DOCSLIB.ORG

Vasily Grossman's Poetics As the Realization of His Philosophy Emily

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Vasily Grossman's Poetics As the Realization of His Philosophy Emily Ethics to Art: Vasily Grossman’s Poetics as the Realization of His Philosophy Emily Austin Traverse Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy under the Executive Committee of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2020 © 2020 Emily Austin Traverse All Rights Reserved Abstract Ethics to Art: Vasily Grossman’s Poetics as the Realization of His Philosophy Emily Austin Traverse This dissertation examines key texts from the intermediate and mature periods of Vasily Grossman’s career in order to determine the relationship between his evolving philosophy and the poetics that characterize his writing. While significant critique has been applied to the nature of Grossman’s philosophy, comparatively less has looked at the aesthetic and technical aspects of his writing itself; still less to the connection between Grossman’s abstract concepts and his accomplished texts. My effort has been to bridge the gap between these two areas of inquiry and to ascertain the quality of their tightly intertwined and complex relationship. I analyze four of Grossman’s key texts in depth, with reference to several other writings. Of the primary texts considered in my study, two are essays from the writer’s intermediate period: “The Hell of Treblinka” («Треблинский ад») and “The Sistine Madonna” («Сикстинская мадонна»);” of the two longer works, one is Grossman’s multi-volume masterpiece novel Life and Fate (Жизнь и судьба) and the other is his novella (повесть) and final fictional work Everything Flows (Все течет). These texts were chosen for their aptness at demonstrating key features of Grossman’s prosody and philosophical thinking, both those that remained constant and those that evolved over time. The following study establishes that Grossman’s writing itself, by means of the formal structures he employs throughout his works, constitutes the embodiment and realization of his ethics. Specifically, the following work considers modes of movement and generation in Grossman’s writing that speak to the value he places on the individual human experience. Table of Contents Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 State of the Current Scholarship ................................................................................................. 1 Levinas: A Comparison of “Philosophical” Systems ................................................................. 6 Thesis and Rationale for the Work ............................................................................................. 8 Selection of Texts ..................................................................................................................... 10 Biographical Background ......................................................................................................... 14 Overview of Chapters ............................................................................................................... 22 Chapter One: The Individual Human Being Emerges as Central and Evolves in Scope ............. 27 1.1 The Foundations of Grossman’s Thought........................................................................... 27 1.2 Human Beings Begin to Emerge in Their Entirety ............................................................. 32 1.3 Human Beings Remain Central .......................................................................................... 35 1.4 Parting Ways with Kant ...................................................................................................... 40 1.5 The Concept of Infinity in the Human ................................................................................ 45 Chapter Two: Grossman’s Use of Lenses as a Means of Generating Ethically Significant Movement ..................................................................................................................................... 49 2.1 Zooming In and Out: The Micro and the Macro as Narrative Vehicles ............................. 49 2.2 The Significance of the Title ............................................................................................... 55 2.3 Movement as Creation ........................................................................................................ 60 2.4 The Limitlessness of Living Movement ............................................................................. 65 Chapter Three: Artistic Forms Embody Abstract Ideas and Facilitate Generative Movement .... 68 3.1 Sistine Madonna: Experience of the “Sublime” ................................................................. 68 i 3.2 Reconciling the Individual and the Group .......................................................................... 71 3.3 Communism: An Ideology That Denies Life...................................................................... 74 3.4 The Importance of Liberation from Ideology ..................................................................... 77 3.5 The Role of Art ................................................................................................................... 79 Chapter Four: Grossman Explores Identity as a Process .............................................................. 90 4.1 The Use of Patterns ............................................................................................................. 90 4.2 Identity as a Key Theme ..................................................................................................... 91 4.3 The Limiting Nature of Identities ....................................................................................... 96 4.4 The Relational Model of Identity ........................................................................................ 