When the manuscript for this book was first reviewed by the Soviet censor, he told Grossman that the book could be published, in about two hundred years. Grossman, a Jew who reported on the Great Patriotic War directly from the front lines while in Stalingrad, at the battle of Kursk and all the way through to the battle of Berlin, was rapidly falling out of favor with his Soviet masters. His book broke so many Soviet taboos; it did not portray the soldiers with Stalin’s name on their lips as they fought, he specifically mentioned the murder of Jews by the German invaders (officially, the Jews were not to be singled out as special victims of the war), a Soviet scientist is self-centered and has a huge ego, etc.. Other writers, such as Babel (executed in 1949) and Ehrenburg (who worked on the Black Book with Grossman) felt the sting of Stalin’s wrath but fortunately for Grossman, Stalin died before the final reckoning.
The novel traces the usual myriad of Russian characters through their lives during World War II. They like millions of others are caught in the struggle between two totalitarian states who have little if any regard for the “average” man. Unlike War and Peace, there are not dramatic battle scenes (surprising since Grossman did spend so much time at the front), and in the first reading I could not grasp the general direction of the story. Except for the egotistical scientist, many of the characters seem to move along in a rather haphazard manner. I would suggest that one keep a pad of paper handy to make notes as there are many individual characters and the names can be confusing.
I certainly do not pretend to be an expert of Russian literature, but I have found these “great” Russian novels to be overly long and missing a clear-cut story (with the exception of the three-book trilogy by Anatoli Rybakov). Is it indictive of the Russian or Soviet mind set where subterfuge was a means of survival or is it merely a great desire to write another War and Peace? Or, perhaps it is just to my American mind set that I seek writing that is more direct and to the point. I must admit however, that I did find this novel more direct than other Russian novels, such as Solzhenitsyn’s March 1917.
