In the middle of this novel a Soviet general is summoned to the Kremlin, and Stalin asks him a question he has not been asked before.
"You are a Communist, Comrade Bessonov, and you must answer like a Communist. Have you always had your own personal point of view on various events?" "I have tried to, Comrade Stalin. But I have not always been able to defend it to the end."
Stalin looks up from the desk. Bondarev then does something no socialist-realist novel is supposed to do: he goes inside Stalin's head. "Long accustomed to the unquestioning assent of those around him, he sometimes allowed a very few of his associates to state their own personal opinion." And then the trap closes.
"I understand, Comrade Bessonov. Presumably your doubts had to do with certain military leaders whom we punished at one time?"
Bessonov feels "as though he had moved closer to the icy wind that was blowing in his face and round his legs", realises that Stalin "had forced him to speak of something he had had no intention of mentioning", and says it anyway: "This point of view was formed from serving with certain military leaders who later became the victims of slander. Of that I am sure, Comrade Stalin. . . ."
Stalin pushes the pipe away "as if it were some intrusive object getting in his way", and answers without warmth:
"I am aware of doubts of this kind. The struggle makes harsh demands. But many of those whom we doubted at the time were people with the potential inner rottenness of a Vlasov. The excesses and mistakes were put right long ago. Rokossovsky and Tolbukhin are fighting well at Stalingrad."
And Bondarev gives his general the thought he cannot say:
What about the others? Bessonov thought.
That exchange is on pages 131 and 132 of a book Progress Publishers put into English in 1971, the year after Alexander Tvardovsky was forced out of Novy Mir. It is the reason to read this novel now.
Progress Publishers, Moscow, first printing 1971. Translated from the Russian by Robert Daglish, who also did Tvardovsky's preface and a novella in the Kazakevich volume in this series. The Russian is Горячий снег, "На английском языке". And there is no copyright line at all. Where the Kazakevich and Tvardovsky volumes in this series each carry a "©" — Progress claiming the compilation, the preface, the illustrations, the English — this leaf carries four statements and no claim: translated by Daglish, the Russian title, "First printing 1971", "Printed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics". Whether that was policy in the Soviet Novels Series or an oversight, the practical effect is that the most widely reprinted Soviet war novel of the 1970s went abroad in English with nobody's name on the rights.
One correction to our own catalogue. This book is attested as a Soviet Authors Library title by an advertisement on the 1976 Ordeal jacket, and it is listed here on that basis — but the printing we have is earlier and belongs to a different series. Its half-title reads Soviet Novels Series, and so does the back cover. Nothing in this volume claims the Soviet Authors Library. Describe it as what it is: the 1971 Soviet Novels Series printing of a book the later series took up.
There is no commissioned foreword. What there is instead is four pages headed IN LIEU OF AN INTRODUCTION — Answers Given by the Author in a Press Interview, in which Bondarev answers four questions put to him by an unnamed interviewer.
That is now a pattern worth naming, because this is the fifth volume in the strand to show it. Polevoi's A Story About a Real Man opens with his own Author's Note (or, in the 1973 printing, with a foreword by the man the novel is about). Paustovsky's Selected Stories opens with his own Some Random Reflections. Tvardovsky's Vassili Tyorkin closes with his own afterword. Kazakevich's Selected Works is prefaced by a friend's obituary essay of 1962. In none of them does a Soviet critic stand between the reader and the book. Whatever the reason — and it may simply have been cheaper — the effect is that the foreign reader of the fiction strand was handed the writers' own accounts of themselves, unmediated, while the same house's non-fiction was armoured in commentary.
It is the most interesting four pages Progress printed about this book, and there are four things in it.
First, a line of descent. "Even while I was still at the Literary Institute, in a study group supervised by Konstantin Paustovsky, a wonderful author and teacher, I wanted to write a book about Stalingrad." Bondarev was Paustovsky's student; Paustovsky's own volume is in this series, prefaced by his own insistence that romanticism is not a failure of political seriousness. Two generations of the same seminar, catalogued separately, with nothing in either book to connect them.
Second, a definition of courage that quietly demolishes the positive hero:
A person who experiences none of the normal feelings of fear in the face of death is a pathological case and, as such, cannot really become a central figure in realist art.
Set that beside Polevoi, in this same series, whose hero's quality is certified for him at a funeral and whose title means Bolshevik. Bondarev is saying that a man without fear is not a hero but a clinical specimen, and that realism cannot use him. He adds the positive formulation, which is better: "a person who is capable of mastering his fear can go on performing everyday acts of courage. This is what I regard as the principle of heroism."
Third, the scene that set the book going, which he dates to 1965 in Vienna, at an International Conference of Novelists. Two Germans came up to him afterwards, an ex-corporal and an Oberleutnant, both his own age, both of whom had fought on his sector in December 1942.
