Your grasp and reach are ferocious. I took great pleasure in the bedazzling beauty of your sentences strung together, leaping from myth to boxing, contemporary physics to fascism. It's hallucinatory the way you write about Vasily Grossman's writing being hallucinatory. I don't know if your writing or Grossman's is more Pynchonesque. The banality of evil is a fantastic reduction akin to the "steaming innards...thrown on the scrap heap." Thank you so much for all of your edifying newsletters.
“ Certainly, that is the view of Grossman and his characters. And it was precisely that which made his books so unpalatable to Soviet censors after the war. Because there is a sting in the tail. What Grossman describes is a victory that was far harder than it should have been. What he indicts is a regime that was wasteful and destructive of its people, their extraordinary talents and commitment. ”
Sometimes one must take the Germans into account. They had accomplished a technical/tactical revolution that no one had an answer to prior to 1943, apart from miles of deep salt water.
Germany had a world-class wireless industry before 1917, and Imperial Russia did not. By 1939, Germany was able to put a radio in every tank, every combat aircraft, and one into the hands of every infantry platoon leader. This is what made the German armed forces so amazingly quick to discover changing conditions, adapt to them, and even exploit them, all at a tempo none of their opponents could possibly hope to match. It also made them capable of massing artillery & aerial fires with astonishing speed, flexibility, & precision.
This is what cut the Polish Army to bloody shreds in 2 weeks. This is what sent the BEF running in headlong flight for the nearest coast, & put a panzer division on the Spanish border in 6. This is what repeatedly trounced the British Army in N. Africa, until the British contrived to hand Rommel so much British fuel & so many British trucks that visions of Alexandria danced in his head, leading him to the logistically untenable position at Alamein.
For Grossman to say it was all a result of the actions of the Soviet “regime” is quite plainly ludicrous, and those oft-maligned Soviet censors had good reason for their sharply negative reaction to these slurs.
"And is the probabilistic logic of modern physics not a harbinger, Shtrum wonders, of the new age of totalitarian politics?"
I think it's worth adding some further clarifying quotes to this paraphrase. A thought of Shtrum's: "Quantum theory had replaced the laws governing individual physical entities with new laws: the laws of probability, the laws of a special statistics that rejected the concept of an individual entity and acknowledged only aggregates." (Ch. 17) Totalitarianism erases the value of the individual by swallowing the individual into the aggregate, by transforming him into an abstract element of the special statistics of the state. Grossman's attitude toward this seems here ambiguous, since Shtrum's analogy occurs in the midst of his triumphalist meditation on the revolutionary accomplishments of modern physics. Yet, the next chapter (18) presents the long last letter from Shtrum's mother, in which she tells here son that she is about to be murdered by the Germans. In Chapter 19 his ambiguity is gone:
"Fascism has rejected the concept of a separate individuality, the concept of ‘a man’, and operates only with vast aggregates. Contemporary physics speaks of the greater or lesser probability of occurrences within this or that aggregate of individual particles. And are not the terrible mechanics of Fascism founded on the principle of quantum politics, of political probability?
Fascism arrived at the idea of the liquidation of entire strata of the population, of entire nations and races, on the grounds that there was a greater probability of overt or covert opposition among these groupings than among others: the mechanics of probabilities and of human aggregates.
But no! No! And again no! Fascism will perish for the very reason that it has applied to man the laws applicable to atoms and cobblestones!
Man and Fascism cannot co-exist."
These points apply equally to Communism and Fascism, both sub-types of totalitarianism.
I'm reading LIFE AND FATE on and off. Of course, one can disagree. One couldn't really disagree during the time Stalin was General Secretary of the CPSU. Still, one can point to the fact that famines occurred in the times of the Tsars, famines were more or less the norm as the geography of the the old Empire made them inevitable. What is generally not said is that after the collectivisation of agriculture in the early 30s, famine failed to reappear.
There are other matters as well e.g. Stalin inviting Von Ribbentrop to shake hands with members of the Soviet Politburo after the signing of the German/Soviet non-aggression pact. Kaganovich was Jewish. It's also a matter of historical record that the Red Army liberated more than one Nazi death camp, including Auschwitz.
Indeed, Grossman's novel is well written, as well written as WAR AND PEACE as far as I'm concerned.
