Vasily Semyonovich Grossman was a Soviet writer, born in 1905 in Berdichev, in present-day Ukraine, and died in 1964 in Moscow. As soon as the Soviet Union was invaded by Germany in 1941, he volunteered as a journalist for Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star), the newspaper of the Red Army, and left for the front, where he witnessed the fighting and the routs. It was in 1943 that Ilya Ehrenburg asked him to join the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in order to collect documents toward building what would become The Black Book, and to collaborate with him on its writing. In Ukraine — particularly when he returned to Berdichev, the land of his childhood — he discovered the scale of the massacres perpetrated against the Jews by the Einsatzgruppen, with the complicity of part of the Ukrainian population. Vasily Grossman was also one of the first writers to describe the extermination camps, in his account The Hell of Treblinka. The decade between 1955 and 1964, marked by the gradual de-Stalinization initiated by Khrushchev at the Twentieth Congress, would see the publication of several works: For a Just Cause, reissued in 1954; Everything Flows, completed in 1963; and the writing of his great fresco Life and Fate, completed in 1960 but confiscated by the KGB in 1962 when the author sought to have it published. It was in 1970 that Semyon Lipkin, with the help of Simon Markish and Efim Etkind, managed to smuggle the recovered manuscripts out of the USSR and have them published in Switzerland. The work would not appear in Russia until 1989, in the midst of glasnost.
To summon Vasily Grossman within a collection titled “Dialogues” is, at first glance, properly paradoxical. For Vasily Grossman is an author shaped by socialist realism. It was within that canon of writing that he formed himself as a writer. Now, socialist realism prescribes a monologic mode of writing, organized around an “unlimited deployment of the narrator’s omniscience,1” in which dialogue would have no place. And yet, a sustained analysis of Life and Fate2 — and in particular of chapter 14 of the work’s second part — will make it possible not only to qualify this claim, so as to see in Grossman a genuinely dialogic author, but also to think the very notion of “dialogues” in a more complex way. Grossman’s work is authentically a prose that justifies using the notion of dialogue in the plural. It is not a single form of dialogue, the traditional one setting several characters against one another, but a multitude of textual effects that allow the text to exist in a dialogic mode.
A dialogue between an executioner and his victim
This chapter 14, drawing on strongly typed characters dear to socialist realism, presents the dialogue between Mostovskoy, an old imprisoned Bolshevik, and the Nazi officer Liss,3 in the course of which the Obersturmbannführer introduces the possibility of a comparison between Nazi and Soviet violence. The first impression that emerges on reading the dialogue is truly the violence of refusal, the resistance with which the Bolshevik Mostovskoy denies any empathy with, or understanding of, his interlocutor’s discourse. The Bolshevik rejects the assertions of his interlocutor, who tirelessly seeks to convince him of an interchangeability between Nazi violence and Stalinist violence. Mostovskoy’s position is stated in his silence, which becomes a genuine manifestation of violence in the face of his interlocutor’s vain agitation. In Mostovskoy’s resistance there takes shape the idea, omnipresent in Grossman’s prose, of the struggle between good and evil and “that of a morality of the people founded on freedom for all, which stands opposed to the servitude of all — reserved, in this first volume, to Nazism alone, but which in the second volume will characterize the Soviet Union just as well,4” even though, in the author’s work, the identification between Nazism and Stalinism is never total. Indeed, Grossman was nourished by the Russian democratic tradition and reserves for Nazism the concretization “of an absolute initial evil.5” Through the clash of typed positions, through the violent confrontation of viewpoints, what is posed is the quest for an explanation of the emergence of evil, as though elements of meaning could be born from the violence of this dialogue.
