Grossman's Life and Fate comes to Russian TV.

Russian version of this post is here and a review of the film is here (in Russian)

The Russian TV series based on Vassily Grossman's Life and Fate, the greatest Russian novel of XX century, begins today at 21:25 Moscow time (GMT+3). 

Rossiya 1 channel online is here, click on the red button Прямой эфир to switch to online TV.

This is the first screen version of the novel that was 'arrested' by the KGB in 1961 — all copies were confiscated, carbon paper and type-writer ribbons too. A communist party boss promised that the book will not be published for another 200 years. 

A friend of Grossman saved one copy and hid it in a shoulder bag at his dacha. In the 70s it was smuggled out on microfilm. The English translation of the novel by Robert Chandler's was published in 1985. A few years later it came out in Russia during Gorbachev's glasnost.

But it was only in 2000s when Grossman's incredible epic started slowly gaining recognition. A year ago the BBC ran a week-long radio play based on Life and Fate.

The film is available on YouTube — 

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Fifty years ago the KGB arrested the book, Grossman was told it will not be published for another 200 years.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.

BBC's Map to Life and Fate: Wrong Beard?

Readers of Russian novels often complain that it is difficult to follow the narrative because of the complexity of names. People can be called by their name, nickname, full formal name and patronymic, or by surname or title. Add to this numerous affectionate-familiar suffixes used with the main name and it can be a nightmare!

I can assure you that not only it is difficult for a non-Russian reader. It can be quite a challenge for a native Russian reader too.

Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate dramatised on BBC's Radio 4 this week has about a thousand characters, as many as Tolstoy's War and Peace.

Producers of the radioplay found a clever solution: on the programme web-page there is a map of the main characters complete with cartoon portraits and dotted lines showing their relationships.

I found one cartoon a bit puzzling, though. Viktor Shtrum, the physicist working on the Soviet nuclear programme, is given a short beard of the kind that became fashionable among the young Russian intellectuals in 1960s, perhaps after Ernest Hemingway. In 1940s only the eccentric few would wear such a beard, certainly not a relatively young man like Shtrum, raised under Soviet rule.

I wonder if the drawing is after the beard that is currently worn by Kenneth Branagh who plays Shtrum, or Branagh was made to grow a 'Russian' beard for the Life and Fate photoshoot which is now on the BBC web-site?

The episodes broadcasted so far are brilliant. They can be downloaded from the Radio 4 web-site as podcasts.

How Did Life and Fate Get to KGB?

BBC’s Radio 4 continues with its week-long monumental 8-hour 13-episode adaptation of Vasily Grossman’s world war II classic novel Life and Fate (based on translation by Robert Chandler, producer Alison Hindell).

Practically every reference to the novel mentions that Soviet leadership deemed the work so damaging to the communist cause that the novel was arrested by the KGB. A single copy, or perhaps two, was hidden by Grossman’s friends, smuggled to the West and published there, more than twenty years after it was written.

Here is the story of how it happened as told by Semyon Lipkin, poet and translator and a close friend of Grossman. He was one of the first readers of the book, the one who helped the writer to cut out the more politically risky chapters before presenting the manuscript to a literary journal. He was also one of the friends who saved the novel.

Grossman wrote a prequel to Life and Fate soon after the war and submitted it to the prestigious literary journal Novy Mir (New World). Originally it was titled Stalingrad. Novy Mir editor Konstantin Simonov, himself a famous war writer, rejected the novel after a year-long delay. The  new editor Alexander Tvardovsky, a poet and an influential power in Soviet literary establishment, pushed the novel through censors and party bosses. After a few substantial changes – a chapter with a positive portrait of Stalin was added and the Russian-Jewish physicist Viktor Shtrum, the main character in the novel, was given an ethnic Russian mentor Chepyzhin.  The novel was published in 1952 under the title For the Just Cause.

