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<\/a>Totalitarian physics & moral threshing<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\nJacob Howland<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n On the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Vasily Grossman\u2019s great anti-Soviet novel\u00a0Life and Fate.<\/em><\/p>\n Thi<\/span>s year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the first publication in the Soviet Union of Vasily Grossman\u2019s\u00a0Life and Fate<\/span>, a nine-hundred-page novel of life under Stalin. This was a small posthumous triumph for the author. The\u00a0kgb<\/span>\u00a0had confiscated the manuscript in 1961, and Grossman\u2014who wrote to Khrushchev asking, \u201cWhat is the point of me being physically free when the book I dedicated my life to is arrested?\u201d\u2014was told that it could not be published in the\u00a0ussr<\/span>\u00a0for another two hundred years. Depressed and suffering from stomach cancer, he died in 1964.<\/span><\/p>\n The censors knew what they were doing. Like Arthur Koestler\u2019s\u00a0Darkness at Noon<\/span>,\u00a0Life and Fate<\/span>\u00a0depicts Communism and Fascism as ideological mirror-images, two quarreling heads on one great monster. The manuscript made it out of the\u00a0ussr<\/span>\u00a0on smuggled microfilm in the late 1970s, and appeared in English in Robert Chandler\u2019s 1985 Harper & Row translation (reissued by New York Review Books in 2006). Although the Soviet Union\u2019s collapse was still a few years off,\u00a0Life and Fate<\/span>\u00a0is far too great to be quickly absorbed, and Grossman\u2019s book was swept under in the wave of historical forgetfulness that followed the Cold War. Immediately after the collapse, Francis Fukuyama\u2019s more-celebrated book descried\u00a0The End of History<\/span>; ironically, its Hegelian presentation of liberal democracy as the culmination of the Universal History of mankind was a\u00a0r\u00e9chauff\u00e9<\/span>\u00a0of the work of Alexandre Koj\u00e8ve, a Russian-born self-avowed Stalinist posthumously exposed in 1999 as a Soviet spy. Since then History has marched on, trampling memory underfoot. Chandler justly remarks that\u00a0Life and Fate<\/span>\u00a0is \u201cthe true\u00a0War and Peace<\/span>\u201d of the twentieth century, \u201cthe most complete portrait of Stalinist Russia we have or are ever likely to have.\u201d Those who have read both books will agree that the comparison honors Tolstoy no less than Grossman. But most American readers still know next to nothing about Grossman\u2019s masterwork.<\/span><\/p>\n Life and Fate<\/span>\u00a0is a massive literary fusion of poetry and mathematics, narrative and scientific observation. Multiple stories of struggle and suffering\u2014a rich accumulation of significant data about the human condition in the age of ideology\u2014are punctuated by Tolstoyan passages of philosophical reflection on the inner meaning of these imaginatively generated phenomena. The book centers on Hitler\u2019s invasion of the\u00a0ussr<\/span>\u00a0and the smashing of \u201ctwo hammers . . . each composed of millions of tons of metal and flesh\u201d at the Battle of Stalingrad, events whose shock waves the narrative registers with seismographic sensitivity as they disrupt and volatilize hundreds of interconnected lives across an entire continent.<\/span><\/p>\n In one of the book\u2019s first chapters, Grossman describes a firestorm unleashed by the Luftwaffe bombing of fuel tanks:<\/span><\/p>\n The life that had reigned hundreds of millions of years before, the terrible life of the primeval monsters, had broken out of its deep tombs; howling and roaring, stamping its huge feet, it was devouring everything round about. The fire rose thousands of feet, carrying with it clouds of vaporized oil that exploded into flame only high in the sky. The mass of flame was so vast that the surrounding whirlwind was unable to bring enough oxygen to the burning molecules of hydrocarbon; a black, swaying vault separated the starry sky of autumn from the burning earth. It was terrible to look up and see a black firmament streaming with oil.<\/span><\/p>\n The columns of flame and smoke looked at one moment like living beings seized by horror and fury, at another moment like quivering poplars and aspens. Like women with long, streaming hair, the black clouds and red flames joined together in a wild dance.