When I talked to Tyler Cowen, he wanted to ask you if there's more humor in life and fate in the Russian than there is in the English. He found, quote, no humor in the English. Could be a statement about Tyler. But he also confessed that he often, his wife, who is Russian, will often laugh at things that he doesn't see the humor in. Is there, and you alluded to the humor of Stalingrad, is there humor in life and faith that doesn't come through in the English, that you just weren't able to bring it in? Or is it just pretty much a humorless book? I

don't think there's humor that I fail to bring in. um i'm interested by what you say and um wondering whether there perhaps is more humor in stalingrad um i was surprised um my my my much elder brother was um tremendously enthusiastic about Stalingrad. He really, really loved it. And then, to my surprise, seemed to just find life and fate unrelentingly grim and not really to enjoy it at all. And I wonder whether humour is a part of it. I mean, there's a certain amount of irony I can think of. Yes. Life and fate. But life, I mean, the difference between the two novels is that Stalingrad is much closer to, you know, there are a lot of passages in it which are quite close to repetitions or paraphrasing of passages from his wartime notebooks. There's a lot of little funny incidents, funny turns of speech in Stalingrad, which are clearly just real-life things that he witnessed. Life and Fate is more distant from the reality of the time. It's much more of a serious moral and philosophical statement. In a way, Stalingrad is more of a novel and Life and Fate more of a sort of, as I said, a philosophical and moral study. So perhaps, perhaps, yeah, perhaps there is less humor in it.

I mean, it's a sort of, it's a pretty grim book, and there are many, many grim parts to it. But as I suggested in that episode conversation with Tyler, I did not find it bleak at all. In fact, parts of it I found quite uplifting. We can talk a little bit about that later maybe. I'm thinking of Solzhenitsyn, who in The Gulag and In the First Circle, which we talked about on this program, they're all grim. But there's a lot of humor in Solzhenitsyn. He has funny passages. mean, if you contrast the – in the first circle, the full version, not the original censored one that he self-censored, the passages about Stalin, especially the long chapter about Stalin is quite – well, it's bittersweet. It's funny and it's dark humor, I would call it. But he also has many set pieces that are comic. A lot of it's dark humor, but he just strikes me as a much more humorous writer about the bleak things and grim things than Grossman. I don't know if that's fair.

It's not really for me to judge. It's a long time since I read The First Circle, so I'm

probably

all right, but I can't say any more.

Let's talk about Grossman's feelings about Stalinism and communism, the Soviet system generally. In my very casual reading about him, Stalingrad is less critical of the Soviet regime, much more triumphant. It's much more patriotic nationalist. Certainly by lifetime, we're reading Life and Fate. It's a much more critical portrait. and the parallels between the Nazi characters and the Nazi system and the Soviet characters and the Soviet system, the parallels between Hitler and Stalin are much more, I mean, you can't avoid them. How do you think Grossman's attitude towards his country and the regime he lived under changed over time. Is there a simple-ish way to tell that story? It

used to get very, very oversimplified indeed, as if Grossman were simply a good Stalinist, and then suddenly he metamorphosed. And that's absolutely not true. I mean, he was, all the way through his career, he was always pushing at the boundaries of what was acceptable. So the wartime articles he wrote for Red Star, which we're translating at present. I mean, he was writing for a military newspaper. He was obviously not going to be criticizing Stalin in it. But he was actually remarkably little mention of Stalin. And there's a very interesting story that the editor of Red Star, the very good David Ortenberg, who was edited till, I think, summer 1943, he commissioned Grossman to write an article titled Tsaritsyn-Stalingrad. Now this city on the Volga that during the war was called Stalingrad until 1924, it was called Tsaritsyn and it's now called Volga Grad. So that's one and the same city. So Ortenberg was really inviting and expecting Grossman to write an article about how Stalin, who did play an important role in defending Tsaritsyn from the whites in the civil war. That's why part of the rationale for changing its name to Stalingrad. So Ortenberg was expecting Grossman to be drawing a parallel between Stalin defending Tsaritsyn in 1919, I think, and the Red Army defending Stalingrad in 1942. And Grossman wrote article without mentioning Stalin. He was being challenging all the time. The Red Star editors were, you know, Ortenberg got fired anyway, so the editing probably got worse, but they were messing up his articles a great deal. There were, Grossman complains about this bitterly in some of his letters. So they were often adding sort of ultra-patriotic bits to them. Grossman really did the minimum of the kind of Soviet grandiose style. He certainly, I mean, I'm sure his feelings about the system were ambivalent towards the end. I mean, I remember giving a talk once at Pushkin House in London, and I was talking quite a lot about Grossman drawing parallels between Stalin's Soviet Union and Hitler's Germany. And I remember this very, very sweet Russian woman coming up to me and saying that she just couldn't quite understand how, on the one hand, what I'd just been saying could be true. the end of his life would enjoy his singing sort of red patriotic red army songs um you know over when people have been eating eating and drinking together and you know grossman would enjoy singing these patriotic songs so you know it was his world i mean it's um and of course you know however much you might draw parallels between Hitler and Stalin, nevertheless, it was Hitler who had annihilated millions of Jews. And the Soviet Union was his world. Sorry, was Grossman's world. People have contradictory

