By, Oliver Kamm
2 min read
ByOliver Kamm, Oliver Kamm
By Vasily Grossman
MacLeHose Press, £8.99
Vasily Grossman, the Soviet Jewish writer, has steadily acquired a deserved reputation among English-speaking readers. He was born in 1905 and showed great promise as a writer of fiction. During the Second World War, he turned his talent for prose to journalism, and filed despatches of historic significance for the Soviet newspaper Red Star.
He witnessed some of the great horrors of modern history. He recounted the famine in his native Ukraine, the battle of Stalingrad, and the terrors of Treblinkla - one of the first written accounts of the Nazi death camps.
Had Stalin not died in 1953, it is likely that Grossman would have been a victim of yet another antisemitic purge. As it was, he lived till 1964 but his two great novels, Life and Fate and Everything Flows, would not see publication for another quarter-century. His brief An Armenian Sketchbook, written in 1962, now appears in English for the first time. It is a pearl of great price.
The book tells of two months that he spent in Armenia. It was a trip made out of necessity. The Soviet regime had confiscated his manuscript of Life and Fate and, to make ends meet, Grossman undertook to revise a literal translation of a long and quite inconsequential Armenian novel by Rachiya Kochar. Far the more significant work to emerge from his trip was this remarkable notebook of observations on Armenia and more particularly the mental landscape of the author himself.
Grossman is fascinated by the way the human mind processes the senses
Grossman is fascinated by the way the human mind processes the senses. It's not just a matter of faithfully rendering what's out there. The mind is the intermediary. "And when a man dies," he writes, "there dies with him a unique, unrepeatable world that he himself has created - a whole universe with its own oceans and mountains, with its own sky."
It's a profound and elegiac observation, and rather a beautiful one. It is this type of aside that makes An Armenian Sketchbook far greater than the normal run of travelogues. Of still greater mordancy is Grossman's reflections on the recent fate of European Jewry and the nature of the divine - "Oh God, how desperately mankind needs to atone, to beg for forgiveness".
Yet this is an earthy and sensuous account of his Armenian venture, too. He praises the quality of Armenian cognac and a cuisine that has since spread to the Georgians ("although, to be honest, they still haven't quite got the hang of it").
The translation from Russian by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler is deft and reads fluently. This slim volume is not on a scale of historical significance comparable to Grossman's evocation of the Holocaust but it is a work of charm and poignancy. I have no notion of what remains of the Armenian scenery he describes but I would wish to find out, and to have Grossman as my guide.
Oliver Kamm is a Times leader writer and JC columnist