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Plural memories vs State memory

Stalingrad.

Vasily Grossman’s Polyptych

Ferdinanda Cremascoli

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Vasily Grossman returned home from the war. It was the summer 1945.

Still dazed by the terrible and dense experience he had lived during those past four years as a correspondent for the Red Army newspaper, he had already decided to write a novel.

From the end of the war to the early sixties he wrote two novels on that experience. The first novel, the first part of the story, focuses chronologically on July-September 1942 events, with some retrospection to the previous months and year. This novel overcame the numerous obstacles created by the Soviet censorship, and was published in the Soviet Union in the mid-fifties years with the title For a Just Cause (Za pravoe delo).

The second novel, Life and Fate (Zhizn i sudba), centered on the events of September 1942-January 1943 with an epilogue in the spring of the same year, was seized by the KGB in 1961. Life and Fate was published only many years later, in the 1980s, first in Western Europe and then in the Soviet Union.

• Presentation

• Iconography

• General Index

• Novel’s Maps

• Novel’s Timeline

• About the Author

The whole essay is in Italian. It will be soon available online (Spring 2020). You can already book your copy on amazon or on kobo

Synopsis Index

Ferdinanda Cremascoli

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The Grossmanian dilogy does not focus on an event, but on the event that the author feels at the center of the twentieth century. In his opinion Stalingrad is the perfect epitome of European history in the first half of that century, when democracy is canceled, betrayed in Europe and suffocated in the bud in Russia, when dictatorships inevitably generate war and massacres, but at the same time there is also an obstinate aspiration to personal freedom and social justice.

This great story is a huge and complex text, difficult to read precisely because of its size and richness: a warp formed by the historical events of the war on the eastern front in 1942, on which is grafted a sophisticated and multiple plot of human events.

So the reader 's first need is not to get lost in such a vast text. A metaphor seems particularly suitable for describing the structure of this novel: this work is a polyptych.

In a polyptych it is the central figure that orients all the stories. The others figures organize around it in a non-linear, but spatial way: the position of the panels is relevant, right and left of the central figure, above and below. In Vasily Grossman’s dilogy, as in a polyptych, the links between one story and the other obey laws that

the text itself creates, in explicit forms or in more hidden forms. The editorial choice to publish only the second novel, as if the first did not exist, is the same operation that leads to disarticulate a polyptych and to present its parts as autonomous (the predella, the cymatium, the cuspid ... ) while its meaning is in the bonds among the panels and between the single panel and the whole.

The Italian reader is penalized by this choice, as a translation of the first novel is not yet available. The condition of the German and Spanish reader is similar to the Italian one. For the French reader, the situation improved in 2008, almost thirty years after the translation of Vie et destin, when the translation of Luba Jurgenson was published for L’Age d’Homme in Lausanne, with the title Pour une juste cause. For the English reader, the translation of Elisabeth and Robert Chandler is available since spring 2019. This translation brings the novel back to the original title the author would have liked, Stalingrad. He was forced to modify it because of the censorship pressures.

This essay, based on the text of the French and English translations, aims to highlight the continuous references among the panels of the polyptych, that is, among the parts of the whole story.

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The first character of the novel in order of appearance is a farmer, Pyotr Semyonovich Vavilov. His story occupies the ideal space of the center of the polyptych, because this novel narrates the people with their vicissitudes and memories.

The notion of “people” in this great novel does not evoke an indistinct whole, but the composite plurality of human individuals. In fact, immediately afterwards, here is the presentation of the Shaposhnikov family, its members and friends who make up most of the characters in the novel.

The ending of the story still focuses on the family, but the last word belongs to a professional soldier, the Major Byerozkin. This very long story is centered on the memories of the peasants who have become soldiers by necessity, on the memories of an entire population undergoing the Nazi oppression, and the Stalinist one, on the memories of brave soldiers. This is why to the right of the central figure in this ideal polyptych one can imagine depicted the difficult and harsh daily life of all the Soviet people: exemplary figures of workers, miners, scientists, mothers of the family, young, old, orphans ... all, men and women of all ages, of every social class, of every job. To the left of the central figure is the war: the people in Stalingrad, the fierce resistance in the city; there are also the commanders of the

Red Army and party men; there are two dictators, Stalin and Hitler and figures of Germans, at home and at war and in the extermination camps, in search of the solution of the most upsetting enigma, their wicked collaboration with the Shoah. This latest event occupies a prominent place in an ideal polyptych, just above the central figure. The lower panel, an ideal predella, finally depicts the bombardment and the fire of Stalingrad. The mass murder of the Jews and the destruction of a city are in fact the two highlights of the events narrated, because the tragedy of the Jews for Grossman is part of the tragedy in the era of total extermination, as his brotherly friend Semyon Lipkin recalls.

