Stalingrad References. Vasnetsov and Grossman.

This large canvas is called After Igor Svyatoslavitch’s fighting with the Polovtsy ("После побоища Игоря Святославовича с половцами"), or simply After the Battle. 

It is the 1880 work of Viktor Vasnetsov, the Russian painter who produced a number of historical and folklore paintings. They became popular in Imperial Russia and, with their patriotic message, stayed so during the Soviet period. After the Battle is exhibited in Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and scores of school excursions have been filing past it for decades (as well as ordinary visitors).

After the Battle draws on the imagery of the Tale of Igor’s Campaign, the medieval Russian poem (late 12th Century), about the 1185 raid of Prince Igor against the Polovtsy (Cuman), the nomadic raiders of the steppes in the Don region. He was defeated and taken prisoner. Alexander Borodin based the opera Prince Igor (1890) on the Tale of Igor’s Campaign. The famous Polovetsian Dances (link to wiki) is from that opera.

In books, visual references are often lost simply because an image instantly recognisable in one generation, or in one culture, is completely lost in the general consciousness of the next generation, or another culture. A popular picture, a poster, an ad, or a cinema episode may go out of circulation. 

This is especially true of translated books. Different cultures have different sets of cultural references. And that includes images. 

It is seventy years since the great battle of Stalingrad (July 1942-February 1943), when the nazi army was crushed between the rivers Don and Volga deep in the steppes of Russia. 

Vassily Grossman’s epic novel Life and Fate (1959) has Stalingrad as its background. In the following passage, the Red Army is amassing troops and armour to the North and South of the besieged city to go on the counter-offensive and encircle a vast German army. As preparations are under way, officers and soldiers have a few pensive moments, when they link their war to wars of the past. And Vasnetsov’s painting, that is in all Russian history textbooks, on postcards and posters, and in reproductions hang in public places, springs up. 

This extract is from Part Two, Chapter 58 of Life and Fate, English translation by Robert Chandler:

«

The camels passed by, leaving a smell of hay in the frosty air. The same huge moon — more black than red — had shone over the deserted fields where Prince Igor was to give battle. The same moon had shone when the Persian hosts marched into Greece, when the Roman legions invaded the German forests, when the battalions of the first consul had watched night fall over the pyramids...

...

Darensky, his head sunk into his shoulders, was sitting on a box of shells and listening to two soldiers who lay stretched out under their greatcoats beside the guns. ... The soldiers puffed blissfull at the cigarettes they had rolled, letting out clouds of smoke. 
...

'Just look at the night! You know, I once saw a picture like this when I was at school: a full moon over a field and dead warriors lying on the ground.'

'That doesn't sound much like us,' said the other with a laugh. 'We're not warriors. We're more like sparrows.'

»

See Russian text below the video. After the Battle and other images by Viktor Vasnetsov can be found on Wikipedia. 

Here, Valery Gergiev conducts the Polovtsian Dances suite. The drum beat sequence begins at 3:25 minutes into the video.

Отрывки из романа "Жизнь и судьба", Часть вторая, глава 59:

«

Верблюды прошли, в морозном воздухе встал деревенский запах сена. Вот такая же, больше черная, чем красная, выплывала огромная луна над пустынным полем, где сражалась дружина Игоря. Вот такая же луна стояла в небе, когда полчища персов шли на Грецию, римские легионы вторгались в германские леса, когда батальоны первого консула встречали ночь у пирамид.

[...]

Даренский, нахохлившись, сидел на снарядном ящике на огневых позициях артиллерийской батареи и слушал разговор двух крансоармейцев, лежавших под шинелями у орудий. [...] Красноармейцы блаженно дымилси самокрутками, выпускали клубы теплого дыма.

[...]

— А погляди, ночь-то какая, знаешь, я еще в школе учился, картину такую видел: стоит луна над полем, и кругом лежат побитые богатыри.

— Что ж тут похожего, рассмеялся второй, — то богатыри, а мы что, воробьиного рода, наше дело телячье.

»

Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman.

Russian women 
in besieged Stalingrad.

Wrap-up of the Radio 4 (BBC) Dramatisation.

The longer Russian version of this review is here. To read other Tetradki posts on the novel and the Radio 4 project, click on Grossman label.

BBC's Radio 4 broadcasted an 8-hour adaptation of Vasiliy Grossman's novel Life and Fate. It is a tremendous achievement by the BBC team, an achievement that brings back to international readership a 'lost' great novel of the 20th Century literature.

Fifty years ago the KGB arrested the book, Grossman was told it will not be published for another 200 years. When Robert Chandler made the first English translation 25 years ago the book was hardly noticed. Last week it shot to the top of British bestsellers list.

There are brilliant finds in transforming the novel into a drama. Producer Alison Hindell and drama writers Jonathan Myerson and Mike Walker should be feted for bringing to radio such a huge and complex work as Life and Fate.