This dialogue is also a reflection on the interchangeability of executioner and victim, through the narrative plays that help to blur the boundary between the two. For although these two characters are placed within a dialogue between jailer and prisoner, at the level of the plot, the symbolic ambition present in Grossman’s prose implies from the outset that the analysis rise to a higher level and designate the two categories that are executioner and victim. In Vasily Grossman, the imbalance between victim and executioner is often akin to an implacable (and often dehumanized) machine reducing the victims to inanimate objects. His text concerning the extermination of the Jews of Berdichev on 15 September 1941, written in 1944 for The Black Book, is representative of his narrative figuration of the relationship between victim and executioner:
Although the greater part of the people executed that day consisted of helpless old people, children, and women with their babies in their arms, the SS nevertheless feared that they might revolt. And the crime was organized in such a way that, at the very site of the execution, there were more executioners armed with submachine guns than there were unarmed victims. This appalling massacre of innocent and defenseless people went on all day long; all day long the blood flowed. The pits were so full of it that the clayey ground could not absorb it, and the blood overflowed, forming enormous pools on the earth, ran in streams, plunging into the hollows of the ground. The wounded who had fallen into the pits did not all die under the SS bullets, but because they drowned, swallowed up by the blood. The boots of the executioners were soaked through, steeped in blood. All day long, the mad cries of the people being shot hung in the air; the peasants of the surrounding farms left their houses so as not to hear those howls that no human heart could bear. The people who filed past the execution site all day long in an endless column saw their mothers, their sisters, their children already at the edge of the pit toward which fate was to lead them, an hour or two later.6
Several specificities of Vasily Grossman’s writing, presented explicitly in this excerpt, are perceptible. The victims are, at the narrative level, more present than the executioners, of whom a single show of force suffices to overturn the plot. The victims are therefore described with greater precision; the narration follows the expressions of their faces, their gestures, their struggles and their despair. Finally, the symbolic force of the victims is capable of annihilating the violence of the executioner, and an imbalance is created, textually, between the executioner alone with his power and the victims, who benefit from an aura and from the empathy of the narrator and of the readers. This imbalance tends to counterbalance that of physical force, and gives Grossman’s texts an extraordinary literary value, transfiguring, through the narrative plays, the violence of the historical referent described. In chapter 14 of the second part, we find these same characteristics: even though he is loquacious and in a position of strength (since he is the jailer), Liss appears a weak being, small, with a soft voice.
It is through this reflection on the positions of each of the dialogue’s protagonists that one can truly reflect on the very notion of dialogism in Grossman’s text. For, since the socialist-realist work is one in which the narrator ranges himself alongside the positive hero, who must have every quality (and thus be a strong character), it is obvious that it is with the prisoner that he stands. And already, by making the victim his positive hero, Grossman constructs his text no longer as a single dialogue between Mostovskoy and Liss, but as a literary space of dialogues: the victim is raised to a higher symbolic plane, she is the hero, and this, in itself, is antithetical to the ideology promoted by socialist-realist aesthetics. Authorial choices therefore enter into account, and make the narrator himself an actor within a dialogic space, the one between the text as it ought to be as socialist-realist prose, and the real text as it presents itself to the reader’s eyes. If, in many works on dissident Soviet literature, it is interesting to observe the deviations that writers impose in their texts upon the prescriptions formalized in 1934 at the first Congress of Soviet Writers in Moscow, it is another posture that must be analyzed when one reflects on Grossman’s aesthetics. He develops literary strategies that lead him to detach himself, genuinely, from the socialist canon, but which are essentially inscribed within the requirements of socialist realism.
Inscribed within a socialist-realist framework, Vasily Grossman’s narration nonetheless does not seem free of spaces of ambivalence, allowing in particular the narrator to introduce play into the stereotyped positions of his characters, and seeking, in this play, to pose fundamental questions about everyone’s positions, and becoming a fundamental instrument of dissidence in a context of single-minded thought.