If we limit ourselves to the reading of the second novel, that is Life and Fate, we make a disarticulation, as it used to be in the past for polyptychs, and the depth of perspective offered by an integral reading is lost.

Only thanks to an integral reading the events of the many characters acquire a complete sense. Only thanks to a complete reading you can notice the insistence on certain images that always return identical in very distant pages. This is the case of the table set by the Shaposhnikov family that appears at the beginning of the story, in July-August 1942 and in the epilogue, in April 1943. This is the case of the terrifying letter from Anna Semyonovna, the mother of

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Professor Shtrum: the vicissitudes for reaching its destination are narrated in the first novel, the content of the letter becomes known to the reader only in the second, and the letter itself becomes a tangible sign of the massacres narrated by this bloody tale.

Finally, it should be noted that many readings limited to the second novel hailed Life and Fate as a masterpiece, grasping above all the parallel between Nazism and Stalinism. Western readers admired the freedom of thought, which emerges with great force in Professor Shtrum’s reflections and in the famous dialogue between Liss and Mostovskoy. For this they admired, and translated, above all the second novel.

However, just reading the whole story not only clarifies that this same theme is also present in the first novel, but offers the reader a richer and deeper perspective: it is not only the similarity between the two regimes, it is also, and perhaps above all, the tragic opposition between popular memories and the State memory, between plural, popular memories and the nationalist myth of the "Great Patriotic War".

Vasily Grossman’s story focuses precisely on the existence of different, sometimes divergent, memories about the Soviet history in the first half of the twentieth century. There

are many memories of all those who lived the revolution, the civil war, the collectivization, the industrialization and finally the war, and they are other than the nationalist legend built by the State on the Russian-Soviet superiority in war and, by extension, in every other possible area, of course under the infallible leadership of the party and its leader.

Memories mutilated by the State memory find a voice in the Grossmanian text. As in Life and Fate the criticism of the Soviet regime returns in the words of many characters, civilians and fighters, so in Stalingrad there are the memories of Novikov, Krymov, Darensky and Byerozkin on the beginning of the war in summer 1941 and on the military errors made in those months by Stalin and his circle, there are Colonel Ageyev’s considerations on order 227, “Not One Step Back”. Furthermore among the civilians, Vavilov himself and the Don Cossacks, there are discussions about the kolchoz; and in the history of Dmitrj there is the fear of the gulag. The origin of the criticism of the Stalinist era lies precisely in these reflections, by civilians and military. The thread of memory unfolds along the story: the facts the new State born in the Seventeen lived, and the choices that were possible and that could have led to quite different outcomes.

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Mostovskoy’s reflections on the revolution develop in the two parts of the novel, not only in Life and Fate, but also at the beginning of the story. In the chapter 12 of Part I of Stalingrad he recalls the winter of Forty-one in the besieged Leningrad, the fatally pale infant faces, the patient and obstinate behavior of women, workers, soldiers. And at the same time he remembers the distant, profound and lively discussions with fellow emigrants, whose voices he still hears within himself, in London, in the University park, on Marx’s grave. Mostovskoy recalls the grueling effort of the years in which the Soviet Republic was built, his personal contribution to the theoretical and practical organization of the five-year plans, the electrification program, his work at the State Scientific Research Center, and above all his work as Commissioner for Public Education, where he always worked with great agreement with a friend, Lunacharsky (LF, I, 4). Just a fleeting mention in Life and Fate to this leading figure of the Bolshevik leadership group; so clever that he knew how to protect himself from Stalin (he was not arrested and eliminated), but, unable to fight him politically, he was marginalized, just like Mostovskoy. The mention to Lunacharsky in Life and Fate shines with its meaning, if it is related to the chapter of Stalingrad in which the story of Mostovskoy, the Bolshevik, is narrated. He idealizes the

revolution, considers it a great work of Lenin, even when he has proof that the error lies precisely in the weakness of that theoretical elaboration. Lenin was not able to imagine institutions capable of translating the ideal of democracy into politics. Mostovskoy knows that Leninism paves the way for the Stalinist regime, which then established itself, and liquidated the whole Leninist leadership group, including Bukharin whom Mostovskoy had esteemed and loved deeply.

