Nicholas Rothwell
In mid-October 1961, at the time of
the 22nd congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the master
novelist of the Russian 20th century, Vasily Grossman, arrived in the
capital of Armenia, Yerevan.
The main boulevard of the city, a wide avenue flanked by plane
trees and lit by a central line of brilliant street lamps, was just then
being renamed. No longer would it be Stalin Prospect; it would take
Lenin's name instead.
They were complex times - for the Soviet
empire, for its writers and for Grossman in particular. His defining
novel, Life and Fate, had just been seized, or "arrested", by the KGB:
three secret policemen had raided his apartment and confiscated all
copies of the manuscript. To be on the safe side, they removed all his
carbon papers and typewriter ribbons as well.
As far as Grossman
knew, the great work of his life had just been destroyed. He was a man
without prospects, his words had been silenced, his strength was ebbing
away.
To survive, he took on a piece of literary hack-work: the translation
of a long novel by a famous, officially favoured writer from the
Armenian republic, and to finish off this task he made a trip to visit
the author and check the typescript through.
Armenia! Grossman,
one of the best travelled Soviet war correspondents of the time, a
veteran of the plains of Russia and the battlefields of eastern Europe,
was in the high Caucasus at last - and he was following a long line of
Russian writers who had made this pilgrimage and been transformed by
what they found. Alexander Pushkin, the tradition's first presiding
genius, had made a journey to Erzurum and the Armenian backlands in
1820;(**) Mikhail Lermontov, Aleksandr Griboyedov, Leo Tolstoy and a parade
of their successors in Russian prose and verse came in his path.
Indeed,
the distinctive cultures of the region served literary Moscow and
Petersburg much as the Aboriginal desert region serves the cities of
Australia today: at once as mirror, exotic wonderworld and sounding
board.
The pattern of continuing visitation persisted into Soviet
times. In 1930, when poet Osip Mandelstam was at a hinge point in his
creative life, he too undertook a trip to Armenia - and both Lermontov
and Mandelstam loom in Grossman's thoughts and lend his Armenian
writings a haunted note.
After two months spent in Yerevan and
the surrounding villages and landscapes, Grossman, his translating
labours done, felt compelled to write his impressions from the journey
down. Hence this brief, touching narrative, An Armenian Sketchbook,(*)
which serves as a quiet pendant to his novels, stories and war reports.
It is a journal of reflection and self-examination, of observations and
explorations - a travel sketchbook in the true sense of the word.
It
appeared in Russian for the first time, heavily expurgated, soon after
his death in 1964. A full text could be published only during the
perestroika era of dawning free expression, in 1988.
There were good reasons for the delay, ideological, of course, but
tonal as well. Few books as sweetly intimate and delicate have found
their way into print; the "sketchbook" is a sketch of its author's
feelings, so plainly described it makes the official writing of the
Soviet era seem like a tidal wave of posturing and pose. In its pages
Grossman is at once wide-eyed traveller, inquiring portraitist and
philosophic writer staring his own death down.
He begins with a
bang: with Stalin, the dictator who stands at the heart of Life and Fate
and who, even in eclipse, seemed in those days to dominate all the
Soviet realm. A Stalin statue, vast, majestic, still rose over the
cityscape of Yerevan.
Stalin wears a long bronze greatcoat, and he has a forage cap on his head. One of his bronze hands is tucked beneath the lapel of his greatcoat. He strides along, and his stride is slow, smooth and weighty. It is the stride of a master, a ruler of the world; he is in no hurry. Two very different forces come together in him, and this is strange and troubling. He is the expression of a power so vast that it can belong only to God; and he is also the expression of a coarse, earthly power, the power of a soldier or government official.
This power
still rules over all the world that Grossman sees; it can no longer be
named so openly but it still decides who rises, who falls, what words
are said and what thoughts are set in print. Its shadow is over
everything, even out on the Soviet periphery.
Grossman resists,
in his own fashion, in his writing. He is driven to seek out remote
byways, to dwell on the tales of individuals he meets by chance, to
commemorate them, to record their faces, their gestures, their ways of
being. He peers into the Armenian mirror: rich, varied, strange.
I met scientists, doctors, engineers,
builders, artists, journalists, party activists, and old
revolutionaries. I saw the foundation, the taproot of a nation that is
thousands of years old. I saw ploughmen, vintners and shepherds; I saw
masons; I saw murderers, fashionable young "mods", sportsmen, earnest
leftists and cunning opportunists: I saw helpless fools, army colonels
and Lake Sevan fishermen.
All around him was life, teeming
life, its jump and pulse resisting every impress of the ruling ideology.