<\/span><\/p>\n Only an eyewitness\u2014Grossman reported from Stalingrad for the newspaper\u00a0Red Star<\/span>\u2014could provide such particular details. Only a great writer could compose such an intensely lyrical apocalypsis: Life, chemically transformed inside the earth into combustible matter, rages and consumes itself in a vast, murderous vortex. Tens of millions of souls haunt these flames, including Grossman\u2019s mother, shot over a pit with the other Jews of Berdichev, Ukraine. Here is the deep mystery at the heart of\u00a0Life and Fate<\/span>, and of our time: how the industrial lethality of totalitarianism gestated within, and broke free from, the soil and sediment of human life.<\/span><\/p>\n Ear<\/span>ly in\u00a0Life and Fate<\/span>, two Soviet commanders under fire seem to be on the verge of beginning \u201cthe one conversation that really mattered\u2014about the meaning of Stalingrad.\u201d That particular conversation fails to occur; the book as a whole is that conversation. It is a teeming and tumultuous literary cosmos, and at its center is the problem of the relationship between organic spontaneity and freedom (Life) and mechanical, ineluctable social forces (Fate).<\/span><\/p>\n Quantum theory offers an illuminating analogy for this relationship, but from a strictly inorganic viewpoint. What an individual photon will do when it strikes a reflective surface cannot be predicted; it may go straight through the surface or bounce off it in any number of directions. In the aggregate, however, photons obey the laws of classical optics; governed by statistical probabilities, the path of light is for all practical purposes entirely predictable. The comparable predictability of human behavior on a large scale, \u201cthe principle of quantum politics,\u201d forms the basis of a totalitarian physics. Probability theory underlies the mass social phenomena with which alone the State reckons, as well as the crude, ideological group-forms\u2014Party, peasant, bourgeois; Russian, Ukrainian, Jew\u2014it imposes on the concrete relations of irreducibly unique human beings.<\/span><\/p>\n Physics in fact furnishes a rich fund of images in\u00a0Life and Fate<\/span>. Viktor Shtrum, the book\u2019s central character, struggles to work out the mathematics of the disintegration of atomic nuclei; Grossman\u2019s narrative, densely populated with characters displaced by enormous acts of aggression, simultaneously records a kind of massive nuclear reaction. Like energized, destabilized atoms, individuals violently collide, clump together, split apart, and experience various degrees of psychological fission. A kindly German governess is denounced by a Russian neighbor who covets her room. A Jewish doctor in a Ukrainian town occupied by the Wehrmacht finds her door smashed and women arguing over her furniture. An old Bolshevik in the Gulag suffers a crisis of political faith when he hesitates to inform on criminals who filch a long nail from the camp tool shop and drive it through another inmate\u2019s ear into his brain. A Jewish commissar is made to \u201cfrown, twitch, and turn away\u201d on seeing the look of a Jewish airman he has publicly reprimanded for \u201cnationalist prejudices\u201d when he defends himself against anti-Semitism. A comrade of Trotsky\u2019s learns in the Lubyanka prison \u201chow a man could be split apart\u201d by the State he had helped to found. A pitiless Party secretary is \u201coverwhelmed by a helpless tenderness, an unreasoning love\u201d on taking leave of his wife and children; \u201ctheir life, which had seemed one, had suddenly split apart.\u201d The particulars are all unique, but the same basic phenomena of behavior and feeling\u2014the observable patterns of a social and psychological physics\u2014recur repeatedly throughout the book. Rea<\/span>ders will pause to reflect on a strange remark that turns out to be located at the mathematical center of\u00a0Life and Fate<\/span>\u00a0as reckoned by parts and chapters. On his way to Berlin to report on the construction of a gas chamber and ovens, the\u00a0SS<\/span>\u00a0Commandant Liss recalls Mostovskoy, a Bolshevik prisoner he had tried to convince of the essential identity of Hitlerism and Stalinism: \u201cWhat an interesting old man! Yes, once you get inside the nucleus of the atom, the forces of attraction begin to act on you as powerfully as the centrifugal forces.\u201d It is no coincidence that the core of Grossman\u2019s narrative is a zone of intense industrial negativity. For the totalitarian State is something like an extremely heavy metal, and its nucleus\u2014the point where all ideological, technological, and administrative forces converge and achieve maximum concentration\u2014is a death camp.