It is therefore on the field of memory, or rather of memories, that an unequal duel takes place between this text in its entirety and the State, from the tormented history of the censorship of the first novel and the seizure of the second. The irrepressible need of the story is to contrast the narrative of power, which builds a rhetorical monument, transforming the love of country into nationalism. The Grossmanian dilogy, on the contrary, gives voice to a love of country declined in different, plural, and all legitimate ways, and all relentlessly expunged from the official version or cut and deprived of their meaning. Yet the homeland love of the Menshevik Chernetsov is no less worthy than the Colonel Novikov one. The “house-manager” Grekov fights for a free homeland no less heroically than the commander Filiaškin and the men who perish with him at the station.

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And the Bolshevik Mostovskoy is no less critical than the old prince Shargorodsky on the repechage of all the figures of glorious generals of the past and on the policy of reopening the churches, which are full, as pointed out not without a note of humor Agrippina Petrovna, Mostovskoy landlady. An explicit controversy with the myth of the “Great Patriotic War” is precisely in Stalingrad in the chapter 4 of Part II in which, during a press conference at the front, General Yeremenko points out to journalists that the current situation is not the one discussed in the war council of Fili, narrated in War and Peace. Yeremenko’s words sound other than those of Kutuzov at the time of the Napoleonic invasion, and the war against the Germans in 1941 is not the war against the French in 1812!

Finally, how can we fail to understand the strong ethical need that characterizes the Grossmanian novel? While conducting his research into the world, this great novel also expresses an anguished fear: history remembers the facts, the generals, the men of power, but what if the torments of ordinary people were forgotten? What if everything that is understood at such a high price is scattered like a mist swept away by the wind of the steppe, or is buried under a blanket of snow? In Vasily Grossman's dilogy the investigation of reality obeys an absolute moral law: the memory of human suffering must be preserved,

we must give voice to the memory of everyone, the survivors and the dead.

From the ethical motivation of the story stems also his stylistic choice: in the middle of the twentieth century, after the crisis of the nineteenth-century novel, after the lesson of the avant-gardes, Vasily Grossman decides, consciously and polemically, to write a historical novel, which lies within the great school of European realism. Not of socialist realism, but of realism according to the beloved Chekhov. The discussion on the limits of the great artistic currents of the first half of the twentieth century is another of the themes that runs through the whole story, in an inexhaustible quest to define an original poetry. Proof of this are the jokes about Zhenya and modern painting, about the lesson of the avant-garde, which are not only followed throughout the text, but are also the object of a long reflection of the narrating voice in Stalingrad, as you can read in chapter 2 of Part II.

But that’s not all. Precisely the strong moral commitment of the novel is the reason that makes intelligible the choice of the omniscient narrator. The narrator is out of action, he comments on events, but he has no consolation to offer, he has a terrible experience to share, questioning himself and the reader.

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The Grossmanian dilogy is therefore a work with a grandiose structure and multiple implications, it is characterized by a strong systemic coherence, the first novel does not have a different nature from the second. It is possible to discuss which of the two parts is better, if desired, but undoubtedly both have great value, and are a unique work.

It is Semyon Lipkin who says it with polemical vigor towards the criticism opposing Stalingrad to Life and Fate: while the second novel would denounce the infamy of the Soviet regime, the first would be an ordinary Stalin era novel. No.

Et Pour une juste cause lui-même avec ses portrait réaliste de gens simple, des paysans, des ouvriers, des femmes éstenuée, avec l’amère vérité de la vie quotidienne de l’Union Sovietique, avec les descriptions géniales d’Hitler et de l’incendie de Stalingrad, avec la mort du bataillon Filiachkine, et les rencontres du commandant Beriozkine avec sa femme, non ce n’est pa là un roman soviétique ordinaire. (Sémion Lipkine, Le destin de Vassili Grossman, L’Age d’Homme, Lausanne 1990, pag. 25)

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Iconography

An ideal image of the “Vasilij Grossman polyptych” could be this, modeled on a 15th century Italian polyptych.

