Front Matter (introduction) An Armenian Sketchbook by Vasily Grossman
Introduction
An Armenian
Sketchbook, written in early 1962, two years before Vasily Grossman’s death
in September 1964, is unlike anything else Grossman wrote. It is deeply
personal and has an air of spontaneity; Grossman seems simply to be chatting to
the reader about his immediate impressions of Armenia—its people, its
mountains, its ancient churches—and digressing, almost at random, onto subjects
that range from the problem of nationalism to his views on art and even his
difficulties with his bladder and bowels.
The
underlying cause of these physical problems was that Grossman was in the early
stages of cancer, soon to be diagnosed in one of his kidneys. Just as Everything Flows, which he
began in the mid-1950s but continued to expand and revise during his last
years, is Grossman’s political testament, so An
Armenian Sketchbook is his
personal testament, a discussion of the values he holds dearest—in art and in
life. It seems likely that, at some level, Grossman sensed he did not have long
to live.
There are
relatively few memoirs of Grossman, and there is no other work, by Grossman or
anyone else, that gives us so clear a sense of the man he was. Three qualities
stand out: an unusual openness to other people, and especially to those who are
not members of the Soviet elite; a clearheaded skepticism, directed sometimes
towards others but more often towards himself; and a quiet, modest persistence.
Grossman never deliberately sets out to be original, either with regard to
literary style or with regard to content; his originality emerges only
gradually, as he doggedly continues to see with his own eyes and to think his
own thoughts. And the remarkable coherence of these thoughts emerges equally
gradually; the different threads of this apparently casual memoir are deftly
interwoven.
Russian
writers, unable to travel freely outside the Russian (or Soviet) Empire, have
often been attracted to the Caucasus, and they have left us a number of fine
travel sketches: Alexander Pushkin’s Journey
to Erzurum and Osip Mandelstam’s Journey to Armenia are the two most remarkable.[1]
Grossman, however, does not mention either of these works; the inspiration for An Armenian Sketchbook came not from literature but from the
circumstances of his life.
In
October 1960, Grossman had submitted the manuscript of Life and Fate to the editors of a Soviet literary
journal. It was the height of Khrushchev’s “thaw” and Grossman seems genuinely
to have believed that Life and
Fate could be published in
the Soviet Union , even though a central theme
of the novel is that Nazism and Stalinism are mirror images of each other. In
February 1961, three KGB officers
came to Grossman’s apartment and confiscated the typescript and everything
bearing any relation to it, even carbon paper and typewriter ribbons. The
Soviet authorities were evidently determined not to repeat the mistake they had
made three years earlier with Boris Pasternak; by persecuting Pasternak when he
was awarded the Nobel Prize after the publication ofDoctor Zhivago, they
succeeded only in bringing him unprecedented international attention. They
dealt with Grossman more shrewdly; rather than making a martyr of him, they
simply took his book away.
Grossman
did not know that his work would survive, let alone be published. According to
his friend Semyon Lipkin, “Grossman aged before our eyes. His curly hair turned
grayer and a bald patch appeared. His asthma. . .returned. His walk
became a shuffle.”[2]
And the writer Boris Yampolsky reports Grossman himself as saying, “They strangled
me in a dark corner.”[3]
Later
that year Grossman agreed to rewrite a clumsy literal translation of a long Armenian
war novel—a task that would entail spending two months in Armenia Moscow
It
needs to be said, however, that this story is more complicated than is
immediately apparent and has yet to be fully researched. No previous scholar or
memoirist has mentioned that an entirely competent Russian translation—by a
different translator, Arus Tadeosyan—of an earlier, shorter version of this
novel, Hrachya Kochar’s The
Children of the Large House, had been published in 1955 (by Sovetsky
pisatel′) and again in 1956 (by Voenizdat), only five years before Grossman’s
visit to Armenia. Kochar may have hoped that a new version, by someone
important, would bring more attention to his novel, but it is surprising that
neither Lipkin nor Grossman appear ever to have mentioned the earlier version.