The novel came out just as Stalin launched his last campaign of terror, the so-called Doctors’ Plot, aimed at Soviet ethnic Jews. Grossman’s novel was denounced as anti-Soviet and ‘damaging’. There was a possibility that Grossman himself could be dragged into the Doctors’ Plot. Tvardovsky, a personal friend of Grossman, recanted, denounced the novel and declared himself in error. When Stalin died in March 1953 the Plot investigations were stopped, arrested ‘conspirators’ released and Grossman’s novel published widely to huge acclaim.

But he fell-out with Tvardovsky in a big way, remembers Lipkin. Grossman was writing Life and Fate throughout the 50s. Chapters from the novel were published in the press and there was already big interest regarding the new book without anyone realising what was in it. Novy Mir expressed interest in the novel, but Grossman wouldn’t have anything to do with the editor and friend who had betrayed him.

The editor of another literary journal, Znamya (Banner), Vadim Kozhevnikov persuaded Grossman to give the novel to him. During the summer of 1960 the novel was finished and in October Grossman submitted the typed manuscript to Znamya.  Weeks passed and there was no answer from the journal. Through friends Grossman found out that the editor was hiding the novel from the staff and that something unpleasant was afoot.

That autumn he and his wife were at a writers’ resort at the Black Sea. Tvardovsky and his wife happened to be there too. The wives, who were friends independently from their husbands, arranged for them to make peace. Tvardovsky asked for a copy of the novel, ‘just to read it’. Back in Moscow, Tvardovsky came to Grossman’s flat in the middle of the night to say that the novel was greater than anything he had read, but was unpublishable. He drunk up all the vodka that was there to drink at Grossmans' and among other things told the writer that Kozhevnikov had denounced Grossman to those ‘who ought to know’, meaning the KGB – or the party, or both.

One day in February 1961, in the morning, two KGB officers, one with the rank of a colonel, came to Grossman’s flat with a warrant to seize the novel and all materials related to it. The officers acted in a polite, but firm, very efficient way. It looked as though they had precise orders about what to do. They only searched the room where Grossman worked, left alone anything that wasn’t connected to Life and Fate, but collected all copies, drafts, studies and scribbles for the novel. They then went to Grossman’s typist's flat and confiscated a copy of the novel she’d kept for proofing, carbon paper and typewriter ribbons. Tvardovsky’s copy of the book was also taken away. 

A year later Grossman wrote an appeal to Khruschev asking for the book to be released. He was received by Mikhail Suslov, the party’s chief ideologue. In a meeting that continued for about three hours Suslov admitted that he hadn’t read the book himself, but decided that it couldn’t be returned to the author. Nor could it be published, not for another 200 years, he said. He promised (promise not kept), though, that Grossman’s five-volume collected works would be published and assured him that the party ‘highly valued his previous works’.  Suslov based his judgements on two memos prepared for him by party aides. According to Lipkin, by Grossman’s account each memo was about 15-20 type-written pages.

Summing up what’d happened to him, Grossman told Lipkin: ‘I was strangled in a dark passageway’.

He died of cancer in 1964, his books were hardly published, the memoryof him as a writer faded and name rarely mentioned, except by friends and a few writers and scholars. 

I was lucky that I had among my university professors Galina Belaya and Anatoly Bocharov, who in their lectures put Grossman among the top writers of the Soviet literature. It was from them that I first heard the name. Bocharov wrote a book on Grossman in 1970. 

Semyon Lipkin’s book ‘The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman’ was published by Kniga publishers, Moscow, 1990. The text is available online here.
BBC Radio 4 page on Life and Fate dramatisation is here.
In Russian the book is here.

Grossman's Life and Fate on BBC Radio 4

-->

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.

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.

Grossman's Life and Fate to be serialised by the BBC

Vasily Grossman
as war correspondent in Germany in 1945

 (version in Russian is here) read the Tetradki review of the radio play here and download the 13 episodes of Life and Fate from the BBC web-site here. Read all Tetradki posts on Grossman here.
 