Narration as an instrument of “dialogues”
Régine Robin proposes a distinction between “thesis effect” and “text effect” in socialist-realist aesthetics,7 which proves genuinely effective in the analysis of Life and Fate. The “text effect,” which she also calls “resistance of the text,” is inevitable, since the dream of a monologism is properly a utopia, language being unable to be neutralized at every moment.8 From the moment Vasily Grossman poses to himself the question of the violence he describes, a third space forms in the text, one that annexes itself — without, however, placing itself in an equivalent position — to the two spaces that stand opposed in the confrontation of viewpoints: that of interpretation as a third voice. This third voice is not entirely taken up by the narrator, whose ambiguous position we have seen, nor assumed by either of the two characters, whose discourses are at times ambivalent. It is a space that belongs to no one, but that each of the protagonists of the narrative text invests, and that constitutes the discourse of a possible questioning of the ideological foundations of the stated positions.
This space emerges at several points in the chapter. First of all, it is the doing of Mostovskoy himself. His doubts, growing in the text, perceptible in the character’s inner thoughts, most often appear spontaneously, and turn the dialogue into a genuine trialogue. The doubts, in the text, become discourse, but it is the narration itself that undermines these returns of the repressed, by sending them back under the yoke of their original censorship.
It would have been easy to refute this man’s reasoning. His eyes drew still closer to Mostovskoy. But there was something more repugnant and more dangerous than the words of this SS provocateur: it was the repugnant doubts that Mostovskoy found deep within himself and no longer in the discourse of his enemy.
So it happens that a man is afraid of being ill, that he fears a malignant tumor, but he does not go to consult a doctor, he strives not to notice his pains, avoids speaking of illness with those close to him. But then one day someone says to him: “Tell me, do you ever happen to have such-and-such a pain, usually after you have… That’s it… Yes…9”
The very fact that the protagonist set up in this scene as a positive hero — and therefore obliged to assume and take charge of the Party’s ideological discourse within the framework of the socialist-realist novel — can, through his ambivalence, also cast doubt on the soundness of that ideology, in an extreme violence, is a genuine narrative act of dissidence.
And what if his doubts were not a sign of weakness, of impotence, of fatigue, of lack of faith? And what if the doubts that seized him at times, now timid, now destructive, were precisely what was most honest and most pure in him? And he, he repressed them, drove them back, hated them. And what if it was they that contained the seed of revolutionary truth? It was they that contained the dynamite of freedom!
To push back Liss, his viscous fingers, it is enough to stop hating the Menshevik Chernetsov, to stop despising the holy fool Ikonnikov! No, no, more still! One must renounce everything that had constituted his life until now, condemn everything he defended and justified.
But no, no, far more! Not condemn, but hate with all his soul, with all his revolutionary faith, the camps, the Lubyanka, the bloody Yezhov, Yagoda, Beria! That is not enough, one must hate Stalin and his dictatorship!
But no, no, far more! One must condemn Lenin! The path led to the abyss. There it is, Liss’s victory! It was not a victory won on the battlefields, but in that war without gunfire, full of venom, that the Gestapo man was waging against him.
Madness lay in wait for him. And suddenly he gave a sigh of relief. The thought that had, for an instant, blinded and terrified him was crumbling into dust, seemed ridiculous and pitiful. His lapse had lasted only a few seconds.10
But through his irony, the narrator signals his ambiguity. When, at the end of his “lapse,” Mostovskoy thinks, “How could he have, even for a fraction of a second, doubted the rightness of the great cause?,”11 the “great cause” is a genuinely ironic formulation. The censor himself, in a grotesque dynamic, is the very one who attacks, in the most acerbic manner, the power he judges ridiculous.
The narrator therefore stands, in many respects, as an ambiguous instance, but one that ultimately takes charge of a dissident voice and invests the third space of the interpreting third party. He compares Liss to a mere bandit, the very enemy of the construction of Soviet ideology. The triviality of this scene helps to reinforce the “repugnant,” “grotesque” character of the Nazi officer’s words. Nevertheless, intertextuality plays an extremely important role in Grossman’s prose, and the grotesque triviality summoned here is not without recalling the one that the narrator of Everything Flows imposes upon his fictional avatar of Lenin. It is truly in this intertextuality that the whole ambivalence of the text deploys itself, and that there is posed, implicitly, the comparison between the Nazi officer and the Soviet leaders.