Grossman would certainly have known about it; Sovetsky pisatel′ and Voenizdat were
two of the most important Soviet publishers. Both were based in Moscow , and both had brought out editions of Grossman’s
first novel about Stalingrad , For a Just Cause.
The
most plausible explanation of the decision by the Soviet literary authorities
to commission a new translation of Kochar’s novel is that it was an attempt to
buy Grossman off, to compensate him—at least in financial terms—for the
non-publication of Life and
Fate, and so lessen the danger of his contacting foreign journalists or
sending manuscripts abroad. According to Kochar’s daughter Meri, it was Vardkes
Tevekelyan, the chairman of the very important Literary Fund, who first
introduced Grossman to her father.[5]
Tevekelyan may simply have been wishing to do Grossman a favor, or he may have
been acting under instructions from some still-higher authority.
Grossman
began work (in both his letters and his memoir he follows the standard Soviet
practice of referring to the work
of improving a literal version not as “editing” but as “translation”) some time
in the summer, and by mid-October he was halfway through the novel. On October
13, he wrote, “Today I’ve finished the first volume—690 pages! I’m a
translator! Still, this work really is good for me—the rhythm, the systematic
nature of it, the hours I devote to it every day—all this is calming and
strengthening.”[6]
In early November, he traveled to Yerevan , the
capital of Armenia
I’ve finished with the awful,
illiterate literal version. I’ve reached the final page, the 1,420th. Now I’ll
be reading through and revising the text as it comes back from the typists.
I’ve read through 100 pages already. Compared with working on the literal
version, this is like being on the staff of Red
Army Soldier after being with
Gorokhov’s men in Stalingrad in October 1942.
It’s a rest for the soul. . . . I’ve already got used to the
author’s almost sleepy indifference to the way an elderly gentleman is working
on his book so diligently that by evening his face and brow are covered in
purple blotches. Two weeks ago I found this astonishing, but what would most
astonish me now would be to hear the words “Thank you!”[7]
A
letter written two weeks later, on December 30, tells us more about Grossman’s
difficulties with the author of the novel:
I’m so exhausted that, apart
from nervous upset and a senseless desire to weep, I feel nothing at all. It’s
as if everything’s come loose inside me. There have been sharp words between me
and my client. He is no fool; he understands that I have helped him, but at the
same time he can’t help hating me—like a wild animal that has fallen into the
clutches of Doctor Moreau. And Doctor Moreau truly has cut him up and crumpled
him a great deal and taken him several steps up the ladder of literary
evolution. But he, of course, finds this painful: “Where’s my hair? Why’s my
tail been chopped off?” And, at the same time, he’s pleased.[8]
This
brief vignette of Kochar is memorably witty, but Kochar’s mixed feelings are
understandable. No one has yet carried out a detailed comparison of Grossman’s
“translation” with the Armenian original, but it seems likely that Grossman put
a great deal of himself into the final Russian version. His version ends with a
soldier telling a young woman by the name of Anik that the Germans are gone. Anik,
who is pregnant, feels her child moving inside her; hearing the sound of
distant artillery, she momentarily imagines that they are firing a salute in
honor of this child. It would be hard to imagine a more “Grossman-like” ending;
the tension between motherhood and human destructiveness is a central theme
throughout his work. It seems that Grossman may have been attempting to compensate himself
for the “arrest” of Life and
Fate; unable to publish his own novel about the Second World War, he may
have seized the opportunity to rewrite someone else’s.