99 4.5 The Development of Self as Separate ............................................................................... 102 4.6 The Self is Never Realized ............................................................................................... 103 4.7 “Names” Create Movement and Meaning ........................................................................ 109 4.8 Personal Identity and the Fundamental Self ..................................................................... 112 Chapter Five: The Thematics of Science: Superficial and Deep ................................................ 117 5.1 Science: Bridging the Conceptual with the Concrete ....................................................... 117 5.2 The Problematic Nature of Technology ............................................................................ 119 5.3 The Contradictory Roles of Modern Technology ............................................................. 124 5.4 Art and Science as Generators of Meaning ....................................................................... 127 5.5 Soviet Ideology and Science ............................................................................................. 129 5.6 Ethics: The Abstract vs. the Concrete ............................................................................... 134 Chapter Six: Pain Is a Generative Experience That Supports Movement Within Both Linear and Cyclical Constructs of Time ....................................................................................................... 137 ii 6.1 Pain: Its Evolution in Grossman’s Works ......................................................................... 137 6.2 Linear and Cyclical Time Evinced Through Narrative..................................................... 145 6.3 Synthesis ........................................................................................................................... 150 6.4 Personalized Trauma as Defining a Life ........................................................................... 150 6.5 Contradictions Create Meaning ........................................................................................ 155 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 158 Notes ........................................................................................................................................... 163 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 164 iii Introduction State of the Current Scholarship Very little work has been dedicated to understanding Vasily Grossman’s writing as such. In the introductions and notes to his English translations of Grossman’s works, Robert Chandler occasionally makes note of a stylistic choice on the part of the author that is significant to the effect for which he is aiming or that heightens the tone or ethos Grossman is establishing in a particular passage. Observations of this kind are occasional in Chandler’s commentaries and, in any case, are not central to his treatment of Grossman’s work. Aside from these punctuations of interest in the poetics of Grossman’s writing itself, John Garrard has focused some attention on the “architectonics” of Life and Fate (Жизнь и судьба), while the majority of his Grossman scholarship deals with the writer’s biography and how his thinking was shaped by it. Natalia Leonidovna Karpicheva’s (Натальия Леоидовна Карпичева) doctoral dissertation offers one example of an approach oriented toward structural and technical aspects of Grossman’s texts.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • After Stalin: the Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union (Weeks 1-12) | University of Kent
    10/01/21 After Stalin: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union (Weeks 1-12) | University of Kent After Stalin: The Decline and Fall of the View Online Soviet Union (Weeks 1-12) 435 items Operation Typhoon: Hitler's march on Moscow, October 1941 - Stahel, David, 2013 Book Introductory Bibliography (12 items) Conscience, dissent and reform in Soviet Russia - Boobbyer, Philip, 2005 Book Soviet communism from reform to collapse - Daniels, Robert V., 1995 Book The rise of Russia and the fall of the Soviet empire - Dunlop, John B., 1995 Book Russia and the idea of the West: Gorbachev, intellectuals, and the end of the Cold War - English, Robert D., 2000 Book Last of the empires: a history of the Soviet Union, 1945-1991 - Keep, John L. H., 1996 Book The Soviet tragedy: a history of socialism in Russia, 1917-1991 - Malia, Martin E., 1994 Book Russia's Cold War: from the October Revolution to the fall of the wall - Haslam, Jonathan, c2011 Book Rulers and victims: the Russians in the Soviet Union - Hosking, Geoffrey A., 2006 Book The shadow of war: Russia and the USSR, 1941 to the present - Lovell, Stephen, 2010 Book Lenin's tomb: the last days of the Soviet Empire - Remnick, David, 1994 Book Twentieth century Russia - Treadgold, Donald W., 1995 Book Zhivago's children: the last Russian intelligentsia - Zubok, V. M., 2009 1/34 10/01/21 After Stalin: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union (Weeks 1-12) | University of Kent Book Collections of documents (9 items) The Soviet political poster, 1917-1980: From the USSR Lenin Library Collection - Baburina, Nina, 1986 Book The Soviet system: from crisis to collapse - Dallin, Alexander, Lapidus, Gail Warshofsky, 1995 Book A documentary history of communism - Daniels, Robert Vincent, 1985 Book The great patriotic war of the Soviet Union, 1941-45: a documentary reader - Hill, Alexander, 2009 Book Revelations from the Russian archives: documents in English translation - Koenker, Diane, Bachman, Ronald D., Library of Congress, 1997 Book Sedition: everyday resistance in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev and Brezhnev - Kozlov, V.
