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Spectator.co.uk
Aug 18 2013
An Armenian Sketchbook, by Vasily Grossman - review
by Ian Thomson
An Armenian Sketchbook Vasily Grossman, translated by Robert and
Elizabeth Chandler
MacLehose Press, pp.221, £12, ISBN: 9780857052353
Vasily Grossman, a Ukranian-born Jew, was a war correspondent for the
Soviet army newspaper Red Star. His dispatches from the front between
1941 and 1945 combined emotional engagement with independent-minded
commentary. A solitary, questioning spirit, Grossman set out always to
document truthfully what he saw and heard. His report on the vile
workings of the Treblinka death camp, `The Hell of Treblinka', remains
a masterpiece of controlled rage and unsparing lucidity.
Unsurprisingly, Grossman was mortified when the man who had prevented
Hitler's annihilation of Jewry was suddenly set on their extinction.
In early 1953, Stalin announced in the pages of Pravda that a plot to
murder Kremlin members had been unmasked among Jewish doctors and
intellectuals. Jews like Grossman were now condemned as a
self-regarding, supra-national sect, inimical to the interests of
Mother Russia. It made no difference to Stalin that Grossman had
fought courageously against Hitler; he was reduced to the status of a
non-person. But worse was to come.
In 1960, Grossman's great novel of Russia during the Hitler war, Life
and Fate, was confiscated in typescript by the KGB. This was done at
the height of the Khrushchev `thaw', when a new political tolerance
was supposedly in the air. Grossman's crime had been to draw parallels
between Nazism and Soviet Communism. The Hitler and Stalin regimes (as
Trotsky had pointed out as long ago as 1936) were totalitarian twins
that bore a `deadly similarity'. Grossman had been dead for 24 years
when, in 1988, Life and Fate was finally published in the Soviet
Union.
An Armenian Sketchbook displays all the humanity and candour of
Grossman's Red Star journalism, but with a difference. Grossman was in
the early stages of cancer when he wrote the book in 1962 and the
prose has acquired a death-haunted tone. In Soviet Armenia the Moscow
authorities had hoped that Grossman would meet new people, consume
lots of cognac and life-giving pomegranates and, most important,
forget about the censorship inflicted on Life and Fate. But Grossman
had taken ten long years to write his epic, Tolstoyan novel; whatever
else it might be, An Armenian Sketchbook was hardly going to be a
paean to Soviet idealism.
`Apparently some of our pupils were born in wedlock. We must do all we
can to ensure they're not treated as outcasts.'
Instead, the book is Grossman's attempt to give his life and politics
meaning and justification. Beneath the hawk-eyed observations on
Armenian religion and the Turkish genocide of Armenians is an
old-fashioned belief in `human dignity and human freedom'. When
Ottoman officials had stood by as Kurds bestially slaughtered Armenian
Christians in present-day Turkey in 1915, a new age of atrocity had
got under way, from which it was a short step to Hitler and Stalin,
Grossman believed.
In the ancient Armenian capital of Ani (now in Turkey), images of
Christ can be seen in abandoned churches with their eyes drilled out.
The persecution of minority peoples by a superior power was anathema
to the tolerant-minded Grossman. In the course of his two-month tour
of Armenia he encountered a 75-year-old man who had `lost his mind
during the genocide', when his family was murdered before his eyes.
Along the way, Grossman reports on the anti-Stalinist sentiments he
encounters. The dictator is `an ignoramus, a boaster, an upstart',
Armenians tell him. Not surprisingly, given its anti-Soviet animus, An
Armenian Sketchbook was bowdlerised on its posthumous publication in
the Soviet Union in 1965. All references to nationalism, anti-Semitism
and Stalin were removed; Khrushchev had been deposed, and any talk
against Stalin was no longer acceptable. The book was not published in
Russian in its entirety until the late 1980s; Robert Chandler (who
translated Life and Fate) has rendered it into exquisite English with
the help of his wife Elizabeth. The result is a book wonderful in
every way.