BBC Radio 4 controller Gwyneth Williams has confirmed that an epic eight-hour dramatisation of Vassily Grossman’s novel ‘Life and Fate’ will be produced and is to be broadcast in September this year. In Radio 4 ‘Feedback’ programme Williams called the project ‘agenda setting’. She also said that ‘what is relevant is important, even if it is history’ and happens in far away places. Williams pointed to the huge interest provoked by the recent radio series ‘I, Cladius’ as another example of such indirect relevance.

What transpires from the programme, which ostensibly provides the platform for the BBC producers and editors to defend their decisions and answer criticism from listeners, but often throws light on the inner workings of the corporation, is that there must have been some opposition to the production of ‘Life and Fate’ against the background of swingeing cuts at the BBC. Just a few days ago BBC announced  that 25 percent of its World Service staff is to be cut. Russian and Ukranian services, among others, will no longer broadcast through traditional radio, but only via the internet.

So, keeping the project that is to take over practically all drama slots on Radio 4 for a week must be seen as something of significant importance. That significance is not measured by the importance of Russia in modern world, but by Grossman’s exploration of the nature of totalitarianism, in broad sense – of the relationship of the people and the state. His novel is set during the second world war and describes the Battle of Stalingrad, life and death in nazi concentration camps and the Soviet repressive machine. 

The book is often said to be ‘the War and Peace’ of the 20th Century (link to a review in Russian). Grossman wrote it in 1950s, first thinking of it as a sequel to the novel Stalingrad (later retitled as For a Just Cause), but soon realising that it is a novel in its own right. Soon after Grossman submitted the novel for publication KGB raided his flat, confiscated all copies and the communist party ideology boss Suslov, who hadn’t read the book, told him that it would not be published in the Soviet Union for another 200-300 years. A copy was smuggled to the West in 1970s and published in 1980 in Switzerland. In 1988 it was published in the Soviet Union. The English translation was made by Robert Chandler, according to whom the novel slowly gains recognition in the West with annual sales going from a few hundred a year initially up to four-five thousand copies in recent years. The BBC series will put the novel into a wider public circulation.

This is what Chandler says about the novel (from an article in Prospect, note: paid site, only part of the article available):

It is easy for a translator to exaggerate the importance of what he is working on. In the early 1980s, while I was translating Life and Fate, I was certain that it was a very great work. As the years passed and few people either in Russia or the west seemed to be paying much attention to it, I began to doubt my judgement. It was a joy, therefore, to reread the novel last winter, for the first time in 20 years, and realise that I had underestimated Grossman’s greatness. Life and Fate is not only a brave and wise book; it is also written with Chekhovian subtlety.

Collins Harvill published my translation of Life and Fate in 1985. The reviews were mostly positive but sales were disappointing, especially in view of the fact that the book had been a bestseller in France; one of Grossman’s central themes – the identity of fascism and communism – was clearly a more pressing concern in a country where communism was still a significant political force. And there were English critics who thought Grossman dull. Anthony Burgess, for example, seemed irritated by George Steiner’s judgement that ‘novels like Solzhenitsyn’s Red Wheel and Life and Fate eclipse almost all that passes for serious fiction in the west today.’ Burgess accused Grossman of lack of imagination – a surprising thing to say of a writer able to describe so convincingly the last moments of a child dying in a Nazi gas chamber.

The BBC Radio 4 press-release about the forthcoming series:

This autumn BBC Radio 4 presents the much-anticipated eight-hour dramatisation of Life And Fate by Vasily Grossman.

For the first time on Radio 4, a single title will take over every drama slot (apart from The Archers) across a week in September, reflecting the epic span of this 20th-century Russian masterpiece.

Set against the background of the Battle of Stalingrad, the turning-point in the defeat of the Nazis in the Second World War, Life And Fate follows the stories of an extended family separated by the German invasion. Flung to the four corners of the Soviet Union and beyond, they experience hardships, grief and the value of human kindness.

Recording mainly in 2011, the extensive cast includes Samuel West, Sara Kestelman, John Sessions, Kenneth Cranham and Matthew Marsh. The producer/director is Alison Hindell for the BBC.

Life and Death is online in Russian here.