First, they've changed the narrative from the writer's third person to the characters' first person. It produces a surprisingly fresh, sharp effect in the Viktor and Lyuda episode narrated through the eyes of Nadya, Viktor and Lyudmila Shtrums' daughter, a minor character in the novel. The script writers, while being faithful to the novel rebuild the character to a greater importance which may well be how Grossman himself intended to develop her had he time to carry on with his epic, which he had planned to be in four parts like Tolstoy's War and Peace. Nadya is based on Grossman's own daughter Katya.

Another striking find is the first person narrative of the nazi soldier – operator of a gas chamber in the concentration camp, whose main duty is to watch Jewish inmates die. It's absolutely chilling ('I'm only closing doors').

Another brilliantly played scene is from Chapter 15, Part II, the 'theoretical discussion' between an old bolshevik Mostovskoy and an SS 'thinker' Liss, when the nazi interrogator succeeds in stirring up doubts in the head of the bolshevik. 'We are your mortal enemies, yes-yes. But our victory is your victory. Do you understand? And if you win, then we will die, but also live in your victory. It's like a paradox: by losing the war, we will win the war, we will develop into a new form, but with the same essence,' says Liss.  That chapter, I think, should be republished separately, included in every anthology of modern thinking, taught and discussed everywhere where thinking and debating is still taught and allowed. And the BBC rendering does it its due credit.

Where script-writers needn't change much for the radio is Viktor's mother's last letter from the Jewish ghetto in Ukraine just before she was killed by the nazis. Grossman's own mother perished in the first wave of the mass shootings of Soviet Jews in September 1941, exactly 70 years ago. The mother's letter is read by Janet Suzman, a great British actress who comes from a South African Jewish family with a long history of campaigning for civil liberties and against apartheid.

I am not sure if merging Lieutenant Bach, a German company commander in Stalingrad, with another character, is a good idea. Bach is given the thoughts of a different character, Lennart, also a company commander, but a staunch nazi believer. Bach is a 'normal' German, has a Russian girlfriend in Stalingrad, and it seems slightly incongruous for him to report to the Gestapo chief on the moral spirit of the soldiers – 'there won't be a mutiny', the report which, in the novel, is made by the nazi party member Lennart. The Gestapo officer says words, that could easily have come from the mouth of a Soviet political officer: 'There will be no mutiny because of the genius of our leader. We've cut out the sick among us and also those who might get sick'. The nazi chief prepares to flee from the besieged city and promises Bach (in the play) a free pass out, in the novel the offer is made to Lennart. That doesn't really work quite well, I think, but, then, drama has to be concise.

I think Shtrum played by Kenneth Branagh is a bit too jovial, and both the tank commander Novikov and the commissar Krymov (David Tennant) slightly too hysterical, but, then, again that's drama.

Compositionally, Radio 4 series end with Shtrum being suck into the Soviet system of privilege for those who toe the line. Which, I think, may be even better than the ending of the novel itself. Grossman rushed it to deliver to a deadline – and after that neither he, nor other Russian editors had a chance of putting it through a proper pre-publishing editorial and review process. When the book was finally published in Russia Grossman was 24 years dead. The novel called Life and Fate that we know today, brilliant as it is, is in fact the 'writer's cut' – the final draft version.

There are a few bits to pick, which are Russia-specific. In the Soviet Union you didn't use 'citizen' as a form of address, not in your own workplace (Shtrum does). 'Citizen' is for those who are denied being a 'comrade', i.e. 'enemies of the people'. There is the usual mistaken shift in the stress in some Russian surnames. The director of an academic institute, Shishakov, in the play is pronounced as SHE-she-koff instead of Shi-shah-KOFF, making the 'boss's name', that is derived from 'shishka' or 'shishak' – the big one, the important one –  sound almost the same as Chichikov (CHI-chi-koff), the comic character from Gogol's novel 'The Dead Souls', whose name resembles a chirping of a small bird.

BBC's radioplay  is available for downloading as 13 podcasts from the BBC site. If you use iTunes you can download it in one go. The podcast page is here and the Life and Fate project page with additional information and links is here.

The radio adaptation is from the English translation by Robert Chandler (link to Amazon, some pages available to read).

Photo is from Deutsches Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archive), Bild 183-F0703-0217-001, by Yakov Ryumkin, ADN/TASS.

Grossman's Life and Fate on BBC Radio 4

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From tomorrow, 18 September, BBC's Radio 4 starts broadcasting Vassily Grossman's Life and Fate. For schedule, clips and additional information visit the programme page. 

Why were the Soviet authorities so afraid of Vassily Grossman’s great novel ‘Life and Fate’?