Grossman clung to two distinct ideas of Armenia: that it was a little
nation surviving in the Soviet embrace, and that it was an assemblage of
strong-cast characters. He presented both in the meanders of his text.
By
this stage, he had almost completed his literary evolution. He was born
in 1905 in the Ukrainian town of Berdichev, and wrote short stories
about his childhood home that attracted the admiration of the Soviet
cultural establishment. They elevated him. In World War II he served as a
correspondent on the eastern front, advancing with the troops and tank
battalions on the road towards Berlin. They passed close by the site of
Treblinka; Grossman was the first writer to reconstruct the events in a
German death camp.
He wrote long, successful realist novels. But
the things he had heard and had witnessed on the battlefield compelled
him to compose a different kind of narrative, one that would catch and
convey the feelings of a vast, jostling crowd of characters, all joined
in the murk and flow of time. This project became Life and Fate, over
which he laboured for a decade, only to see it stolen away.
At
the time of his Armenian journey, Grossman had already begun writing his
last work, the loose, elusive, imagistic Everything Flows, a book that
seems much like the script of an unmade Andrei Tarkovsky film. The trend
away from sequential narrative is plain in this sketchbook too. His
simplest observations give rise to flights of speculation: the writer is
continually slipping the bounds of his own being, and continually
seeing the surrounding world through the eyes of others, and realising
their view is his as well.
Metaphor comes naturally to Grossman; he builds a whole world of associations from the stones of the plain around Mount Ararat:
There
is no beginning or end to this stone. There it lies - flat and thick on
the ground. There is no escape from it. It is as if countless
stonecutters have been at work. Here we can see the earth's profound
gloom - without artifice or affectation, without any chorus of birds,
without any eau de cologne of spring or summer flowers, without any
dusting of pollen.
The image stream runs on, Grossman
draws his intuitions out: "I know the local stone-polisher; he doubles
as the local stonecutter. His name is time, and he is invincible."
Such
is the world sketched here. Forces push down on men and women; they, in
their simplicity, endure. And what are these forces that oppress us?
They are the harsh theories binding us, the models, the designs and
plans of bureaucrats, even the blueprints of God, whose work is full of
contradictions, and who rushed to publish his first draft too soon, and
should have waited and revised his creation before committing it to
print.
Visions and memories drift through the sketchbook text,
lending its records of chance encounters the feel of episodes in a great
breathing tapestry. There are recollections of the deep underground
mines the writer saw in his young reporting days; there are glimpses of
his much-loved relations, lost in the pogroms of the war.
Grossman
is summing up his passage through the world even as he steeps himself
in the life-ways of another culture. How close death seems! At one
moment, he believes he is on the brink. He describes his fear, his sense
of the end upon him; it is one of the strangest passages set down by an
author in our time:
In the sultry
darkness - though already almost forsaken by my body, which was still
slipping out from me, still slipping away from me - I went on thinking
with a terrible clarity about what was happening. I was dying. And what
gave rise to this mortal anguish, to this feeling of death, which is so
unlike anything in life, was that my "I" was still present, not obscured
in any way; it was continuing quite separately from my body.
Grief
fills him; regret, too. Suddenly, as if through thought's power alone,
he revives: life has taken its proper place in him again.
All
this leads me to think that this world of contradictions, of typing
errors, of passages that are too long and wordy, of arid deserts, of
fools, of camp commandants, of mountain peaks coloured by the sun is a
beautiful world. If the world were not so beautiful the anguish of a
dying man would not be so terrible, so incomparably more terrible than
any other experience.
Grossman throws himself back into
life, into Armenia, into an Armenian wedding. He fills his pages with
its details, lovingly observed. Armenia has become the whole world to
him, it is youth and maturity and regeneration: "This chain seemed
eternal; neither sorrow, nor death, nor invasions, nor slavery could
break it." He describes the bride and groom, dancing, and the groom's
serious face with its large nose, directed straight ahead, as if he were
driving a car - and feelings overwhelm him: "Though mountains be
reduced to skeletons," he thinks to himself, and writes, "may mankind
endure forever."
He finished writing his journey memoir and
submitted the typescript to the literary journal Novy Mir. The state
censor demanded cuts. He refused. Two years later he was dead; the
manuscript of the sketchbook, which he had wished to title with a
traditional Armenian greeting - "All Good to You" - remained untouched
in the drawer of his writing desk.
"The Australian," August 24, 2013
By Vasily Grossman
Maclehose Press, 192p, $39.99 (HB)
(**) Alexander Pushkin's trip was in 1829 ("Armeniaca")
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