<\/span><\/p>\n It is not for nothing that Liss calls Mostovskoy \u201cTeacher.\u201d Hitler\u2019s vast concentrationary universe\u201442,500 ghettos and camps had been identified as of 2013\u2014plagiarizes the Gulag, the prison archipelago begun by Lenin and finished by Stalin. Liss\u2019s gas chamber\/crematory complex is designed by a Professor Stahlgang (Steel Corridor), an echo of Stalin (Man of Steel) and of the trains and railways that incessantly fed the camps of Poland and Siberia. In the Nazi camps, the exhausted slaves that Primo Levi describes as \u201cempty inside . . . like the slough of certain insects one finds on the banks of swamps\u201d were called\u00a0Muselm\u00e4nner<\/span>. In the Soviet ones they were called\u00a0dokhodyagi<\/span>, a term derived from\u00a0dokhodit<\/span>, \u201cto reach\u201d or \u201cto attain\u201d: these extinguished souls had at last come to the end of the road of socialism. But Hitler\u2019s trains went further, to the very last stop on the line. While the Gulag\u2019s millions died of exposure, starvation, and overwork on the frozen tundra, the Germans of the Third Reich, \u201ca people moved by the most progressive of philosophies,\u201d addressed the problem of the enemies of the State with real entrepreneurial innovation. Stahlgang\u2019s streamlined factory is built to fulfill all production quotas, \u201ctransforming life itself, and all forms of energy pertaining to it, into inorganic matter\u201d through a process that combined the principles of \u201cthe ordinary industrial hydro-turbine . . . with those of the slaughter-house and the garbage incineration unit.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n This is not all. For the Annihilation Camp at the center of\u00a0Life and Fate<\/span>\u00a0(the operational abstraction of the word\u00a0Vernichtungslager<\/span>\u00a0is stunning) is the scene of a perverse Last Supper, a ghastly photographic negative of the biblical original:<\/span><\/p>\n A small surprise had been laid for Eichmann and Liss during their tour of inspection. In the middle of the gas chamber, the engineers had laid a small table with hors d\u2019oeuvres and wine. Reineke invited Eichmann and Liss to sit down.<\/span><\/p>\n Eichmann laughed at this charming idea and said: \u201cWith the greatest of pleasure.\u201d . . .<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWell, gentlemen,\u201d said Eichmann, \u201cI call that excellent ham!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Adolf Eichmann\u2019s little Jewish joke is more than a demonic obscenity. Jesus agrees with the Hebrew God who calls himself\u00a0El Shaddai<\/span>, \u201cGod of Breasts\u201d: man does not live by bread alone. The biblical God nourishes soul and body alike\u2014literally, in the case of the communion wafer. Totalitarianism reverses this relationship. Like some primitive, malformed Titan, the State, Nietzsche\u2019s \u201ccoldest of all cold monsters,\u201d feeds on human lives.<\/span><\/p>\n Mas<\/span>s murder and cannibalism are intimately connected in the history of the\u00a0ussr<\/span>\u00a0and the Third Reich. Stalin used famine as a targeted political weapon, killing roughly five million Ukrainians in the Holodomor of 1932\u201333; some victims resorted to anthropophagy. Nor is Eichmann\u2019s gas-chamber meal a farfetched invention. Ukrainian witnesses interviewed by Father Patrick Desbois in\u00a0The Holocaust by Bullets<\/span>\u00a0repeatedly testified that the men of\u00a0the\u00a0Einsatzgruppen<\/span>\u00a0banqueted next to the pits where Jews were being shot. Desbois also learned from a Polish peasant in Belzec that the\u00a0SS<\/span>requisitioned farm machinery used to separate husks from grains. Enslaved Jews had to turn the handles of the machines, not to sort wheat or barley, but to ventilate the ashes of their cremated fellows.<\/span><\/p>\n Images of ravenous, grinding machines and fierce, voracious beasts are woven throughout\u00a0Life and Fate<\/span>, sometimes in subtle ways. Soviet soldiers wait at Stalingrad \u201cto be eaten,\u201d chewed up by \u201cthe iron teeth of the German offensive.\u201d Flames \u201cflickered like tongues from the mouths of mortars.\u201d Liss\u2019s gas chamber seems to have \u201cbroken free of its creators . . . feeling its own concrete hunger, secreting toxins, masticating with its steel jaws, beginning the long process of digestion.