Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…Well, I wanted to just say a little bit about Grossman and the book very briefly. Vasily Grossman was born in 1905 in Berdychiv. Berdychiv, at the time, was part of the Russian Empire. It eventually, in 1922, after the revolution, became part of the Soviet Union. He rose to some fame as a war correspondent. He covered the Battle of Stalingrad. People, when they talk about this book, Life and Fate, say it’s about the Battle of Stalingrad. No, it’s not. It takes place around the time of the Battle of Stalingrad. There is some war in the book, but that is, I think, a very misleading summary of what the book’s about. He wrote the book after World War II. The book was arrested by the KGB in 1961. They came to his house. They took the manuscript. They took all the typewriter ribbons. Those of you who are older than a certain age will know what that is. They tried to find other copies. They ended up digging up the garden of a friend of Grossman’s but did not find any other copies. He was successful in hiding a couple of copies with friends. Eventually, the book was smuggled out in 1980 and published in Switzerland, published in the Soviet Union in 1988. Grossman died in 1964, unaware that his book had survived. Just one other biographical note, which is relevant because of the nature of the book. His mother was killed in 1941 when the Nazis overran Berdychiv. Berdychiv was a town of a little over 50,000 people. About 40,000 were Jews. It had 80 synagogues, and his mother died in the murders there. His mother is an important part of this book in a fictionalized role, and we’ll talk about that. Tyler, give us your short initial assessment of this book. Amongst Soviet authors, he is the GOAT, one could say, to refer to our earlier episode. But this, to me, is one of the very few truly universal novels. The title itself, Life and Fate — it is about life and fate, but the novel is about so much more. It’s about war. It’s about slavery. It’s about love, motherhood, fatherhood, childbirth, rape, friendship, science, politics. How many novels, if any, can you think of that have all of those worlds in them in an interesting and insightful manner? Very few. The one that comes closest to it is, in fact, his model. That’s Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a three-word title with an and in the middle and two important concepts. They’re both about war. They’re both about the invasions of Russia or the USSR. There’s a central family in both stories. The notion of what is fate or destiny is highly important to Tolstoy, as it is to Grossman, though they have different points of view. Napoleon plays a significant role in War and Peace. In Life and Fate, Hitler and Stalin make actual appearances in the novel, which I find shocking when I read it, like, here they are on the page, and it’s actually somewhat plausible. So, he’s modeling this, I think, after War and Peace. He actually pulls it off, which is a miracle. I think it is a novel comparable in quality and scope and import to Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which is sometimes called the greatest novel ever. So that is a pretty amazing achievement. Yes, I think I mentioned on the air in an earlier episode — when I was reading it, I enjoyed the first 100 pages. After 200, it got a little better. Somewhere around 300 or 400, I couldn’t put it down. There are so many passages that move you to tears or to incredible emotional reaction. It’s not a traditional novel akin to War and Peace or akin to other Russian novels such as The Brothers Karamazov or In the First Circle, which we talked about here on the program. Previously, it is what our guest, talking about In the First Circle, Kevin McKenna, called polyphonic. Here’s how he described it. He said, “Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn are so similar. Dostoevsky is famous for what is called the polyphonic structure of his novels. That is, rather than having — as we are used to in the West — one central, main character who stands as the centerpiece of everything that happens in the novel, the polyphonic structure of a Dostoevsky or Solzhenitsyn is that there is not a main central character. There is a cast, I would say perhaps five to eight central characters, as well as perhaps three to four central, major themes, so everything is kind of a fugue of characters, a fugue of plot.” In the case of Grossman and Life and Fate, I would say there are eight to ten main characters. There are about 100 characters overall, and that can be discouraging when you start the book. But if you keep reading, you’ll realize that only the eight to ten who are the main ones are going to reappear over and over again and, often, dozens or hundreds of pages apart when they reappear. But as you point out, Tyler, there are so many interesting intellectual and emotional themes of the book. It really spans an enormous part of the human experience. In that sense, you could argue it’s the greatest novel of the 20th century and, for me, one of the greatest novels of all time. Certainly, one of the greatest I’ve ever read.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.