One of them said to me that neither the Germans nor the Russians should even attempt to remember the war now. The other gave a grim laugh and retorted, "I have a guilt complex." To this the first replied, "Memory is a vice."
"Memory is a vice." Bondarev says that at that point he "once again had the feeling of coming up against good and evil, just as in 1942", and wanted a new novel. The whole book is an argument against that sentence — and the argument is not confined to Germans.
He then builds a theory on it. Memory, he says, "possesses enormous energy, built up through associations", and "a small push from outside is often sufficient to set off a whole train of happenings and historical scenes". It "can explain some things; it can be an instrument of research". And then the division that the two Germans in Vienna had acted out for him:
For some people memory is a scourge, a punishment; for others it stands for responsibility.
That is the book's thesis stated as a proposition, and it is not only about Germany. A Soviet reader in 1971 had his own reasons for wanting memory to be a vice.
Fourth, and this is the sentence the publisher itself chose to put on the jacket:
"The time has come in our literature," he says in an introductory interview, "for a thorough investigation of the nineteen forties and fifties. We have accumulated enormous experience of life connected with this period and our study should embrace both the heroic and the tragic, the courage and the character of the Soviet people."
In 1971, "the nineteen forties and fifties" is not a neutral span. It is the war, the postwar terror, the last years of Stalin, the Doctors' Plot, and the Twentieth Congress. Bondarev asks for a thorough investigation of it, "both the heroic and the tragic", in the year after the journal that had been conducting exactly that investigation lost its editor. And Progress put the request on the back cover.
He also names his models: "Sholokhov, Leonov, Alexei Tolstoi and Bulgakov". Bulgakov, in a Soviet state publisher's English-language book in 1971, listed among the masters of memory.
The Hot Snow covers three days in December 1942 on the Myshkova river, where the Soviet 2nd Guards Army dug in to stop Manstein's tanks from reaching von Paulus at Stalingrad. Bondarev's structural decision, as he explains in the interview, was to run it on two levels at once: "from the Supreme Commander to the lowest-rank in the battery". Both halves are meant seriously, and the upper one is the historically astonishing part.
Stalin's name occurs sixty-nine times in this novel as a person rather than a city, almost all of them in one long chapter. Against that: Lenin twice, Party seven times, Communist four. The commissar — in the person of Vesnin, the army's member of the Military Council — appears forty-three times. This is a book in which the Party as an institution barely exists and its General Secretary is a character with a face.
And what a face. Bondarev's Stalin is not the poster. He is "a small man, who at first sight seemed to have little resemblance to his portraits", with "narrow, yellowish eyes", a "thick moustache and heavy eyebrows" barely touched with grey, moving "with soft, slightly rolling strides in supple, squeakless boots" and holding "his left, apparently not fully flexible arm over his stomach". He greets Bessonov "without a handshake or any invitation to sit down". Standing close, Bessonov can smell "the sweetish smell of rich tobacco from his clothes", and see "the sallow, pock-marked skin of the cheek".
Then Bondarev does the thing that makes the portrait more than physical. Late in the interview Stalin smiles, and
the harsh yellow coldness in his eyes melted and disappeared, and his whole face with all its tiny pock-marks softened, becoming homely, kindly, as Bessonov had been accustomed to see it in the portraits of him.
The cult's own image is described as an expression this man can produce at will. The kindly face in the portraits is a thing Stalin does with his features. Bondarev put that in a novel in 1970 and Progress translated it.
There are two other moments worth marking. One is a small, cold detail about how power hears: Stalin repeats back to Bessonov a word Bessonov never used — "So it's a Cannae, you say, Comrade Bessonov?" — and the narrator notes it in passing. The other is the matter of Bessonov's son, who is missing, and whom Bessonov fears is a prisoner. Stalin's ruling:
"As regards your son, Comrade Bessonov, we shall not put him down on the list of prisoners. We shall consider him to be missing. Later on we shall make detailed inquiries. And keep you informed. My elder son, Yakov, was also posted missing at the beginning of the war. So we are in the same position, Comrade Bessonov."
Then: "Stalin was about to add something else about his elder son but he hesitated." A reader in 1971 who knew what happened to Yakov Dzhugashvili, and what the Soviet state did to the families of men taken prisoner, could fill the hesitation in. The novel does not fill it, and does not have to.
None of this is dissidence. Bessonov is loyal, Stalin is competent, the army wins, and the chapter never questions the war or the state. But it does two things that the official history of 1971 would not do: it says out loud that commanders were destroyed by slander, and it declines to accept Stalin's assurance that the matter is closed. "The excesses and mistakes were put right long ago" — and immediately, in free indirect speech, "What about the others?"
The lower level is the better novel, and it is where Bondarev was writing from memory: he went to the front at seventeen as an artilleryman and, as the jacket says, went "from Stalingrad to the frontiers of Czechoslovakia".