\u201d David, a Jewish boy caught in the Nazi dragnet, recalls a picture book in which a wolf\u2019s \u201cgreen eyes\u201d and \u201cred jaw\u201d are just visible in a dark forest near a clearing where a small goat grazes. Viktor refers to\u00a0Max und Moritz<\/span>, Wilhelm Busch\u2019s classic illustrated children\u2019s book about naughty boys who are ground into pellets by a farmer and eaten by ducks: human grist for the mill. And a letter to Viktor from his mother, Anna Semyonovna, smuggled out of a Ukrainian ghetto, mentions Alphonse Daudet\u2019s \u201cLes Vieux.\u201d The reader who turns to Daudet\u2019s story finds in it many funny and poignant things, including an orphan haltingly mouthing a passage in which the Church Father Irenaeus cries out \u201c \u2018I am the wheat of the Lord; I must be ground between the teeth of animals.\u2019 . . . Just then two lions jumped on him and devoured him.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n In fact, something like the wheat of the Lord\u2014individual goodness that nourishes the soul even as the body is being ground to \u201clabor-camp dust\u201d\u2014turns out to be the eccentric, living antipode in\u00a0Life and Fate<\/span>\u00a0of the dense gravitational mass of the State. This deep moral truth is brought home by Ikonnikov, a camp inmate who lost faith in Stalin\u2014and then in God\u2014after he witnessed the horrors of collectivization and the execution of twenty thousand Jews. In a written testament that Liss and Mostovskoy regard with contempt, Ikonnikov offers an organic characterization of the process described in the analogy of quantum politics. The world is ruled by abstract concepts of universal Good, capable of producing \u201cgreater evil than evil itself.\u201d These strange historical outgrowths are the husks of a discarded human vitality, as inevitable, in Ikonnikov\u2019s view, as the accretion of Christian orthodoxy around the living example of Jesus. Yet kernels of individual goodness and freedom, \u201chiding in the living darkness of the human heart,\u201d are \u201cscattered throughout life like atoms of radium.\u201d These living kernels, undetectable by political calculations, sprout senseless acts of kindness \u201coutside any system of social or religious good.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Life and Fate<\/span>\u00a0bears out Ikonnikov\u2019s insight. Anna Semyonovna knows what awaits the Jews, but continues to tutor pupils in French and to treat patients for glaucoma and cataracts. She writes from the ghetto that \u201cit\u2019s not so much me visiting the sick as the other way round\u2014that the people are a kind doctor who is healing my soul.\u201d The Soviet soldier and physician Sofya Levinton, \u201cfighting against some powerful force that she found repugnant,\u201d remains silent when the\u00a0SS<\/span>\u00a0calls for doctors and surgeons. With a \u201cfeeling of exaltation,\u201d she chooses to die with David, whom she has been feeding and caring for since they were imprisoned in a goods wagon. She is a virgin, but her last living thought as she clings to the boy in the gas chamber testifies to the inner generativity of love: \u201cI\u2019ve become a mother.\u201d Grekov, a captain in an outpost surrounded by Germans, saves the life of Krymov, a commissar who intends to have him shot for anti-Soviet attitudes. \u201cThere\u2019s something good in your eyes,\u201d Grekov tells Krymov. \u201cBut you\u2019ve suffered a lot.\u201d These private acts of kindness are in one sense entirely futile: all of these men and women are doomed. Yet Ikonnikov, who condemns himself to death when he refuses to help build extermination facilities, maintains that \u201cdumb, blind love,\u201d as \u201cpowerless as dew\u201d before Fate, is nothing less than \u201cman\u2019s meaning.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Peo<\/span>ple everywhere in\u00a0Life and Fate<\/span>\u00a0are fed into a steel hopper of tremendous social forces. The State is unconcerned with whether any particular individual resists or cooperates with these forces; all are in any case effectively governed. That is the fundamental truth of totalitarian physics. But there is deeper truth: the moral truth of freedom, of the \u201cinflammable peat\u201d of the soul. In Grossman\u2019s book, the encounter of existing individuals and unalterable circumstances, of freedom and necessity, ultimately reveals itself to be a process of moral threshing. And no writer observes and registers this process more perspicuously than he.