Dialogism as resistance of the text
The text thus offers the reader, at the margins of the dialogues proper, discursive spaces capable of indicating the ambiguity of the stated positions. Effective narrative strategies are set in place in order to interrogate, even beyond the confrontation of the two protagonists, the ambivalence of the scene described.
The office was empty. Rugs on the floor, flowers in a vase, a painting on the wall (the edge of a forest and roofs of red tiles); Mostovskoy said to himself that he was in the office of the director of a slaughterhouse: all around, the death rattles of dying beasts, the steaming entrails, the men covered in blood, but in the director’s office all is calm and only the telephones on the desk evoke the link that exists between the slaughterhouse and this office.12
On reading this passage, the reader is struck by the impression of the uncanny that emanates from the office. The calm, silent space is only a portent of the flood of horror it conceals. Everything is dehumanized in Liss’s office: the narrator here indicates the possibility of the lie, or at least of a hidden discourse, occulting death behind a veil of humanity. But this humanity itself is not feigned, and therein lies the whole force of Grossman’s text, in indicating the essential ambiguity of the actors of his fresco. Through the uncanniness that emanates from the discourse, it is a whole metaphor of the narrative position that takes shape: each element designates at once itself, but also denotes the duality of its presence — a terrifying Janus for whom any manifestation of a rational sublimation is the index of the violent destructive drives it represses. It is therefore another space that looms between the lines, the one to be glimpsed in the “steaming entrails” that impose themselves as a return of the repressed, but also the one, in an ethical dynamic proper to Grossman’s writing, of a speech dictating an imperative according to which one must never forget: to close one’s eyes is already a guilty act, and the narrator never ceases tirelessly to make this idea resurface through the images and metaphors he summons. Life and Fate is not entirely a monophonic work, in this respect, since it constantly allows the work to dialogue with itself, giving to be seen what it conceals. Luba Jurgenson, in her work on Bolshevik and then Soviet propaganda, indicates the ambiguity of the “seen” and the “concealed,” since what is given to be seen, often with violence, often helps to designate the other scene, which is masked but shows through, the image being unable to control the whole of its visual manifestations. The mechanism is doubtless close in Grossman’s text: it is through this staging of an ambiguity that he indicates the possibility of a heterodox truth13 as the nodal point of his reflection on the establishment of the discourse of the “concentrationary civilization,” to borrow Nadezhda Mandelstam’s words.
It is a genuine impossibility of fixing a meaning that one can read between the lines. The text, when it brings different discourses into confrontation, holds the writing within an in-between apt to demythify any single discourse on the soundness of the Soviet regime: “Is it not there,” Mostovskoy says to himself, “that Stalin’s genius resides? When he was exterminating people of this sort, he was the only one to see the secret brotherhood that united fascism with the Pharisees who made themselves the apostles of an abstract freedom.14” The rhetoric proper to “Soviet-speak,” in its most hermetic and hollow formulations, is here summoned in a context that discredits its omniscience, its omnipotence, and its orthodox character. Without being genuinely ironic, what is at stake here is showing the ambiguity of each element of the discourse and thereby casting doubt on the very foundations of the ideology. In Grossman, it is the questionings and the doubts that are the most finely honed instruments of his refusal of Soviet orthodoxy. These questionings he states, through the play of audacious juxtapositions, of subtle indications, as if surreptitiously, to the attentive reader who accepts them: Liss’s Russian “had that taste of cold ashes proper to the language of popular-science pamphlets.15” If Liss adopts the rhetoric of Soviet scientific pamphlets, dehumanized, that is a narrative index of the possibility of a comparison between Nazi fascism and the Soviet concentrationary politics. The narrator goes so far as to place Soviet slogans in Liss’s mouth: “Our hands, like yours, love real work and we are not afraid to dirty them.16” Through these narrative strategies, it is a genuine gray zone, to take up Primo Levi’s formulation, that Vasily Grossman draws here. The impossibility of tracing a clean separation between the positions of Liss and Mostovskoy, the executioner and his victim, but also between the executioner and the victim — the questioning being doubled by an ethical reflection that exceeds the very stakes of the plot — restores to the problematic of guilt all its ambiguity. “All are guilty, executioners and victims. Grossman comes to the same deduction as Nadezhda Mandelstam. It is impossible to survive an era of terror,” writes Simon Markish in his Grossman Case.17 This gray zone appears in a particularly violent manner when Liss, taking the floor, explicitly makes himself the spokesman for the discourse of the author Vasily Grossman.