It is the polyptych by Giovanni Canavesio, located in the parish church of Verderio in the province of Lecco, Italy.

This polyptych suggested the shape in which Russian works find their place. Mostly they are paintings or posters from Russian museums, but not exclusively.

The author, the title, the year of composition (when known), the place, where the image is, are indicated here.

Polyptych

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Central panels In the middle Grigory Myasoyedov, Harvest Time, 1867, Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

Above David Olère, Crematorium III in activity, After1945, Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem

Predella Guernica Pablo Picasso, photo by Almudena-Sanz-Tabernero, Pixabay

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Right panels The homeland of the workers, the farmers and ... the single party. Aleksandr Dejneka, Weavers, 1927, Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

Alexey and Sergey Tkachev, Children, 1957, Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

Right Cymatium Konstantin Juon, Komsomolka, 1926, Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

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Right Cymatium Natan Isaevič Altman, Portrait of Anna Akhmatova, 1915, Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

Right Cusp Lenin and the Bolsheviks, free image

Danzig Baldaev, Drawing, Gardien de camp: tatouages et dessins du goulag, éditions des Syrtes, Genève 2013,

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Left Panels: the War Stalingrad Battle, Section, City of Volgograd Museum

Left Cymatium Commanders and Commissars, City of Volgograd Museum

1941: Bombs on Stalingrad, City of Volgograd Museum,

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Left Cusp Nazim Fayik Zaheerr, Stalin, Pixabay

Hitler, Drawing from pngtree.com

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Introduction

Centre Central Panel. The Farmers, the Kolchoz and the War: Vavilov

Predella. The Burning of Stalingrad

Upper central panel. Shoah. Victims and Torturers Anna Shtrum, the Ghetto Natasha and Naum Rozenberg, the Pit Sofya and David, the Train and the Gas Assassins, Collaborators and Instigators Anti-Semitism and Totalitarianism

Right Panels Right Panel. The Homeland of Workers, Farmers and Single Party

In Mine. Ivan Pavlovich Novikov At the Stalgres. Stepan Fyodorovich Spiridonov Science and Power. Viktor Pavlovich Shtrum

Right Cymatium. Ordinary People Scenes from a Marriage: Andreyev and Varvara The Quantum of Love. Zhenya, Vera, Novikov

Right cusp. Four Bolsheviks and One Chekist Dmitry in the Gulag. The Gulag According to Katsenelenbogen Discretionary Power. Abarchuk Internationalism. Mostovskoy Revolutionary Cause Freed People from Morality. Krymov

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General InDEX /1.2

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Left Panels Left Panel. Ordinary People, Extraordinary Feats

The Station and the House 6/1 The Unknown Gallantry. Byerozkin To Whom Russia Must Say Thanks. Novikov The Experience of Pain. Darensky Fates of death. Tolya and Viktorov Dogfights Soviet Volunteers. Polyakov, Seryozha, Chentsov

Left Cymatium. Soviets and Germans in Stalingrad In Stalingrad One Can Only Die. Soviet Officers Homines Novi. Pryakhin and Getmanov Those Who, Albeit Reluctantly, Executed the Orders. Paulus and the other officers German Soldiers. Stumpfe e Schmidt German Officers. Bach, the Confused, and Lenard the Nazi

Left Cusp. Comparison between Two Dictators Hitler Stalin

General InDEX /2.2

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In the following pages we present seven maps to help you reconstruct the complex story of the text.

The whole story develops in two novels of three parts each. The first six maps reconstruct the events narrated around four focal points: the historical facts, the figure of Vavilov, the characters related to the Shaposhnikov family, or because they are members of the family itself or because its friends or because they are related to friends; and finally the Germans, historical or novel characters.

Each thread has a different color. Each node begins with a number: it corresponds to the chapter (or chapters) in which that specific fact is narrated. The nodes are distributed so that the reader can follow the progress of the story chapter by chapter vertically.