    [Show full text]
  • Revolving Beast: Identifying the Animal in Post-Revolutionary Russian Literature
    Revolving Beast: Identifying the Animal in post-Revolutionary Russian Literature by Eric D. Ford A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Slavic Languages and Literatures) in the University of Michigan 2016 Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Sofya Khagi, Chair Associate Professor Herbert J. Eagle Professor Peggy S. McCracken Assistant Professor Benjamin B. Paloff In memory of my brother Jason Ford (1970 - 2012) ii Acknowledgments This dissertation would not have been written without the support and encouragement of several people at the University of Michigan. I am especially indebted to two individuals: Herb Eagle, who served admirably as chair of the Slavic Department for the majority of my time at the university, and who gave invaluable help and advice during some particularly trying times; and Sofya Khagi, my advisor, with whom I have had the great pleasure of working over the past several years. She has been a wonderful mentor, colleague, and friend. I am deeply grateful to my other committee members, Peggy McCracken and Benjamin Paloff, who read my dissertation carefully and provided very helpful criticism and suggestions. I would also like to thank the talented and dedicated faculty of the Slavic department with whom I’ve worked as student and colleague: Olga Maiorova, Mikhail Krutikov, Tatjana Aleksić, Jindrich Toman, Svitlana Rogovyk, Nina Shkolnik, Natalia Kondrashova, Eugene Bondarenko, and Omry Ronen. Thanks also to the many fellow graduate students I’ve had the pleasure of knowing and working with: Aleksandar Bošković, Vlad Beronja, Yana Arnold, Jessica Zychowicz, Renee Scherer, Adam Kolkman, Sarah Sutter, Jodi Grieg, Marin Turk, Jamie Parsons, Olga Greco, Paulina Duda, Haley Laurila, Jason Wagner, and Grace Mahoney.
    [Show full text]
  • Unforgiving Years by Victor Serge (Translated from the French and with an Introduction by Richard Greeman), NYRB Classics, 2008, 368 Pp
    Unforgiving Years by Victor Serge (Translated from the French and with an introduction by Richard Greeman), NYRB Classics, 2008, 368 pp. Michael Weiss In the course of reviewing the memoirs of N.N. Sukhanov – the man who famously called Stalin a ‘gray blur’ – Dwight Macdonald gave a serviceable description of the two types of radical witnesses to the Russian Revolution: ‘Trotsky’s is a bird’s- eye view – a revolutionary eagle soaring on the wings of Marx and History – but Sukhanov gives us a series of close-ups, hopping about St. Petersburg like an earth- bound sparrow – curious, intimate, sharp-eyed.’ If one were to genetically fuse these two avian observers into one that took flight slightly after the Bolshevik seizure of power, the result would be Victor Serge. Macdonald knew quite well who Serge was; the New York Trotskyist and scabrous polemicist of Partisan Review was responsible, along with the surviving members of the anarchist POUM faction of the Spanish Civil War, for getting him out of Marseille in 1939, just as the Nazis were closing in and anti-Stalinist dissidents were escaping the charnel houses of Eurasia – or not escaping them, as was more often the case. Macdonald, much to his later chagrin, titled his own reflections on his youthful agitations and indiscretions Memoirs of a Revolutionist, an honourable if slightly wince-making tribute to Serge, who earned every syllable in his title, Memoirs of a Revolutionary. And after the dropping of both atomic bombs on Japan, it was Macdonald’s faith in socialism that began to
    [Show full text]
  • War Memory Under the Leonid Brezhnev Regime 1965-1974
    1 No One is Forgotten, Nothing is Forgotten: War Memory Under the Leonid Brezhnev Regime 1965-1974 By Yevgeniy Zilberman Adviser: Professor David S. Foglesong An Honors Thesis Submitted To The History Department of Rutgers University School of Arts and Sciences New Brunswick, NJ April, 2012 2 Table of Contents Acknowledgements Pg. 3 Introduction Pg. 5 1964-1967: Building the Cult Pg. 18 a) Forming the Narrative: Building the Plot and Effacing the Details Pg. 21 b) Consecrating the War: Ritual, Monument and Speech Pg. 24 c) Iconography at Work: Soviet War Poster Pg. 34 d) Digitizing the War: On the Cinema Front Pg. 44 1968-1970: Fascism Revived and the Battle for Peace Pg. 53 a) This Changes Everything: Czechoslovakia and its Significance Pg. 55 b) Anti-Fascism: Revanchism and Fear Pg. 59 c) Reviving Peace: The Peace Cult Pg. 71 1970-1974: Realizing Peace Pg. 83 a) Rehabilitating Germany Pg. 85 b) Cinema: Germany and the Second World War on the Film Screen Pg. 88 c) Developing Ostpolitik: War memory and the Foundations for Peace Pg. 95 d) Embracing Peace Pg. 102 Conclusion: Believing the War Cult Pg. 108 Bibliography Pg. 112 3 Acknowledgements Perhaps as a testament to my naivety, when I embarked upon my journey toward writing an honors thesis, I envisioned a leisurely and idyllic trek toward my objective. Instead, I found myself on a road mired with multiple peaks and valleys. The obstacles and impediments were plentiful and my limitations were numerous. Looking back now upon the path I traveled, I realize that I could not have accomplished anything without the assistance of a choice collection of individuals.