This
same letter of December 30 also includes a first mention of the memoir that
Grossman titledDobro vam (literally
“Good to You”) and that we have titled An
Armenian Sketchbook.[9]
Grossman continues, “Yesterday I finished this bone-breaking work—and today
I’ve begun writing, noting down my Armenian impressions. I’m like George Sand,
who finished a novel at four in the morning and, without going to bed, began a
second one there and then. Though there is, admittedly, a difference—she was being published. My own behavior,
in contrast, is hard to understand. Why should I be in such a hurry?”[10]
Two weeks later, in a letter written from Sukhumi, on the Black Sea, where he
stopped on his way back to Moscow, Grossman referred again to his need to work:
“For me, this New Year has begun, like all my life: well and happily, and
bitterly and anxiously, confusedly, with joy in my heart, and with the desire
to work—a desire as irrational as the life instinct, as senseless and
invincible.”[11]
It seems likely that an additional reason for Grossman’s eagerness to begin
work on the memoir was the desire to be writing in his own voice again. In a
letter to his wife, he wrote, “I dream of finishing work and resting in
silence. Once again I’ll be myself—not a translator.” And in another letter he
wrote, “But, you know, I really do find all this translation work very hard. It
demands a great deal of strength, and it is emotionally difficult. I like to be
myself, however difficult and complicated this may be. And this need to be
myself only gets stronger over the years. And I respect it; I shan’t become a
translator.”[12]
The self-revelation of An
Armenian Sketchbook seems, at
least in part, to have been a reaction to the self-effacement required of a
translator—even of a translator who treats his original text with considerable
freedom.
After
completing his Armenian memoir in the first half of 1962, Grossman submitted it
to the journal Novy Mir.
The editor, Aleksandr Tvardovsky, accepted it. The censor, however, insisted on
the omission of around twenty lines about anti-Semitism from the penultimate
page.[13]
By then Grossman had come to feel deeply ashamed of the many compromises he had
made in the course of his life and he refused to agree to this demand. As a
result, Dobro vam was not published until 1965, eight months
after Grossman’s death—and then only with the omission of whole chapters.[14]
The
complete text was published in November 1988 in the journal Znamya. It is this text,
prepared from the manuscript by Grossman’s daughter, Yekaterina Korotkova, and
republished in Russia
The
passages omitted from the 1965 version (and also from two editions in 1967)
fall into four main categories. There are the passages about Stalin—for
example, the whole of the second chapter—which might have been acceptable in
1962, while Khrushchev was still in power, but which were certainly no longer
acceptable three years later, after Khrushchev had been deposed. There are the
long discussions of nationalism; chapter four, for example, was also entirely
deleted—a useful reminder to the modern reader that Grossman’s thoughts about
nationalism were, at the time, controversial. There are passages that might
have offended particular individuals—for example, some of the more ironic mentions
of “Martirosyan” and “Hortensia.”[15]
Lastly, some of the passages about Grossman’s physical problems are greatly
abridged. Until recently, Russian writers have tended to shy away from
descriptions of physiological matters. In addressing such potentially
humiliating problems, Grossman was being characteristically bold.[16]
Grossman’s
own title for this memoir, Dobro
vam, is a strange but effective phrase. The literal meaning, as I have
said, is “Good to you.” This is not a Russian idiom but a literal, unidiomatic
translation of a standard Armenian greeting, Barev
dzez. The phrase works better in Russian than in English, because the
Russian dobro is clearly a noun, whereas the English
“good” could be either a noun or an adjective. For this and other reasons, it
seemed best to give this English translation a different and more explanatory
title. Grossman’s own title, however, was clearly important to him, and in the
last lines of this memoir he returns to the Armenian greeting that inspired it: Barev dzez—“All good to you,
Armenians and non-Armenians!” Since Grossman put such emphasis here on the word
“good,” since the nature of true goodness is one of his central themes, and
since, at least in retrospect, his memoir has the air of a farewell gift or
blessing, it seems appropriate to end this introduction with a moving quotation
from an article by Lev Slavin, a Russian writer who visited Armenia eight years
after Grossman:
In Tsakhkadzor I went to the
house where Vasily Semyonovich had stayed and worked eight years before. A
white two-story building like many other houses of recreation built in the
1930s. This was the small House of Creativity of the Armenian Writers’ Union . Outside on the veranda was a battered billiard
table, the one Grossman had played on. The rooms were closed. Everything bore
an imprint of neglect and sorrow. I looked attentively at everything round
about, trying to look through Grossman’s eyes. Yes, I tried for a moment to
adopt his slightly surprised, slightly amused gaze. A good-natured gaze. It was
this good nature, probably, that came hardest to me. There had, apparently,
been an old man who kept talking to Grossman in Armenian. When someone told him
that Grossman did not understand, he got angry and said, “No, it’s impossible
that a man with such good and kind eyes doesn’t understand Armenian.”[17]
—Yury Bit-Yunan
and Robert Chandler
September 2012
NOTES
1 Valentin
Kataev’s In the Country of
Seven Springs (1934) and
Andrey Bitov’s The Lessons of
Armenia (written in 1969,
five years after Grossman’s death) also deserve mention.