As the BBC is about to broadcast a week-long radio adaptation of the novel, the dramatic story of the book, confiscated by the KGB, smuggled out to the West and only now slowly getting the recognition it deserves, is being repeated again and again. And the same question is being asked – what was it that was so frightening about the book? The question is asked rhetorically, but seldom gets a seriouis answer.



Here are a few points:

First of all, because it showed that there was hardly any difference, if at all, between the Soviet-style communism and the nazi system in Germany. Both are presented as totalitarian oppressive inhuman regimes.  In one scene an 'intellectual' nazi officer talks to a veteran communist, captured at the front and put in a concentration camp. 'When we look each other in the face, he says, we are looking in the mirror. Our victory is your victory'.

Grossman's history of the Great Patriotic War (WWII) is the history of ordinary people fighting for their freedom – not just freedom from the foreign invader, but from their oppressors at home too.

The writer portrayed the commissars – party functionaries at the front and behind the lines as dishonourable, treacherous and cynical lot who were such by the nature of them belonging to the communist party elite. They undermine and betray the best, the honest, the professional, the loyal everywhere they go. Even in a German concentration camp they arrange for a resistance activist to be sent to the gas chamber.

The party censors wouldn’t have liked the portrayal of people of the two main ethnic groups of the USSR, Ukrainians and Russians, collaborating with Germans en masse, taking part in executions and fighting at the front line.

The people who are systematically exterminated by the nazis in occupied territories are Jews, not the supra-ethnic ‘Soviet people’ – another fact which the USSR leadership didn’t like to admit.

Grossman tells of German concentration camps in the same vein as the camps of Gulag, of the KGB/NKVD as the Gestapo.

And of course what frightened them most was how powerful and convincing the book was. It wasn’t slander, it was the truth. 

It is scary to see yourself for what you are, not what you tell yourself and others.

Through Chekhov's Eyes. Grossman's Season on BBC.

Read the Russian version of this post here.

BBC Radio 4 opens Vassily Grossman's season today (19:45 GMT) with a reading of one of his Stalingrad reports 'Through Chekhov's Eyes'.

Chekhov here is a Russian sniper who killed 256 nazi soldiers and officers at Stalingrad. Grossman, who later wrote the great war novel Life and Fate, was a correspondent for the Red Star, the army newspaper. He spent months in Stalingrad. The Chekhov article is based on Grossman's first-hand observations when sitting together with the famous sniper in his hideout. In 1942 Chekhov was 19. 

Chekhov survived Stalingrad, but was seriously wounded in 1944 – he lost a foot.  After the war he quarelled with authorities over his living conditions, he didn't even have a room of his own, not to speak of a flat or a house. In 1965, when the 20th anniversary of the Victory was widely celebrated in Russia, Chekhov was 'rediscovered' by another famous war writer Sergei Smirnov and became a hero again.

Konstantin Simonov, the writer famous for his war trilogy The Living and the Dead, wrote once that he couldn't understand the sniper psychology. To kill a man in a general combat, yes, but to hunt down a human, keep him in sights and shoot down, sometimes seeing the face, no, he couldn't comprehend that. In the first Soviet novel about Stalingrad, Days and Nights, which came out while the war was still on, Simonov doesn't say a word about the Stalingrad snipers.

To Grossman they were heroes.

Here is an excerpt from the Radio 4 introduction to the three-episode reading:

 'I wanted to become the sort of man who destroys the enemy with his own hands' [said Chekhov]. The cult of the sniper emerged spontaneously during the Stalingrad conflict. The 'Stalingrad Academy of street fighting' became a new kind of war where every floor, every building, every block became its own front line. Here a sniper could extract a terrible and personal vengeance upon the German invaders who had forced the Soviets to the very banks of the river Volga. Encouraged by their commanders, lionized by journalists like Grossman, the sniper became a heroic symbol of steely determination. Here Grossman delivers a portrait both intimate and heroic of a young man transformed by war amidst the ruined city.

The story is read by Elliot Levey, translation is by Jim Riordan.

Radio 4 is to broadcast in September a play based on Grossman's great epic Life and Fate with Kenneth Branagh in the leading role. The novel was banned in the Soviet Union, smuggled out to the West and published in 1985 in Robert Chandler's translation.

Grossman's article and a biography of Anatoly Chekhov (in Russian) is here. The BBC programme web page is here and here. Tetradki posts about Life and Fate are here and here. 


The 2001 film Enemy at the Gates with Jude Law and Ed Harris is based on the story of the duel between a German ace sniper and a top Russian sniper Vassili Zaitsev. Here is a video:

Ken Branagh to Play Viktor in BBC's Drama Life and Fate

Ken Branagh

The BBC Radio 4 has just announced that Ken Branagh will play the leading character Viktor Shtrum in the forthcoming radio adaptation of Vassily Grossman's World War II epic novel Life and Fate. The Radio 4 press-release is here.