And why, then? asked Liss. You look at my uniform. But I was not born wearing it. Our guide, our party gives us a job and we go to it, we, the soldiers of the party. I have always been a theoretician in the party, I take an interest in problems of history and philosophy, but I am a member of the party. And among you, do you think that all the agents of the NKVD love what they do? If the Central Committee had charged you with reinforcing the work of the Cheka, could you have refused? No, you would have set aside your Hegel and you would have gone. We too set aside Hegel.18
This intervention by the Nazi officer resonates with the reflections the author developed in several others of his works — namely that of the “Judases,” in particular in Everything Flows. There is created here a certain connivance between Grossman and his a priori negative character, the authorial voice taking charge of the discourse of the comparison between Nazism and Stalinism. The interventions in which the author’s point of view is stated open breaches that invest the text with dimensions that charge the prose with a violent contextual acuity: “I told myself: in your camps, your knowledge of foreign languages would have been just as useful to you as in ours. Today, you are frightened by our hatred of Judaism. But it may be that tomorrow you will take it up on your own account.19” Through these premonitory interventions, heavy with meaning, an interpretive field opens, nourished by the reader’s awareness of the context in which the work is inscribed, which from the outset complicates the interpretive space of the trialogue. To consider the Jewish victims is inevitably to think Mostovskoy, as a Bolshevik representative, as an executioner. From then on, because it is stated by the narrator and the author, the question of the porousness of the boundary between victim and executioner takes on a symbolic weight, notably through the intertextual links it deploys. Dostoevsky’s reflection on the interchangeability of executioner and victim, inscribed in particular in The Brothers Karamazov, is here particularly salient. Emmanuel Levinas, in Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence,20 notes the ambiguity that emanates from this sentence drawn from the biography of the starets Zosima, by Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov: “I will tell you further, mother, that each of us is guilty before all, for all, and I more than the others.” If the guilty one is guilty more than the others, then the others too are guilty toward the guilty one, simply because they are the others of an “I,” and because the relation to alterity is inevitably inscribed within a duality between victim and executioner.
Through the indecision of positions, the generalized ambivalence, the text resists any thesis effect. The positions of victim and of executioner cannot hold in the face of this ambiguity, and the site of their confrontation gives way to the space of a questioning where each utterance defamiliarizes the others, in an anguished entanglement of discourses whose statuses remain undecided. Vasily Grossman departs only slightly, consciously, from the socialist-realist aesthetics in which he was formed. Nevertheless, it is truly a “revenge of the text,” in the expression of Susan Rubin Suleiman, that emerges, thereby positing the muffled motivations of the narration. The dialogue is built, on the material plane of the plot, on Ikonnikov’s manuscripts, posing the question of good and evil, of kindness, a problematic dear to Grossman. The violence of the chapter change, between the end of chapter 14 and the beginning of chapter 15 presenting the manuscripts, is eloquent of this: it is indeed a matter of anchoring the question of the dialogue between executioner and victim in a broader reflection on the foundations of good and evil, and their ambivalence — the imposition of a supreme good for humanity being, according to the author, a genesis of evil. The elliptical silence that results from this rupture establishes the site of this inscription of dialogue in the ethical and ontological field; silence becoming the ultimate consecration of individual kindness and of a quest for meaning, in the absence of a truth.
