasons.
When Grossman moves on to the Battle of Stalingrad, he shows it from all sides. Animals were the first to leave the city, then some of the inhabitants, and then the war came. Vasily in the same manner consistently reflects in detail the ongoing processes. The soldiers suffer from troubles, the civilian population continues to vilify each other in a quarrelsome way. Grossman pays attention to everything, satisfying the reader's curiosity. Behind the seeming abundance of words, the short essence of what is described is hidden: it was so before, it is so now, tomorrow it will happen again; it is useless to speak, to warn, to visually demonstrate, to correlate with the past. The reader will reasonably object, recalling to the author the desire of nature for balance - bad blood will come out by itself, or tension will result in a cataclysm. In both cases, a significant number of living souls will cease to exist. Grossman encourages the reader to speculate with his reflections. What he didn't say, others will.
“For a Just Cause” is taken with a share of reproach by a number of readers for Grossman's idealization of Stalinist reality. The work abundantly boasts of the state system, the bright motives of the people inhabiting the country and the excessive desire to sacrifice oneself in the name of ideals. It may seem that it is better to live like this than to be aware of the oppression of a flimsy financial system that threatens to collapse in the evening and plunge you into the darkness of hopeless bondage, because the factories have been converted into shopping centers and it will no longer be possible to earn a living in an honest way. Again, Grossman gives food for thought: everyone is capable of scolding, but only a few agree to accept.