Alison Hindell, who is in charge of the production, admits, that, as a Russian speaker, she hadn't even heard the title, but having read the book realised how great it was. This is what she says about how they approached the dramatisation:

The novel is a sprawling epic, telling the loosely interconnected stories of members of one Russian family and their different experiences during the Battle of Stalingrad, the battle which clinched the defeat of the Germans in WWII. It works almost like a series of longish short stories: the number of characters named in the novel runs to over a thousand though the timespan is only a few months (Sept 1942 - April 1943). And the locations range from the frontline in Stalingrad to the Lubyanka in Moscow, from a Russian labour camp to a Nazi gas chamber, from Kuibyshev to Kazan, from the northern forests to the river Volga and more.
But the storylines of each group of characters largely stand alone so it is possible, for example, to read only the chapters about Viktor (the character most closely based on the author himself, Vasily Grossman) and get a complete story. And that structural device turned out to be the key to unlock a dramatic structure.

The book was stolen from three generations of Russian and international reading public – a few days after Grossman submitted the manuscript to a literary journal in Moscow in October 1960 the KGB 'literary critics' raided his flat and the journal's office confisctaing all copies and even the carbon paper and typewriter ribbons. Miraculously a copy survived, kept by a dissident and was taken out of the Soviet Union on microfilm to be published in 1980s.


Hopefully the coming production will return one of the greatest works of Russian literature to the reading public and give it its due place in the pantheon of big novels.

Please read my earlier post on the BBC radio play here.

Photo: Giorgia Meschini, from here.

Songs of Victory: In The Dugout

VE Day - Den' Pobedy - is a huge holiday in Russia. It is marked on the 9th of May, not on the 8th as in Western Europe. The difference is because of the time zones - what happened late at night on 8 May in Berlin, was already the 9th Moscow time. But I also like to argue that we, Russians, celebrate the first day of peace, while in the West  the last day of war is celebrated.

My correspondents write to me that over the recent years the holiday has become the biggest event in the Russian calendar of official festivities. This is probably connected to the resurgence of Russian nationalism. A multitude of militant nationalist groups practically hijack the event. There is also bitterness and anger in the former Soviet republics where nazi collaborators and nationalists who fought against the Soviet Union freely parade and harass the Red Army veterans.

However, as everywhere in Europe, in Russia the end of the Second World War was a powerful liberating moment. The soldiers returning home stood tall, walked proud, the felt free and not afraid of anything. The feeling was universal - from the private to Generalissimo himself.

Of the war books I've read recently I was most impressed by Antony Beevor's 'Stalingrad' (1998.) It has been waiting on a shelf for a long time. Something in me resisted picking it up. As a Russian, I've read many books, fiction and non-fiction, on Stalingrad. Konstantin Simonov, Vassily Grossman and others. I started on Grossman's 'Life and Fate' and then remembered that Beevor cites him often. Then I saw 'Enemy At the Gates' (Jude Law as the Russian sniper, Ed Harris his German opposition and Bob Hoskins as Khrushev) - and decided to have a go at 'Stalingrad'. It was unputdownable. I read it first in one go, then again with a pencil and a wad of stickies.

Beevor the historian is meticulous. His every sentence is supported by a wealth of documental evidence, and where that evidence is dubious or politically or ideologically slanted, he indicates it.  Beevor the narrator is a brilliant master of multi-angled technique. Close-ups of events described through the eyes of participants on both sides, from ordinary riflemen to officers in the field to staff members to commanders and politicians are then interspersed with commentary and analysis, also by participants and observers. We see the unfolding battle from the trenches, through tank sites and from the cabins of airplanes above the ruined city. We go from Stalin's Stavka (HQ) to Hitler's Wolfsschanze.

The result is both a convincing historical account and an exciting read.

All over Russia today war-time songs are played. Beevor mentions the 'Dugout' (Zemlyanka)  as the most popular song among the Russian soldiers. The words

It is so hard for me to come to you
And here there are four steps to death.

were especially poignant, as the Army commander in Stalingrad Vassily Chuikov ordered the positions never to be farther than 50 metres away from the German lines. That made it impossible for the Germans to use heavy artillery and bomb Russian positions from air.

Here is the Dugout sung by Lidiya Ruslanova in 1942.
Text of the poem in English as quoted in 'Stalingrad' is below the video.



The Dugout (or In the Dugout),
lyrics by Alexei Surkov, music by Constantine Listov

The fire is flickering in the narrow stove
Resin oozes from the log like a tear
And the concertina in the bunker
Sings to me of your smile and eyes.

The bushes whispered to me about you
In a snow-white field near Moscow
I want you above all to hear
How said my living voice is.

You are now very far away
Expanses of snow lie between us
It is so hard for me to come to you
And here there are four steps to death.

Sing concertina, in defiance of the snowstorm
Call out to that happiness which has lost its way
I'm warm in the cold bunker
Because of your inextinguishable love.