    [Show full text]
  • ABSTRACT BITCHES and THIEVES: GULAG GUARDS, ADMINISTRATORS, and PROFESSIONAL CRIMINALS in the BITCHES' WAR by Adam Richard
    ABSTRACT BITCHES AND THIEVES: GULAG GUARDS, ADMINISTRATORS, AND PROFESSIONAL CRIMINALS IN THE BITCHES’ WAR by Adam Richard Rodger Amongst the professional criminals imprisoned in the Soviet Gulag, a split developed between those who kept to the Thieves’ Law and those who broke the Law and collaborated with the State. This violent schism, the Bitches’ War, raged across the entire Gulag system, becoming most heated between 1948 and 1953, and implicated the camps’ guards and administrators as much as the prisoners themselves. This research examines primary and secondary sources, heavily incorporating Gulag survivor memoirs, to investigate the culture of the Thieves-in-Law, these professional criminals, and also to uncover the involvement, intentions, and guilt of the camp administration. This study argues that the Bitches’ War sheds light on the real purpose and function of the Gulag; that it was not primarily about ideological re-education, nor was it primarily about economics and production, but that the Gulag served as a model for social control through use of power, persuasion, and violence. BITCHES AND THIEVES: GULAG GUARDS, ADMINISTRATORS, AND PROFESSIONAL CRIMINALS IN THE BITCHES’ WAR Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Miami University in partial fulfillment of Master’s Degree by Adam Richard Rodger Miami University Oxford, Ohio 2017 Advisor: Dr. Stephen Norris Reader: Dr. Dan Prior Reader: Dr. Scott Kenworthy ©2017 Adam Richard Rodger This thesis titled BITCHES AND THIEVES GULAG GUARDS, ADMINISTRATORS, AND PROFESSIONAL CRIMINALS IN THE BITCHES’ WAR by Adam Richard Rodger has been approved for publication by The College of Arts and Sciences and The Department of History ____________________________________________________ Dr.
    [Show full text]
  • Talking Fish: on Soviet Dissident Memoirs*
    Talking Fish: On Soviet Dissident Memoirs* Benjamin Nathans University of Pennsylvania My article may appear to be idle chatter, but for Western sovietolo- gists at any rate it has the same interest that a fish would have for an ichthyologist if it were suddenly to begin to talk. ðAndrei Amalrik, Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984? ½samizdat, 1969Þ All Soviet émigrés write ½or: make up something. Am I any worse than they are? ðAleksandr Zinoviev, Homo Sovieticus ½Lausanne, 1981Þ IfIamasked,“Did this happen?” I will reply, “No.” If I am asked, “Is this true?” Iwillsay,“Of course.” ðElena Bonner, Mothers and Daughters ½New York, 1991Þ I On July 6, 1968, at a party in Moscow celebrating the twenty-eighth birthday of Pavel Litvinov, two guests who had never met before lingered late into the night. Litvinov, a physics teacher and the grandson of Stalin’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov, had recently made a name for himself as the coauthor of a samizdat text, “An Appeal to World Opinion,” thathadgarneredwideattention inside and outside the Soviet Union. He had been summoned several times by the Committee for State Security ðKGBÞ for what it called “prophylactic talks.” Many of those present at the party were, like Litvinov, connected in one way or another to the dissident movement, a loose conglomeration of Soviet citizens who had initially coalesced around the 1966 trial of the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, seeking to defend civil rights inscribed in the Soviet constitution and * For comments on previous drafts of this article, I would like to thank the anonymous readers for the Journal of Modern History as well as Alexander Gribanov, Jochen Hell- beck, Edward Kline, Ann Komaromi, Eli Nathans, Sydney Nathans, Serguei Oushakine, Kevin M.