<\/span><\/p>\n At Stalingrad, a Soviet artillery barrage blasts soil into the air; \u201cthese clouds of earth then passed through the sieve of gravity, the heavier lumps falling straight to the ground, the dust rising into the sky.\u201d Gravity separates totally disintegrated matter from clumps of earth that retain mass and density in spite of the explosion; the atomized particles are sucked up by \u201cthe cruel sky, the sky of ice and fire\u201d\u2014an image of the pitiless abstraction of the State\u2014while the clods are drawn toward the earth. Here is how a former Chekist describes an Arctic construction project that cost the lives of ten thousand prisoners:<\/span><\/p>\n You should have seen the columns of zeks marching to work. In dead silence. The blue and green of the Northern Lights above them, ice and snow all round them, and the roar of the dark ocean. There\u2019s power for you.<\/span><\/p>\n In Grossman\u2019s anthropomorphic and almost pantheistic vision, even plants and animals are disturbed and afflicted by the \u201cterrible frozen abyss\u201d that hangs overhead. Trees at a northern airfield shake in the night, \u201cfrightened by a bad dream.\u201d Spruce and birch saplings, cut off from the sun by the forest canopy, freeze to death \u201cin the twilight of penal servitude.\u201d Soldiers tell of dogs who ignore Russian aircraft but run at the sound of German ones, and of flocks of starlings that perfectly mimic the whistle of bullets. A cat is scalded after its owner is arrested; another, a thin stray with \u201cweepy eyes\u201d that David feeds from a tin, is disposed of by a neighbor who finds it disgusting. But other animals share a precious measure of warmth with human beings. A kitten, \u201chalf-paralyzed\u201d by artillery fire, drags itself from a pile of rags so that it may die near kind Katya, the radio operator. Novikov, a battle-hardened tank corps commander, keeps a chipmunk and a hedgehog in his quarters, and David treasures a cocoon in a matchbox, releasing the chrysalis that emerges from it right before he is sucked into the gas chamber. Simple kindness draws rich human grain toward the life-giving earth, separating it from the empty husks that ride the frozen wind.<\/span><\/p>\n The hard reality of combat also separates wheat from chaff in\u00a0Life and Fate<\/span>. Operation Barbarossa mobilized the largest invading force in history (one hundred and fifty divisions of four million Axis soldiers), and culminated in the greatest and most terrible battle ever fought. Nowhere was the uselessness of the State, of commissars, security officials, and Party bureaucrats, more evident than at Stalingrad. The inexperienced Nyeudobnov is given a generalship only because of his status in the Party and the\u00a0nkvd<\/span>. Left briefly in command by Novikov (whom he actually outranks), he realizes with horror that \u201chere at the front, the terrible rage of the State, before which millions of people bowed down and trembled, was of no effect\u201d; were the Germans to appear, \u201cit would be no good threatening to dismiss them from their posts or accusing them of conspiring with enemies of the people.\u201d Stalingrad was a socio-physical experiment in which an enormous quantity of ideological and administrative mass simply evaporated; formerly a \u201cmillion tons of granite,\u201d the State at the moment of crisis weighed less than a desiccated leaf.<\/span><\/p>\n “The<\/span>\u00a0soul of wartime Stalingrad was freedom,\u201d Grossman writes. We see this freedom in the soldiers\u2019 open mockery of Krymov, assigned to a surrounded outpost so that he may deliver ideological indoctrination to the besieged combatants and write reports about them. (The certainty of being turned to dust by German steel must have had a liberating effect on them.) We see it most of all in the incalculable power of spontaneously united individuals:<\/span><\/p>\n For all the vast forces involved, the German attacks had still not led to a decisive victory. Some of the Russian regiments now only numbered a few dozen soldiers; it was these few men, bearing all the weight of the terrible fighting, who confused the calculations of the Germans.<\/span><\/p>\n The Germans were simply unable to believe that all their attacks were being borne by a handful of men. They thought the Soviet reserves were being brought up in order to reinforce the defence.