http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/8993181/an-armenian-sketchbook-by-vasily-grossman-review/
Aug 18 2013
An Armenian Sketchbook, by Vasily Grossman - review
by Ian Thomson
An Armenian Sketchbook Vasily Grossman, translated by Robert and
Elizabeth Chandler
MacLehose Press, pp.221, £12, ISBN: 9780857052353
Vasily Grossman, a Ukranian-born Jew, was a war correspondent for the
Soviet army newspaper Red Star. His dispatches from the front between
1941 and 1945 combined emotional engagement with independent-minded
commentary. A solitary, questioning spirit, Grossman set out always to
document truthfully what he saw and heard. His report on the vile
workings of the Treblinka death camp, `The Hell of Treblinka', remains
a masterpiece of controlled rage and unsparing lucidity.
Unsurprisingly, Grossman was mortified when the man who had prevented
Hitler's annihilation of Jewry was suddenly set on their extinction.
In early 1953, Stalin announced in the pages of Pravda that a plot to
murder Kremlin members had been unmasked among Jewish doctors and
intellectuals. Jews like Grossman were now condemned as a
self-regarding, supra-national sect, inimical to the interests of
Mother Russia. It made no difference to Stalin that Grossman had
fought courageously against Hitler; he was reduced to the status of a
non-person. But worse was to come.
In 1960, Grossman's great novel of Russia during the Hitler war, Life
and Fate, was confiscated in typescript by the KGB. This was done at
the height of the Khrushchev `thaw', when a new political tolerance
was supposedly in the air. Grossman's crime had been to draw parallels
between Nazism and Soviet Communism. The Hitler and Stalin regimes (as
Trotsky had pointed out as long ago as 1936) were totalitarian twins
that bore a `deadly similarity'. Grossman had been dead for 24 years
when, in 1988, Life and Fate was finally published in the Soviet
Union.
An Armenian Sketchbook displays all the humanity and candour of
Grossman's Red Star journalism, but with a difference. Grossman was in
the early stages of cancer when he wrote the book in 1962 and the
prose has acquired a death-haunted tone. In Soviet Armenia the Moscow
authorities had hoped that Grossman would meet new people, consume
lots of cognac and life-giving pomegranates and, most important,
forget about the censorship inflicted on Life and Fate. But Grossman
had taken ten long years to write his epic, Tolstoyan novel; whatever
else it might be, An Armenian Sketchbook was hardly going to be a
paean to Soviet idealism.
`Apparently some of our pupils were born in wedlock. We must do all we
can to ensure they're not treated as outcasts.'
Instead, the book is Grossman's attempt to give his life and politics
meaning and justification. Beneath the hawk-eyed observations on
Armenian religion and the Turkish genocide of Armenians is an
old-fashioned belief in `human dignity and human freedom'. When
Ottoman officials had stood by as Kurds bestially slaughtered Armenian
Christians in present-day Turkey in 1915, a new age of atrocity had
got under way, from which it was a short step to Hitler and Stalin,
Grossman believed.
In the ancient Armenian capital of Ani (now in Turkey), images of
Christ can be seen in abandoned churches with their eyes drilled out.
The persecution of minority peoples by a superior power was anathema
to the tolerant-minded Grossman. In the course of his two-month tour
of Armenia he encountered a 75-year-old man who had `lost his mind
during the genocide', when his family was murdered before his eyes.
Along the way, Grossman reports on the anti-Stalinist sentiments he
encounters. The dictator is `an ignoramus, a boaster, an upstart',
Armenians tell him. Not surprisingly, given its anti-Soviet animus, An
Armenian Sketchbook was bowdlerised on its posthumous publication in
the Soviet Union in 1965. All references to nationalism, anti-Semitism
and Stalin were removed; Khrushchev had been deposed, and any talk
against Stalin was no longer acceptable. The book was not published in
Russian in its entirety until the late 1980s; Robert Chandler (who
translated Life and Fate) has rendered it into exquisite English with
the help of his wife Elizabeth. The result is a book wonderful in
every way.
http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/8993181/an-armenian-sketchbook-by-vasily-grossman-review/