    [Show full text]
  • Shalamov's Testament: Pushkinian Precepts in Kolyma Tales
    Bard College Bard Digital Commons Senior Projects Spring 2020 Bard Undergraduate Senior Projects Spring 2020 Shalamov's Testament: Pushkinian Precepts in Kolyma Tales Andres I. Meraz Bard College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2020 Part of the Russian Literature Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Meraz, Andres I., "Shalamov's Testament: Pushkinian Precepts in Kolyma Tales" (2020). Senior Projects Spring 2020. 310. https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2020/310 This Open Access work is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been provided to you by Bard College's Stevenson Library with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this work in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights- holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/or on the work itself. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Shalamov’s Testament: Pushkinian Precepts in Kolyma Tales Senior Project Submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College by Andres I. Meraz Annandale-on-Hudson, New York May 2020 Contents Acknowledgments ii Introduction The Gulag Chronicler and the National Poet 1 Chapter 1 Pushkin’s Heir 13 Chapter 2 Pushkinian Authorial Strategies in Kolyma Tales 32 Chapter 3 A Chronicler of His Time 50 Conclusion The Testament of Pushkin in Contemporary Russian Fiction 68 Bibliography 72 i Acknowledgments This project would not have been possible without the Russian and Eurasian Studies program at Bard College.
    [Show full text]
  • Aberystwyth University Vasily Grossman and the Myths of the Great Patriotic
    Aberystwyth University Vasily Grossman and the Myths of the Great Patriotic War Finney, Patrick Benedict Published in: Journal of European Studies DOI: 10.1177/0047244113501747 Publication date: 2013 Citation for published version (APA): Finney, P. B. (2013). Vasily Grossman and the Myths of the Great Patriotic War. Journal of European Studies, 43(4), 312-328. https://doi.org/10.1177/0047244113501747 General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the Aberystwyth Research Portal (the Institutional Repository) are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the Aberystwyth Research Portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the Aberystwyth Research Portal Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. tel: +44 1970 62 2400 email: [email protected] Download date: 01. Oct. 2021 Vasily Grossman and the myths of the Great Patriotic War Patrick Finney Aberystwyth University, UK Corresponding Author Dr Patrick Finney Department of International Politics Aberystwyth University Aberystwyth SY23 3FE UK [email protected] Abstract This article locates Vasily Grossman’s work in the context of the official collective remembrance of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ in the Soviet Union.
    [Show full text]
  • Zsuzsa Hetényi University ELTE Facts and Fiction: Vasily Grossman Writing History and Literature
    THE CENTRAL EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY JEWISH STUDIES PROGRAM cordially invites you to a lecture by Zsuzsa Hetényi University ELTE Facts and fiction: Vasily Grossman writing history and literature Vasily Grossman (1905, Berdichev – 1964, Moscow) was one of the Soviet frontline correspondents of the WWII and an eyewitness of the Battle of Stalingrad. But from all 1000 pages of his novel Life and Fate (1952–1961) one cannot put together the events, the military motivations or quantifiable data for a coherent army strategy or account of the battle. A constant dialog of history and literature was in the focus of Grossman’s life, and he was aware of the difference of the two genres of narratives, historic and literary. This skill was given to him also by his tormented life experience—his Jewish origin, events of wars and terror of Stalinism, the general Soviet falsehood. He had to live trough brutal KGB home search, arrests of relatives and close colleagues, censorship, confiscation of manuscript, humiliation, delusion, masked anti-Semitism. The time he happened to born in drove him to write mainly fiction based on historic events, but also non-fictional essays and notes for documentation. The paper will discuss the relationship and difference between writing history and writing fiction with examples of Grossman’s oeuvre, aiming a second, theoretical goal—reassess literature for history’s benefit. Tuesday, January 28 at 5.30 p.m. In Popper Room Zsuzsa Hetényi is Professor of Literature at the University ELTE, Faculty of Humanities, Budapest, and literary translator (Award by Academy of Sciences, 2002). Among her cca.
