• Home
• /
• Opinion

The soul of a writer’s work

He is 39. The photographs show him always in his owlish glasses, and there is sometimes more to be read in his posture or the way he holds a cigarette than there is in his eyes, which have none of the grimness but all of the experience of the generals he interviewed.

Grossman spent four years in and around the front lines as a correspondent for Red Star, the Soviet Army newspaper, and the job altered him almost beyond recognition. Gone was the plump, urbane and relatively conventional writer of fiction. What the war gave Grossman were the materials and the mind to write "Life and Fate," arguably the greatest Russian novel of the 20th century.

What is striking about Grossman’s war reporting, as gathered in a new book called "A Writer at War," is the tension between the moral arc of his storytelling and the poetic isolation of the details contained in his notebooks. On any day, he might experience a massive and impelling movement of humans —civilians fleeing a city about to be overrun by Germans, for instance —only to find himself caught up in the chaos of the front itself.

There is really no guessing what numbing went on inside him, but he never seems to have numbed to the particularity of what lay around him. To notice any detail —"a stove made from a helmet" —is to risk both poignancy and triviality, to give it either too much meaning or too little. But what Grossman notices never vanishes under the burden of typicality. It has no allegory to serve —not even the allegory of the Soviet state.

Grossman is a juggler that way. He is caught somewhere between the killing cliches of Soviet propaganda and the rhetoric of open weeping. He gives due weight to what he notices around him, especially death, which is ubiquitous. He carries a sense of his own predicament, but it surfaces only in private letters. He is a Jew and an intellectual, yet fiercely proud of the soldiers of the Red Army, at least until they cross into Poland and Germany.

As a journalist, he is not embedded —to use the contemporary phrase —among soldiers as a representative of a free press in a civilian society. There is no free press. Civilians are only those who will be killed without weapons in their hands, and who have already been brutalised by Stalin before the war. Grossman is not free himself. He is all but a soldier under orders. Yet he is forced to sustain the consciousness needed to record everything he sees around him. His survival, after four years of war, is as miraculous as the survival of Kuznechik, the Bactrian camel that accompanied the 308th Rifle Division from Stalingrad to Berlin, where it spat on the Reichstag.

Particularity is the soul of the writer’s work, but it creates an inherently political problem. You can hear an unaccustomed freedom in the voices of some of the soldiers Grossman interviews, if only because they believe their death is certain.

Grossman’s own instincts incline him to honour the candor he hears at the front, even if it is politically dangerous. He is protected by his willingness to listen and by the fact that his readers are the very soldiers he is talking to. He writes within a strange moment —surrounded by the apolitical violence of war, temporarily sheltered from the brutality of Stalinist politics by his understanding of the Red Army soldier.

Grossman is among the first to come to the concentration camps, Treblinka especially, in the Soviet push westward. He is not prevented as a Jew from writing about Treblinka, but he is prevented from writing for Red Star —an arm of state propaganda, after all —about the humans who died there because they were Jews. Official policy was to deny the particularity of every victim of the Germans, to submerge identity in the mass of the dead.

To read, now, Grossman’s "The Hell of Treblinka" —knowing how far he had come to be there and how fresh in his imagination the shock of the camp must have been —is to be stunned by the care with which he tells the story, holding it apart from himself, submerging everything of himself except his ability to gather information, organise it and elicit suffering from it.

Near the end, he allows himself a "lunatic hope" that this might merely be a dream. It is a rhetorical gesture, whose only purpose is to be denied. Four years at war have persuaded him that feeling and even morality arise from the particulars in the case.