The last map, the seventh, is a timeline. Above there are the main events of the war in the Stalingrad region between the summer of 1942 (with a retrospective on the events of the previous months and year) and February 1943, with an epilogue in the spring. Below the central timeline there are the stories of the novel, intertwined with the events of the war.

Italicized nodes indicate events whose date is not stated, but which are supposed to have occurred at that specific time.

Novel’s Maps

and

novel’s timeline

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Ferdinanda Cremascoli. Stalingrad. Vasily Grossman’ Polyptych. Map 1/7

You can freely use this map as long as you give the author due credit. No change allowed. No commercial use allowed

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Ferdinanda Cremascoli. Stalingrad. Vasily Grossman’ Polyptych. Map 2/7

You can freely use this map as long as you give the author due credit. No change allowed. No commercial use allowed

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Ferdinanda Cremascoli. Stalingrad. Vasily Grossman’ Polyptych. Map 3/7

You can freely use this map as long as you give the author due credit. No change allowed. No commercial use allowed

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Ferdinanda Cremascoli. Stalingrad. Vasily Grossman’ Polyptych. Map 4/7

You can freely use this map as long as you give the author due credit. No change allowed. No commercial use allowed

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Ferdinanda Cremascoli. Stalingrad. Vasily Grossman’ Polyptych. Map 5/7

You can freely use this map as long as you give the author due credit. No change allowed. No commercial use allowed

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Ferdinanda Cremascoli. Stalingrad. Vasily Grossman’ Polyptych. Map 6/7

You can freely use this map as long as you give the author due credit. No change allowed. No commercial use allowed

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Ferdinanda Cremascoli. Stalingrad. Vasily Grossman’ Polyptych. Map 7.1/7

You can freely use this map as long as you give the author due credit. No change allowed. No commercial use allowed

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Ferdinanda Cremascoli. Stalingrad. Vasily Grossman’ Polyptych. Map 7.2/7

You can freely use this map as long as you give the author due credit. No change allowed. No commercial use allowed

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About the Author In September 2015 I left Italian high schools where I worked first as a teacher (1973-1996) and then as principal (1996-2015). I loved my job very much, but the time has come to take part in something else. Since 2016 I have been managing italianacontemporanea.org, a collection of original and translated writings in Italian. Inside there are potentially all the t e x t s y o u c a n u s e t o b u i l d y o u r s k i l l s i n I t a l i a n . I a l s o m a n a g e www.nelmezzodelcammin.it, a site in progress, which has the ambition to gradually collect the documents of my activity as teacher and principal. I also hold some conferences in Holland, where I spend part of the year. I held a series of conferences and workshops at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Amsterdam about Primo Levi on the occasion of the Memorial Day 2019; on the same theme in November 2019 a conference at the Società Dante Alighieri in Eindhoven and in the same Dutch city I collaborate with the Libera mente Association which organizes meetings on issues of Italian culture for the city.

As a teacher of Italian and Latin in high school I worked mainly on language education. Since the mid-1980s I have introduced new technologies into teaching. I have written articles and speeches in many conferences and manuals on education in writing. I will cite only three essays in chronological order.

With Dante Trezzi I wrote La costruzione del curriculum di Italiano published in 1990 by La Nuova Italia in Florence. Also with La Nuova Italia in 1993 I published a Guida alla scrittura. With Domenico Fiormonte I wrote a Manuale di scrittura, published in 1997 by Bollati and Boringhieri in Turin. Finally, I would like to remind you that since 1993 I have taken care of the online presence of my students. An example is the e-text of the Decameron, still on the Brown University website and the publication of Rime by Guido Cavalcanti on LiberLiber.

As principal I promoted new technologies in the school. I only remember two of my publications on the subject. One, with Mara Gualdoni, La lavagna elettronica, published by Laterza in 2000. The other is an eBook that I published in July 2019, Il mestiere della scuola. Memoria. It is a pamphlet dedicated to the professions of the school and in particular to the profession of directing it.

• For my complete CV visit www.nelmezzodelcammin.it

• You can mail me at ferdinandacremascoli@gmail.com

• My books are available on the bookshops Amazon, Kobo, AppleBooks. All links available on www.nelmezzodelcammin.it

who is she?

Ferdinanda Cremascoli