2 Lipkin, Kvadriga (Moscow: Knizhny sad, 1997), 582.
3 Yampolsky,
“Poslednyaya vstrecha s Vasilyem Grossmanom,” Kontinent 8 (1976): 147.
4 Letter
of January 3, 1962, published in Glazami
druzei, an anthology of writings by Russians about Armenia
5 See http://karabah88.ru/history/persony/89_meri_kochar-grossman_voshishalsia_kecharisom.html.
In his memoir about Grossman, Lipkin claims that it was he who first proposed
this task to Grossman. He reports Grossman as replying, “If the novel isn’t
vile, I’ll translate it. It’s a good thing that it is, as you say, a long book.
I need the money, and I feel terrible. Maybe putting my nose to the grindstone
will do me good.” (Kvadriga, 593). Lipkin, however, is not always
reliable; other parts of his account of Grossman and his Armenian memoir have
been refuted by Natalya Gonchar-Khandzhyan in “K istorii publikatsii ‘Dobro vam
V. Grossmana,’ ” Literaturnaya
Armeniya (1989): 2.
6 Fyodor
Guber, Pamyat′ i pis′ma (Probel, 2007), 109.
7 Ibid.,
600.
8 Ibid.,
603. The Island of Doctor Moreau
9 Grossman’s
original subtitle was “Notes of an Elderly Man.” The French translation is
titled La paix soit avec vous.
In English the memoir has often been referred to as Good Wishes, a title we
considered for this edition but eventually rejected.
10 Lipkin,
603.
11 Ibid.,
605.
12 Lev
Slavin quotes parts of these passages in “Armenia Armenia
13 From
“Never in my life have I bowed to the ground” to “the words ‘It’s a pity Hitler
didn’t finish off the lot of you.’” The accounts of this episode by Lipkin and
by Grossman’s daughter, Yekaterina Korotkova, differ with regard to important
details. Lipkin remembers Tvardovsky as having consistently stood by Grossman
and interceded with the censor on his behalf; Korotkova remembers her father
telling her in December 1962 that he had lost his temper with Tvardovsky and
shown him the door when he insisted, after Grossman had already agreed to many
cuts, on the need for still more. See John and Carol Garrard, The Bones of Berdichev (The Free Press, 1996), 288.
14 Literaturnaya Armeniya 6 and 7 (1965). In 1967 it was
republished both in Yerevan and in Moscow Yerevan it was included, along with Mandelstam’s Journey to Armenia, in Glazami druzei, a collection of
works about Armenia Moscow
15 The
writer’s real name was Gabrielyan, though he published under the pseudonym
Hrachya Kochar. The translator’s real name was Hasmik Taronyan; “Hasmik” is the
Armenian for Jasmine. The real identities of these two figures would have been
obvious to many people in Yerevan
16 These
remarks about the editing, and censorship, of Grossman’s manuscript are largely
drawn from the thoughtful discussion of these questions in Shimon Markish’s
preface to the French translation of Dobro
vam, published as La paix
soit avec vous (L’Age
d’Homme, 2007); in this edition, every passage omitted from the 1965
publication of Dobro vam is italicized.
17 See
“Armenia Armenia
Copyright © 2013 New York Review Books
Copyright © 2013 New York Review Books