<\/span><\/p>\n Because the Germans erroneously assumed that the reserves had already been deployed, they were entirely unprepared for the lightning-fast encirclement they suffered in the final Soviet offensive. The \u201ctrue strategists\u201d of the offensive were not generals, but scouts, sappers, plotters, gunners, and snipers: free patriots \u201cwith their backs to the Volga who fought off Paulus\u2019s divisions.\u201d Victory was achieved not by a State collective abstractly conceived and imposed from above, but\u2014for once!\u2014by a true social collective, an organic brotherhood of workers. It was achieved by the Soviet people.<\/span><\/p>\n But freedom\u2014Life\u2014is only one part of the meaning of Stalingrad. Hegel saw the cunning of Reason even in the Terror of the French Revolution, the paradigm of all modern ideological revolutions; History\u2019s abandonment and sacrifice of vast multitudes of individuals and peoples was in fact a necessary means of universal advancement, a hard husk that protected the idea of freedom until it was ready to sprout into the living actuality of human existence. Stalingrad fits this picture only partially. The Soviet victory meant that the peoples of Nazi-occupied Europe would be liberated from ideological tyranny. Yet the final defeat of Hitler cut off only one of the monster\u2019s two heads\u2014and anyway, both grow back. Stalingrad also saved Stalin, which meant that the peoples of Eastern Europe and the northern half of the Korean peninsula would be shoveled into the maw of Communism. And it fed an ugly Russian nationalism that picked out fresh targets of State oppression, including Tartars and Jews\u2014the very people Vladimir Putin blamed for alleged interference in the 2016 election, dismissing them as \u201cnot even Russian . . . just with Russian passports.\u201d The meaning of Stalingrad was in these respects a grotesque reversal of Hegel:<\/span><\/p>\n The remorseless cunning of History, however, lay still more deeply hidden. Freedom engendered the Russian victory. Freedom was the apparent aim of the war. But the sly fingers of History changed this: freedom became simply a way of waging the war, a means to an end.<\/span><\/p>\n In\u00a0<\/span>Life and Fate<\/span>, the atomic State undergoes a kind of fission. The sheaf splits open; golden kernels spill out and sprout in ruined buildings and bomb craters. Three Soviet generals sit together in silence after the great battle ends, feeling \u201conly human feelings\u201d; these few minutes of silence\u2014of happiness and sadness, love and humility\u2014are \u201cthe finest of their lives.\u201d In exile in Kazan, a city on the Volga, Viktor engages in intense conversations about politics and literature with a Muslim translator of Dante and Homer and a historian who speaks with the fearless \u201clogic of truth.\u201d Refreshed by the exhilaration and terror of speaking his mind, Viktor suddenly achieves a theoretical breakthrough, the most important scientific discovery of his life. His theory of atomic decay, which arises in \u201cabsolute freedom\u201d from \u201cthe free play of thought,\u201d is \u201cbread, bread, black bread\u201d for the soul.<\/span><\/p>\n But these communities of freedom and goodness are as ephemeral as any fleeting isotope produced in a nuclear reaction. When Viktor returns to Moscow, he is persecuted by detractors who regard his theoretical work as an anti-Soviet piece of \u201cTalmudic abstraction,\u201d and his Jewish laboratory assistants are fired. In Stalingrad, the victorious State\u2019s cannibalization of the victorious people commences while the guns are still hot. Colonel Novikov keeps Stalin waiting for eight minutes past the time he was to launch his tanks in the final Soviet offensive; exercising \u201cthe right to think twice before you send men to their death,\u201d he delays so that the artillery will have time to clear out some enemy batteries. The attack succeeds without the loss of a single tank, and he is heartily and sincerely congratulated by General Nyeudobnov and Commissar Getmanov. That night, Getmanov asks Nyeudobnov to review his report denouncing Novikov for delaying, \u201cat the start of a crucial operation, the operation to decide the outcome of the Great Patriotic War.\u201d The steel City of Stalin rises anew on the ground of freedom: \u201cHere, ten years later, was constructed a vast dam, one of the largest hydro-electric power stations in the world\u2014the product of the forced labor of thousands of prisoners.