Tyler Cowen: disagreement

Transcript context

…Yes, the Chekhov part — there are just so many numerous, unforgettable vignettes of characters struggling with betrayal, struggling with the state bearing down on them, whether it’s the Nazis or the Communists. One of the themes you didn’t mention that reverberates throughout the book is the parallels between the Nazis and the Communists. They’re both, in many ways, fascist, authoritarian states, but what he’s really interested in is how they grind the individual down and how the individual stands athwart that grinding, stands and says, “Stop. No, I’m a human being.” I found that when I thought about the title, you’d think, “Well, why isn’t it called Life and Death or Freedom and Fate?” For Grossman, life is really about freedom, so in a certain sense, the title Life and Fate, for me, is very much not the only, but one of the central themes of the book, which is, how human beings caught in the throes and the gears of the state manage to maintain their freedom and their essential humanity despite that brutal, brutal reality. This is where I think we might disagree because I disagree with everything else I’ve read about this book, including the main Grossman biography. If I had to name a central theme of the book, I think it’s, in a funny way, a patriotic book, arguing that Communism, for all of its horrible faults, is actually better than fascism and explaining or showing to us why it is better than fascism. I have a riff on that, which I’ll do, but let me just put that out on the table and hear your immediate reaction. I’m not sure I disagree with that. I wasn’t suggesting that they were equivalent. It’s just that they have certain powerful equivalencies that the characters in the book find repellent. The idea to the Communists that they have a brother in the Nazis, the idea that to the Nazis, they have a brother in the Communists is extremely disturbing. Grossman forces a number of his characters to confront those similarities. But I agree it’s a very patriotic book. It’s a very Russian book. There’s a lot of talk in his biography and in people who write about him, how much he was pro-regime, how much his antagonism to the regime and the Soviet regime changed, how it grew over time, and like his characters, and it’s a very autobiographical book, which is bizarre, but it’s a very autobiographical book. The main character, Viktor Shtrum, is a physicist, a world-class physicist. Grossman himself was a chemist, not a world-class chemist as far as I know, but he identified with Shtrum’s marital problems, his problems of keeping faith with his conscience. In that sense, I think he’s overwhelmingly, certainly, on the side of the Russians, but I don’t think he has any romance about Communism.…

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