feelings. Yeah, no doubt. I mean, you can feel it in life and fate. It's not easy being a Jew in Soviet Russia. Certainly, at various times it was extremely unpleasant, but it's nothing like Nazi Germany, obviously. But there's something in those parallels between an authoritarian system where the state is supreme that he seems quite fascinated by in life and fate. And I remarked in the earlier conversation about life and fate with Tyler Cowen that as a non-Soviet expert, to realize that the Soviets had commissars and other officers, as the Germans had SS officers, both looking to uncover heresy about the regime in the middle of a war, not a small war, a life and death existential war, was quite extraordinary. And so the parallels that those characters are forced to confront is to me one of the most powerful parts of life and fate. Obviously, they're not the same system. Obviously, they have similar things though, and Grossman must have been felt that very strongly.

Absolutely. And it was actually the very first chapter of Life and Fate I translated, was the dialogue between the SS officer, Lys, and the old port of Moschovskoy. I translated that for what was then the rather important journal. I mean, it's still going, but it was more important at the time than is now Index on Censorship. So they published my translation of that chapter, along with a kind of summary, a kind of article of mine about the novel. So that's what got a publisher interested. And I did, I

mean, I

find that dialogue absolutely riveting myself.

Unbelievable. It's an unbelievable section of the book, and you feel like the Russian is, through some significant portion of it, putting his hands over his ears and going, because he doesn't want to hear or confront, even imagine the possibility. And at the same time, knowing something about interrogation, he's constantly thinking, well, this isn't what he really thinks. It's just to get me to confess or for me to be broken. But he's also wondering, as are we the readers, maybe this is from the heart. This is a man having a moment of intense self-awareness, the German, that he has a kinship to this communist. It's an extraordinary, extraordinary section of the book. Yeah,

absolutely.

Are there portions in a book like Life and Fate? I mean, there are extraordinary passages that have incredible emotional weight. There's the letter that Victor's mother writes that is presumably Grossman's imagining what his own mother would have written if she had had a chance to write him before her death at the hands of the Nazis. I mentioned the incredible scene where German soldiers come to avenge the death of some Germans at the hands of the Russians. And a Russian woman, I'll come back and talk about this later, but has faces a moral dilemma. There's an unbearable scene where a woman and a child are killed in a Nazi death camp. When you're translating those, do you find yourself spending more time on them? Because they pack such emotional power. And, you know, I can't judge how much of that was in Grossman and how much of that is Chandler, you. But they're really, they're unforgettable. And I'm just curious, do you spend more time on those, getting the wording the way you want them, the poetry effectively is what you're

translating there? Not necessarily. There's an interesting example. There's the terror-famine chapter in Everything Close. Yeah,

brutal. That

is absolutely crystal clear. It was very straightforward to translate. The woman who is narrating the chapter, she keeps repeating the word, I saw. I saw this, I saw that, and I saw this. It's absolutely straight. There's no backtracking, no sort of saying something and then qualifying it. It's absolutely straight narrative it was emotionally it was emotionally overwhelming but it was actually very easy to translate because it was so simple and clear and the absolute opposite to that in the same book is the equivocations of the main character the scientist who is looking back on his past, and he's constantly sort of trying to be honest, and then running away from being honest. He'll using the word instead of I saw, it's kazalas, it seemed, it seemed to me. And then he was sort of, oh, did it really seem to me? And it had seemed, you know, getting the tense right was terribly, terribly difficult in English because in Russian they actually only have present, future and past. So sometimes in English, when you're translating, you have to think a lot whether it should be, it seemed, it had seemed, you know, whatever. So those kind of equivocations were, which Grossman is very, very skilled at, you know, in other chapters as well, where he says something and then he kind of backtracks or his character backtracks. And so those are the ones that are difficult to translate.