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Strangely, Novikov has his first good sleep in weeks the night after he receives the dreaded summons from Moscow. Viktor\u2019s experience is equally strange. A phone call from Stalin saves him from persecution and catapults him into a position of great privilege. But while he had previously \u201cbeen full of thoughts about life, truth and freedom, about God,\u201d he now teems with \u201cpetty anxieties, trivial irritations and thoughts that were emptier than the husks of sunflower seeds.\u201d And when, \u201cunable to refuse candies and cookies,\u201d he sacrifices his inner freedom by signing his name to a letter denouncing two doctors on trumped-up charges of poisoning Maxim Gorky (Grossman signed a similar letter in 1952, when Jewish doctors were accused of plotting to murder Stalin), he realizes that \u201cEverything in the world was insignificant compared to what he had lost. Everything in the world is insignificant compared to the truth and purity of one small man\u2014even the empire stretching from the Black Sea to the Pacific Ocean, even science itself.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Vas<\/span>ily Grossman came to know History as more than a philosophical concept. It stormed through his homeland, seizing people by the millions and crushing them underfoot, and he smelled its foul breath in the stench of corpses. That experience brought home a fundamental truth that our willfully abstract and increasingly ideological age seems hell-bent on forgetting:<\/span><\/p>\n Human groupings have one main purpose: to assert everyone\u2019s right to be different, to be special, to think, feel and live in his or her own way. People join together in order to win or defend this right. But this is where a terrible, fateful error is born: the belief that these groupings in the name of a race, a God, a party or a State are the very purpose of life and not simply a means to an end. No! The only true and lasting meaning of the struggle for life lies in the individual, in his modest peculiarities and in his right to these peculiarities.<\/em><\/p>\n One passage in\u00a0Life and Fate<\/span>\u00a0is eerily prescient. Grossman imagines a \u201cmachine of future ages and millennia\u201d capable of recreating the whole range of human emotions and thoughts: \u201cBut the surface of the whole earth will be too small to accommodate this machine\u2014this machine whose dimensions and weight will continually increase as it attempts to reproduce the peculiarities of mind and soul of an average, inconspicuous human being.\u201d This is a prophetic warning for our age of big data and digital surveillance, an age in which the once-vital liberal democracies of the West find themselves littered with hollow institutions surrounded by thick administrative husks.<\/span><\/p>\n The struggle of Life and Fate in the twenty-first century will determine whether Grossman\u2019s waking nightmare will come to pass.<\/span><\/p>\n Jacob Howland\u2019s<\/strong> writing includes\u00a0Glaucon\u2019s Fate: History, Myth, and Character in Plato\u2019s Republic, forthcoming from Paul Dry Books.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n Zawarto\u015b\u0107 publikowanych artyku\u0142\u00f3w i materia\u0142\u00f3w nie reprezentuje pogl\u0105d\u00f3w ani opinii Reunion’68,<\/em> <\/p>\n Totalitarian physics & moral threshing Jacob Howland Vasily Grossman On the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Vasily Grossman\u2019s great anti-Soviet novel\u00a0Life and Fate. This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the first publication in the Soviet Union of Vasily Grossman\u2019s\u00a0Life and Fate, a nine-hundred-page novel of life under Stalin. This was a small […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64363"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=64363"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64363\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64367,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64363\/revisions\/64367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=64363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=64363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=64363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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Vasily Grossman<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
\nrecommended by: Leon Rozenbaum<\/strong><\/span><\/em>
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