Your grasp and reach are ferocious. I took great pleasure in the bedazzling beauty of your sentences strung together, leaping from myth to boxing, contemporary physics to fascism. It's hallucinatory the way you write about Vasily Grossman's writing being hallucinatory. I don't know if your writing or Grossman's is more Pynchonesque. The banality of evil is a fantastic reduction akin to the "steaming innards...thrown on the scrap heap." Thank you so much for all of your edifying newsletters.
“ Certainly, that is the view of Grossman and his characters. And it was precisely that which made his books so unpalatable to Soviet censors after the war. Because there is a sting in the tail. What Grossman describes is a victory that was far harder than it should have been. What he indicts is a regime that was wasteful and destructive of its people, their extraordinary talents and commitment. ”
Sometimes one must take the Germans into account. They had accomplished a technical/tactical revolution that no one had an answer to prior to 1943, apart from miles of deep salt water.
Germany had a world-class wireless industry before 1917, and Imperial Russia did not. By 1939, Germany was able to put a radio in every tank, every combat aircraft, and one into the hands of every infantry platoon leader. This is what made the German armed forces so amazingly quick to discover changing conditions, adapt to them, and even exploit them, all at a tempo none of their opponents could possibly hope to match. It also made them capable of massing artillery & aerial fires with astonishing speed, flexibility, & precision.
This is what cut the Polish Army to bloody shreds in 2 weeks. This is what sent the BEF running in headlong flight for the nearest coast, & put a panzer division on the Spanish border in 6. This is what repeatedly trounced the British Army in N. Africa, until the British contrived to hand Rommel so much British fuel & so many British trucks that visions of Alexandria danced in his head, leading him to the logistically untenable position at Alamein.
For Grossman to say it was all a result of the actions of the Soviet “regime” is quite plainly ludicrous, and those oft-maligned Soviet censors had good reason for their sharply negative reaction to these slurs.
Excellent essay.
"And is the probabilistic logic of modern physics not a harbinger, Shtrum wonders, of the new age of totalitarian politics?"
I think it's worth adding some further clarifying quotes to this paraphrase. A thought of Shtrum's: "Quantum theory had replaced the laws governing individual physical entities with new laws: the laws of probability, the laws of a special statistics that rejected the concept of an individual entity and acknowledged only aggregates." (Ch. 17) Totalitarianism erases the value of the individual by swallowing the individual into the aggregate, by transforming him into an abstract element of the special statistics of the state. Grossman's attitude toward this seems here ambiguous, since Shtrum's analogy occurs in the midst of his triumphalist meditation on the revolutionary accomplishments of modern physics. Yet, the next chapter (18) presents the long last letter from Shtrum's mother, in which she tells here son that she is about to be murdered by the Germans. In Chapter 19 his ambiguity is gone:
"Fascism has rejected the concept of a separate individuality, the concept of ‘a man’, and operates only with vast aggregates. Contemporary physics speaks of the greater or lesser probability of occurrences within this or that aggregate of individual particles. And are not the terrible mechanics of Fascism founded on the principle of quantum politics, of political probability?
Fascism arrived at the idea of the liquidation of entire strata of the population, of entire nations and races, on the grounds that there was a greater probability of overt or covert opposition among these groupings than among others: the mechanics of probabilities and of human aggregates.
But no! No! And again no! Fascism will perish for the very reason that it has applied to man the laws applicable to atoms and cobblestones!
Man and Fascism cannot co-exist."
These points apply equally to Communism and Fascism, both sub-types of totalitarianism.
I'm reading LIFE AND FATE on and off. Of course, one can disagree. One couldn't really disagree during the time Stalin was General Secretary of the CPSU. Still, one can point to the fact that famines occurred in the times of the Tsars, famines were more or less the norm as the geography of the the old Empire made them inevitable. What is generally not said is that after the collectivisation of agriculture in the early 30s, famine failed to reappear.
There are other matters as well e.g. Stalin inviting Von Ribbentrop to shake hands with members of the Soviet Politburo after the signing of the German/Soviet non-aggression pact. Kaganovich was Jewish. It's also a matter of historical record that the Red Army liberated more than one Nazi death camp, including Auschwitz.
Indeed, Grossman's novel is well written, as well written as WAR AND PEACE as far as I'm concerned.