    [Show full text]
  • Soviet Jews in World War II Fighting, Witnessing, Remembering Borderlines: Russian and East-European Studies
    SOVIET JEWS IN WORLD WAR II Fighting, Witnessing, RemembeRing Borderlines: Russian and East-European Studies Series Editor – Maxim Shrayer (Boston College) SOVIET JEWS IN WORLD WAR II Fighting, Witnessing, RemembeRing Edited by haRRiet muRav and gennady estRaikh Boston 2014 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Copyright © 2014 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved ISBN 978-1-61811-313-9 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-61811-314-6 (electronic) ISBN 978-1-61811-391-7 (paperback) Cover design by Ivan Grave Published by Academic Studies Press in 2014 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www. academicstudiespress.com Effective December 12th, 2017, this book will be subject to a CC-BY-NC license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. Other than as provided by these licenses, no part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or displayed by any electronic or mechanical means without permission from the publisher or as permitted by law. The open access publication of this volume is made possible by: This open access publication is part of a project supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book initiative, which includes the open access release of several Academic Studies Press volumes. To view more titles available as free ebooks and to learn more about this project, please visit borderlinesfoundation.org/open. Published by Academic Studies Press 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com Table of Contents Acknowledgments .......................................................
    [Show full text]
  • Vasily Grossman Andhrachya Kochar
    38 russian culture VASIly GROSSMAN AND HRACHYA KOCHAR here is a great deal that we do not yet know about Life and Fate — but no one was preventing him from following sible that a clue lies in Anna Berzer’s words about Grossman Vasily Grossman’s life. The widely held belief that this course. accepting this commission because of “need and unhappi- Grossman lived out his last years in poverty and It is natural to assume that Grossman took on this “transla- ness”. Berzer’s memoir is written with restraint and she does isolation is probably mistaken. tion” because he needed the money. Lipkin writes, “I thought not discuss Grossman’s personal life, but she would certainly In 1986, a Russian-language publishing house in the United it would be good for Grossman to go to Armenia, and he have known that his marriage was close to a complete break- States brought out the first edition of Semyon Lipkin’s needed the money badly.” Anna Berzer (the editor from Novy down. He may simply have been glad of a chance to get away memoir, Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad. Lipkin wrote that in Mir who, in 1990, published another memoir of Grossman, from Moscow. 1961 — after the “arrest” of Life and Fate — a translator from titled Goodbye) says much the same: “He travelled to Arme- Armenian asked him to find her someone who could edit her nia [...] because of need and unhappiness.” And Grossman own word-for-word translation of The Children of the Large himself wrote to his wife in December 1961, “I am glad that I There are further complications to the story of Gross- House, a war novel by Hrachya Kochar.
    [Show full text]
  • The Novel at Work
    THE NOVEL AT WORK REFLECTIONS ON ART AND POLITICS IN SELECTED COUNTER-TOTALITARIAN NOVELS, 1920-70 Patricia Harris This thesis is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Murdoch University For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them … Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye. (John Milton, Areopagitica, 1644) I declare that this thesis is my own account of my own research. It contains as its main content work that has not previously been submitted for a degree at any university. Patricia Harris Acknowledgements Words fail when you most want them to succeed, and this is no exception. So my following attempts to express my gratitude for the wisdom, support and friendship of those who have assisted me through this thesis remain paltry and inadequate. May I first acknowledge the extraordinary skills and support of my supervisory team. To Professor Helena Grehan, my principal supervisor, thank you many times over for the care and patience with which you have watched over this project; your willingness to read draft after draft of half-finished work; your acute yet sympathetic readings of my arguments; and your willingness to be there in total, when fits of anxiety threatened to throw me off course.
    [Show full text]