If Grossman’s work is not “polyphonic,” in the strict Bakhtinian sense of the term, it constitutes itself, on the aesthetic plane as well, as a work of dissidence through the very possibility it offers of formulating itself as a dialogic space, and allows, through its analysis, to give the notion of “dialogues” all its efficacy in the Soviet context. In a universe entirely governed and ordered around the orthodoxy of ideology, dialogues as they are stated and take shape in literary works are capable of introducing play — and Bakhtin’s theorization of dialogism at the end of the 1920s is therefore wholly inscribed within its context of writing. The breaches that the texts open are so many narrative spaces of questioning and possibilities for the emergence of marginal discourses capable of undermining the foundations of Soviet orthodoxy, and they make it possible to give to “dialogues” all their political power.
Bibliography
BERELOWITCH, Alexis, “Les totalitarismes de Vassili Grossman,” Le Débat, vol. 165 / 3, May 2011, pp. 159–172.
EHRENBOURG, Ilya and GROSSMAN, Vassili, Le livre noir — Textes et témoignages, trans. Yves Gauthier, Luba Jurgenson, Michèle Kahn, Paul Lequesne, François Guillaume Lorrain, Carole Moroz, Paris, Actes Sud, Solin, 1995.
GROSSMAN, Vassili Semenovitch, Vie et destin, trans. Alexis Berelowitch and Anne Coldefy-Faucard, Lausanne, L’Âge d’Homme, 1995.
JURGENSON, Luba, Création et tyrannie, Cabris, Sulliver, 2009.
LÉVINAS, Emmanuel, Autrement qu’être ou Au-delà de l’essence, Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1974.
MARKISH, Simon Peretsovich, Le cas Grossman, Lausanne, L’Âge d’Homme, 1983.
ROBIN, Régine, Le réalisme socialiste : une esthétique impossible, Paris, Payot, 1986.
Notes
Luba Jurgenson, Création et tyrannie (Creation and Tyranny), Cabris, Sulliver, 2009, p. 104.↩︎
My reference edition will be the following: Vasili Semenovitch Grossman, Vie et destin (Life and Fate), trans. Alexis Berelowitch and Anne Coldefy-Faucard, Lausanne, L’Âge d’homme, 1995.↩︎
The Tolstoyan model, without which any reflection on socialist realism is unthinkable, is here particularly salient. The confrontation of the two men recalls, in many respects, the opposition between Mikhail Kutuzov and Napoleon Bonaparte in War and Peace. This intertextual depth complicates both Grossman’s calling into question of the socialist-realist model and the placing-in-perspective of the Russian hero against his Western opponent, on the model of the antithetical duality dear to Tolstoy and magnified by socialist-realist aesthetics.↩︎
Alexis Berelowitch, “Les totalitarismes de Vassili Grossman,” Le Débat, vol. 165/3, May 2011, pp. 159–172, pp. 160–161.↩︎
Ibid., pp. 167–168.↩︎
Translation by Carole Moroz, in Le livre noir — Textes et témoignages (The Black Book — Texts and Testimonies), texts assembled by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, Paris, Actes Sud, Solin, 1995, pp. 91–92.↩︎
On this point, see Régine Robin, Le réalisme socialiste : une esthétique impossible (Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic), Paris, Payot, 1986.↩︎
Régine Robin, op. cit., pp. 306–307.↩︎
Vasili Semenovitch Grossman, op. cit., pp. 371–372.↩︎
Ibid., pp. 375–376.↩︎
Ibid., p. 376.↩︎
Ibid., p. 369.↩︎
On this point, see Luba Jurgenson, op. cit.↩︎
Vasili Semenovitch Grossman, op. cit., p. 376.↩︎
Ibidem, p. 370.↩︎
Ibidem, p. 371.↩︎
Simon Peretsovich Markish, Le cas Grossman (The Grossman Case), Lausanne, L’Âge d’Homme, 1983, p. 127.↩︎
Vasili Semenovitch Grossman, op. cit., p. 370.↩︎
Ibid., p. 375.↩︎
Emmanuel Levinas, Autrement qu’être ou Au-delà de l’essence (Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence), Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1974. ↩︎