Down at gun level there is no strategy, only seven shells left and a tank coming. Bondarev is very good on the physiology of it — the loader's hand, which "groped for the trigger with an unhurried tenderness, as though there were no battle, no tanks", the cap nudged off the head by the rubber eyepiece of the gun-sight and rolling down a sweating back, the steam rising off the nape of a man's neck in the cold. The people are Lieutenant Kuznetsov; Sergeant Ukhanov, who is funny and indestructible and does not much like officers; the battery commander Drozdovsky, who is correct, brittle and hated; and Zoya, the medical orderly, who is the only woman in the book and who dies.
Drozdovsky is the most interesting failure in the book, and the one that would have been impossible in 1949. He is everything the drill manual wants — upright, correct, tightly buttoned, brave in the formal sense — and the men cannot stand him, and he gets people killed by being what he is. Zoya loves him, and he is ashamed of it, and then she is dead and he "hasn't been quite the same" since. At the end he is seen from a distance, "slouching along with his head sunk on his chest, ignoring the gun as if there had been no one there at all", and then he "staggered away weakly down the steps, as though he were drunk". The novel does not punish him and does not forgive him; it simply stops looking at him.
The last pages are as good as anything in the strand. Bessonov comes down to the guns to decorate the four survivors, and he cannot get the words out:
"Everything that I personally can do Everything Thank you for the tanks you knocked out. That was the main thing — to knock out their tanks. That was the main thing."
Bondarev is precise about where the medals come from: Bessonov hands them over "on behalf of the supreme authority which had given him the great and dangerous right to command and to decide the fates of tens of thousands of men" — the phrase reaches all the way back to the study with the pock-marked cheek in it. He walks off quickly along the communication trench. Kuznetsov is left "still astonished by the tears that he had seen on this commander's eyelids". And then Ukhanov organises the only ceremony the battery is capable of:
He placed the mess-tin in the middle of the tarpaulin, half filled it with vodka, picked up his medal and, holding it between two fingers, as if it were a lump of sugar, lowered it to the bottom of the tin, then did the same with the others, Rubin's, Nechayev's and Kuznetsov's.
They drink in turn, and Kuznetsov drinks last, with the medals clinking in the bottom of the tin, and hears something flap behind him "like the cape on the edge of the recess when they had laid Zoya there", and chokes, and walks away. The last sentence of the novel is a moon: "a colourless, waning moon was melting in the vast emptiness of the sky."
No victory paragraph. No summing up. The medals are in the vodka and the nurse is under the snow.
Set the dates side by side.
In March 1966, on the eve of the 23rd Congress, World Outlook reported the letter of twenty-seven intellectuals asking that Stalin not be rehabilitated; Tvardovsky signed it. Later that year Ernest Mandel, writing as Ernest Germain in the International Socialist Review, recorded that Tvardovsky and Polevoi had been dropped from the Congress and from the Central Committee as leaders of the "moderate 'liberal' wing". In the spring of 1967 George Saunders described in World Outlook the attack on Novy Mir and the sacking of Tvardovsky's assistant editors. In February 1970 Tvardovsky was forced out. In 1971 Progress issued, in English, a novel in which Stalin is a character and a general tells him the purged commanders were slandered, with the author's demand for "a thorough investigation of the nineteen forties and fifties" printed on the back.
That is not a contradiction to be explained away; it is what the period actually looked like. The line moved, and what fell on the permitted side of it was not always what the permitted side wanted. Kazakevich's The Blue Notebook, also in this series, is the same phenomenon at a further extreme — a hundred and eleven Zinovievs in a volume of 1978.
What happened to Bondarev afterwards can be watched in this collection too. By 1980 Felix Kuznetsov, First Secretary of the Moscow Writers' Organisation, was using him in Of Human Values — also a Progress book, also in this series — as a scoreboard: when Bondarev's fictional Soviet writer beats a West German critic in a televised argument, Kuznetsov underlines the result, "Nikitin, and with him, the Soviet writer Yuri Bondarev, win the argument." The same critic judged that Bondarev's The Shore falters because "the Great Patriotic War is something the author has lived through, while the modern West is something he has only seen." It is an accurate criticism, and it marks the distance travelled in nine years: from a man who could not stop remembering December 1942 to a man being deployed against Hamburg.
Read the interview first, and read the fourth answer twice.
Then read the novel on both its levels, and notice that they are written by different faculties. The battery is memory; the Kremlin is imagination, and Bondarev says as much when he admits that readers "may find it unusual for me to have a figure of the rank of General Bessonov as one of the characters". The battery is better. But the Kremlin chapter is the one that could not have been written ten years earlier or, quite possibly, ten years later, and it contains the sentence this whole series exists to point at: a Soviet general, in a book his state sold abroad, telling Stalin to his face that the men were slandered, and thinking — where the censor could read it and let it through — What about the others?
That question was never answered by the institution that printed it. It is still the right question, and the answer is not in this book. It is in the archives that the men who published this one spent forty years keeping shut.