Popoff , Alexandra Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 163 Dematagoda draws from his construal of other Nabokov works, especially the plays, The Eye and Despair, appear unsubstantiated and driven by the critic’s own theoretical agenda. For example, Dematagoda’s claim that The Waltz Invention is ‘a sublimation of Nabokov’s own megalomaniac fantasy’ (pp. 45, 46) is corroborated by little more than an insistence that Nabokovian ‘instances of denial’ (in this case, of the play’s ‘topical import’) ‘are never so strident than when there is something important to conceal’ (p. 46). In a similar vein, Dematagoda’s analysis of Hermann Karlovich’s leftist sympathies as ‘caricatures’ that reveal ‘a very naïve understanding of Marxism on Nabokov’s part’ (p. 82) is grounded in a confused perception of Nabokov’s rejection of Marxism as an ontology, rather than a system of ideas that gave rise to Bolshevism, with its disregard for human rights, the uniqueness of every individual and freedom of artistic self-expression. (Nabokov, Dematagoda says, ‘seeks to mock Marxism for what he views to be its reductive and absurd interpretation of the material world’, p. 85.) This confusion may be grounded in Dematagoda’s most challenging, but also not fully proven, proposition that Nabokov’s rejection of Symbolism in the 1920s–30s was ‘perhaps also due to the similarities he perceived between Symbolist epistemology and other, putatively more rational, epistemological systems such as Freudian psychoanalysis, or even Marxism’ (p. 74). The main controversy of this work lies in Dematagoda’s seeing other researchers’ interpretations of Nabokov the writer and thinker as ‘overly generous’ and grounded in the ‘attachment which scholars and general readers alike feel towards Nabokov’s body of work’ (p. 188). Dematagoda is obviously taking a less-beaten path in Nabokov scholarship, but since he refuses to appreciate Nabokov’s legacy, seeing in it a ‘conduit for a variety of humanistic ideals: kindness, beauty, vague universalistic notions of freedom, the struggle against tyranny — things which are often at odds with the profoundly subjective and tendentious character of the work itself’ (p. 192) — he may be heading in the direction that many others in the field prefer to sidestep. Bard College, NY Olga Voronina Popoff, Alexandra. Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT and London, 2019. xi + 395 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $32.50: £25.00. The Soviet writer Vasilii Grossman (1905–64) has been the subject of renewed interest with the recent publication of Robert Chandler’s English translation of Stalingrad (London, 2019), the oft-forgotten prequel to the author’s most SEER, 98, 1, JANUARY 2020 164 famous novel, Life and Fate. Alexandra Popoff’s new biography of Grossman is a timely companion to this publication, contextualizing the author’s life and works within the events that shaped both his own existence and the course of twentieth-century European history, namely the Second World War, the Holocaust and Soviet repression. Popoff’s research also brings to light important new information about the source material for Grossman’s final work, Everything Flows, in which the author represented the Gulag, collectivization and famine in Ukraine. The biography is structured chronologically, beginning with Grossman’s upbringing in pre-revolutionary Berdichev’s large Jewish community, his student years in Kyiv and Moscow, and his work as a chemist in the mines of the Donbass. It then assesses the beginnings of Grossman’s literary career in the early 1930s and the peak of his popularity as a correspondent for the Red Army newspaper, Red Star, during the Second World War. A large proportion of the text is rightly allocated to Grossman’s post-war struggles with the Soviet authorities. These chapters include details about the Black Book, a compilation of documentary evidence of Nazi atrocities against the Jews on Soviet soil that was suppressed in 1948, then Stalingrad which, though highly censored, first appeared in 1952 as For a Just Cause. Subsequently, its sequel, Life and Fate, was ‘arrested’ by the KGB in 1961 for its daring comparisons between Nazism and Stalinism. In the final chapters, the text goes into detail about Everything Flows, generally subject to less scholarly attention than Life and Fate, before describing the untimely circumstances...