Behind the Curtain

When visiting Ukraine earlier this year, I spent most of my last day in Kiev desperately looking for a Ukrainian novel in English (or German or French). Not much luck on that front. Book stores there either had nothing in a language other than Ukrainian or Russian or sold a few foreign classics or trashy novels. I finally hit upon a used-book store in basement somewhere sharing its entrance with a rather seedy bar. There I found the only two novels translated into English that seemingly had been written in Ukrainian (I am sure there have been many others, but again, these are the only two I found in Ukraine's capital, so there). I proceeded to buy both of them, depriving any future intellectually curious tourist of them.

And I now finally read one of them. Borys Antonenko-Davydovych's Behind the Curtain is not the greatest novel of all times. It supposedly (according to Leonid Boyko on the cover) was "a novel which provoked heated discussion in the Soviet press" though. I have to admit that I am not sure why. Really it is a relatively short account of a Ukrainian Moscow-educated doctor's experience living in Uzbekistan with his annoying wife, his mother very much of a rural background, and his young child. The doctor clearly brings improvement, modernity, to this far-flung corner of the Soviet Union (what is interesting in fact is that Communists could be as neocolonialist in their attitude towards their own backwaters as Westerners could), yet his implication in his work makes him ignore his family. In result his wife becomes ever snappier and self-centered while his mother is slowly dying of cancer. 

It is not a momentous trying to capture a given period or even region, it feels more like a literary attempt at dealing with what happened to the author to his life. Yet, at the same time this author seems incapable of drawing grander lessons from this, either for himself or for us the readers. The novel is sufficient upon itself so to speak. It is neither good nor bad in that sense, it just is.

Carnets de guerre

J'avais beaucoup entendu parler de Vassili Grossman sans avoir jamais lu quelque chose de lui. Il parait si peu connu en Allemagne au fait que son plus grand œuvre Vie et Destin n'est disponible que dans des versions relativement. Je crains que comme citoyen soviétique qui décrivait l’héroïsme de l'Armée rouge autant que les crimes des Allemands mais aussi la folie du stalinisme il tombait dans un sort de trou de non-attention entre les deux Allemagnes. 

De toute manière c'est le prix la raison pour laquelle je me suis acheté son Carnets de Guerre - De Mouscou à Berlin 1941-1945 en français. Ce qui a été u peu bête en rétrospective en considération de la partie importante du livre qui a été écrit par l'historien britannique Antony Beevor.

Grossman était un des correspondants du journal officiel de l'Armée rouge et en tant que journaliste suivait l'armée partout. Dans sa retraite chaotique en 1941 autant que dans ses avancés timides après et finalement la course vers Allemagne et Berlin en 1944-1945. Il fut parmi les premier a Treblinka et a écrit un récit ci-dessus qu'on n'oublie plus facilement. Mais Grossman bien que communiste et patriote soviétique (il est né en Ukraine) n'est pas aveugle comme la plupart de ses contemporains, il voit aussi le pillage et surtout les viols commises par l'Armée rouge une fois qu'elle était en Allemagne elle-même.

Ce Carnets est une sélection qui a été faite par Beevor qui les liés avec des commentaires extensives afin de les introduire voire les mettre dans leurs contextes. Et la combinaison de ces deux est impressionnante. Grossman le grand écrivain et humaniste dont il faut vraiment que je lise plus et Beevor l'historien militaire de la deuxième guerre mondiale par excellence qui nous aident à comprendre l'autre.

Kleine Geschichte der Ukraine

Andreas Kappelers Kleine Geschichte der Ukraine, 1994 geschrieben, soll angeblich eine der ersten - deutschsprachigen - Werke über die Ukraine überhaupt sein. Der Autor gibt hier die Geschichte der Region (denn ein Land war es den größten Teil dieser Zeit eigentlich nicht) vom 11. Jahrhundert wieder. Zeigt auf die frühe Hochperiode mit dem Kiever Rus, gefolgt von der Dominierung aus dem heutigen Russland (dem Moskauer Rus), die frühe Aufteilung zwischen Habsburg-Österreich und dem russischen Zarenreich. Die vielen Versuche Unabhängigkeit oder zumindest Eigenständigkeit zu behalten. Und schließĺich die furchtbare Geschichte des Landes im 20. Jahrhundert mit Bürgerkriegen nach beiden Weltkriegen, Kriegen mit Polen und Russland bzw der Sowjetunion, der Besetzung durch deutsche Truppen, dem Massenmord der ukrainischen Juden durch die Deutschen, schon vorher Pogrome von Russen und Ukraine verübt an denselben. Eine gut geschriebene Begleitlektüre meiner Reise im Land.

Dead Souls

One more novel from my trip to Ukraine, this was one from the Ukraine-born Russian writer Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls - similarly to the The Daughter of the Commandant but much more so - pokes holes into the Russian self-satisfied noble middle class who - to varying degrees - rely on their serfs and petty business deals (and corruption) for their well-being. 

I have to admit that I found this novel difficult to read though. It seemed too drawn out in its story-telling, too repetitive in a way. Still interesting during my quest to find out more about the Slavic world I was traveling in recently.

Bloodlands

Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin made a lot of noise when it came out in 2010, mostly because of its perceived moral equation of Hitler's and Stalin's crimes. Personally, I am not sure Snyder is even interested in the moral question though, for me he simply states that there is a striking geographic overlap in the areas where both Soviet Communists and German Nazis had most of their victims. 

These Bloodlands - between Eastern Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltics and Western Russia - suffered from the Ukrainian famine, the concomitant invasion and occupation by Germany and the USSR in 1939, followed by a second invasion for the formerly USSR-occupied regions in 1941, the starvation of millions of Soviet soldiers, the Holocaust in both its early (bullets) as well as late (gas) stages, and finally reconquest by the Red Army with the Wehrmacht leaving a bloody trail on its way back to Germany.

It's essentially an absolutely horrifying account of the unprovoked killings of 14 million civilians in a 12-year span.

There is little that I feel I can truly contribute to this debate, which involves far too many outlets and national perceptions as it is (hier in der Zeit, the NYRB, ou Le Monde) and I will let historians figure out whether Snyder's Fascism-Communism comparison holds true or not:

Hitler and Stalin thus shared a certain politics of tyranny: they brought about catastrophes, blamed the enemy of their choice, and then used the death of millions to make the case that their policies were necessary or desirable. Each of them had a transformative Utopia, a group to be blamed when its realisation proved impossible, and then a policy of mass murder that could be proclaimed as a kind of ersatz victory. (Wikipedia)

Let me just say that as someone possessing slightly above average knowledge of the history of the Third Reich I discovered relatively little new in Bloodlands concerning the atrocities committed by the Germans - and, yet, even there specific events especially in Belarus and Warsaw I was little familiar with - while the account of the Soviet crimes perpetrated during those years were revelatory and for the most part completely new to me.