`Life and Fate'

The United States has been blessedly free of war at home, and this may in part account for the scarcity of great American literature devoted to war. Our one exception to domestic tranquility, the Civil War, resulted in many books (Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore is the definitive chronicle) but none of the first rank, and I include The Red Badge of Courage, which to me has always seemed slight. The one exception, Shelby Foote’s three-volume The Civil War: A Narrative, required a century of national pupation before its emergence as the national epic, our Iliad, as it has been misleadingly described. The less said about the American novels generated by World War II, the better.

In contrast, Russia has produced two superior novels that take war, specifically invasions of the Russian motherland, as their theme. Tolstoy’s War and Peace, of course, is more than a war novel, what today we might deride as a “historical novel.” What we remember are characters, as we remember our own family -- Prince Andrei Bolkonsky lying wounded on the battlefield and Pierre Bezukhov’s deranged plans to assassinate Napoleon. My oldest son confessed to falling in love with Natasha Rostov when he first read the novel last year.

I’m reminded of something William Maxwell said, as reported by Edward Hirsch: “I once said to Joe Mitchell that the only part about dying that I minded was that when you are dead you can’t read Tolstoy.” The novelist Annabel Davis-Goff read War and Peace aloud to Maxwell and his wife – the last novel either of them read. She writes: “There are sequences in War and Peace so affecting that one can hardly bear to read them.”

The other great Russian war novel, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, was self-consciously modeled on War and Peace. I wrote about Grossman here in January. Grossman claimed to have read Tolstoy’s novel twice while serving as a journalist with the Red Army. Life and Fate was published only posthumously, because of Soviet censorship, and not published in English until 1985. Perhaps in part because of its formidable Russian bulk – 871 pages – the novel’s reputation has languished, but its republication last year by New York Review Books augers well for literary justice, as does a splendid appreciation by Joseph Epstein in the May 5-6 edition of the Wall Street Journal.

Epstein’s arch glibness can be off-putting, but for once he is sober and unironical, as Grossman and his novel deserve. His brief essay begins:

“No people have been put to the tests of suffering the way the Russians have. They have never known anything approaching decent government. Czars or commisars, their leaders have always treated them as if they were a conquered nation.”

Later he writes:

“To attempt a novel modeled on War and Peace is easy; to write one that is unembarrassing by comparison is not. Far from embarrassing, Life and Fate is one of the great novels of the 20th century.”

I urge you to read Epstein’s piece and then Life and Fate, a novel with all the virtues of Tolstoy and the other 19th-century masters of the form, as well as the moral witness of a man who covered the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, and Berlin, and the liberation of the Treblinka and Majdanek concentration camps. There is nothing experimental or daring in its structure or language. Rather, there is moral passion and unblinking commitment to truth. Dr. Johnson, I think, would have comprehended the vast evil of the 20th century and, though no admirer of the novel as a genre, would have read Life and Fate with recognition and gratitude.