Everything Flows is a much shorter Grossman novel for those listening. And it's imperfect, but it's still an extraordinary read. And maybe we'll talk about it a little more later. It deals, as you mentioned, with the famine and the deaths of millions of kulaks over just an unbearable time of human history, just the cruelty of it. And Grossman captures it in a very, very powerful way. But I want to turn to The Road and bring it back to Life and Fate. The Road is a short story of Grossman's, and it's the title as well of an edited volume that you did of his shorter writings. So it includes short stories, it includes essays. The two most extraordinary essays in there for me were The Hell of Treblinka, which we've already spoken about, and a rather remarkable essay, which I alluded to in the, I mentioned briefly in the previous conversation with Tyler Cowen, The Sistine Madonna. And then so there's short stories. But the other thing that makes the book special is that you've written many sections of biographical material about Grossman and the writings, the stories and the essays. As I mentioned, in Life and Fate, there's a letter from Victor's mother that is presumably the letter that Grossman himself imagined his mother could have written to him. But we also have two letters that he wrote to his mother in the book The Road that Grossman wrote to his mother after her death, nine years after her death, 20 years after her death, two letters. He dedicated life and fate to his mother. He believed very strongly that she was still alive in the form of the book in some sense. So talk about that. And it's really an extraordinary theme, the theme of maternal love, that is very, very powerful and commonly invoked in Life and Fate. Tell

us about that. A great many of Grossman's works do bring in the theme of maternal love. You've mentioned the scene in the gas chamber where an unmarried, childless female doctor, in a way, kind of adopts little eight-year boy on the way to the gas chamber. And one of her dying thoughts as she is holding this little boy is, I've become a mother. Grossman does repeatedly manage to sort of find maternal love occasionally different versions sometimes reversing the generations in the most terrible situations so there's another story where there's a lonely old school teacher a Jewish school teacher who is about to be shot. The Jews from that city have all been led out to an execution site, and he's feeling very, very lonely, deeply lonely. a child who he knows comes up behind him and puts, I think it's her arms, I can't quite remember, puts her hands over his eyes and says, don't look, i.e. don't look at the Jews being executed, being shot just ahead of us. So there you've got a kind of little child playing the parental role. So that's what I meant by the generations being reversed. Yeah. He's constantly finding those kind of situations in the most, he's finding those relationships in the most ghastly situations. And there's a very touching article by Grossman's daughter, Katia, who didn't write a great deal about her father. But she wrote an article about the story called Amarma. and she points out that there are about, I think, eight or nine kind of mothers and adoptive mothers and nurses playing a maternal role and sort of different substitute mothers of one kind or another. So at one level, it's a very bleak story, but centred on the family of Yezhov, the chief, the head of the NKVD at the height of Stalin's purges in the late 1930s. So at one level, it's about evil figure, Joff. And also it is about maternal tenderness. There are a huge number of tender maternal figures in it. One of the other striking things about the relationship with the mother is that, I mean clearly felt a huge weight of guilt that he could have, in the very first weeks of the war, he could have travelled to the Adichiev and fetched his mother and brought her back to relative safety in Moscow. She couldn't do that on her own. She was partly disabled. And in any case, you know, at that point, people didn't realize how quickly the Germans were going to advance. to Fetcher, partly because his wife didn't want that, which was later a cause of bitterness between husband and wife. But anyway, however much Grossman may have blamed his wife, he certainly blamed himself. And he did. I mean, usually guilt a fairly incapacitating feeling. I think it's rather unusual that Grossman was able to turn this weight, you know, to really use this weight of guilt in such a positive way. So in Life and Fate, when Stroum, after he's been sort of blessed by Stalin, and Stalin has realized the importance of nuclear research, when Stroum is in a fortunate position again, he capitulates and signs a letter, signs an official letter criticizing various Jews. Strum feels deeply ashamed of himself and he prays to his mother next time give me your strength lend me your strength mother so he is seeing his mother as a source of strength Yeah, it's a very – there

were a couple of – I felt that in that sequence of events, he was, I don't know, dealing with his own challenges of conscience in his own life.