Irish Times
June 29 2013
An Armenian Sketchbook, by Vasily Grossman
A trip to Armenia proved to be the creative answer for a writer
censored by the KGB, broke, and dying of cancer
Eileen Battersby
In October 1960 the visionary Russian witness and writer Vasily
Grossman submitted the manuscript of what would become his monumental
work, Life and Fate, to a Soviet literary journal. He was optimistic
that it would be published, as his country was at the high point of
Nikita Khrushchev’s more enlightened leadership. Grossman’s central
thesis, however, was the similarities between Stalinism and Nazism.
The authorities acted swiftly. Within months not only had the Soviet
secret police, the KGB, confiscated the manuscript but officers had
also arrived at Grossman’s Moscow apartment and taken away the
typescript and all the notes relating to it, `even carbon paper and
typing ribbons’. Unlike the public ordeal it had inflicted on Boris
Pasternak, officialdom this time limited itself to taking only the
offending book.
Grossman was left unharmed, yet he was devastated by the plight of his
book. Later that year he was approached about an Armenian novel of
life in the copper mines, which had been poorly translated. He agreed
to undertake a more literary translation. He needed the money, but he
was also attracted by the idea of a two-month stay in Armenia – and it
seemed an ideal plan. Earlier Russian writers, including Pushkin,
Lermontov, Tolstoy and Mandelstam, had all travelled south to the
Caucasus and loved the experience, as, later, would Andrei Bitov. In
addition, Grossman, already ill with the cancer that would kill him in
1964, aged 59, was eager for some breathing space from his failing
marriage.
His trip provided him with wonderful material for An Armenian
Sketchbook, an intimate and relaxed account of his travels to a remote
country of stone. `We are not far from Turkey,’ he writes, `we are not
far from Persia.’
Grossman is alert to the history, extending back as far as Noah’s Ark:
`I see Mount Ararat – it stands high in the blue sky. With its gentle,
tender contours it seems to grow not out of the earth but out of the
sky.’ But he dwells more on time and human life than the politics.
`The longer a nation’s history, the more wars, invasions, wanderings
and periods of captivity it has seen – the greater the diversity of
its faces. Throughout centuries and millennia victors have spent the
night in the homes of those they have defeated. This diversity is the
story of the crazed hearts of women who passed away long ago, of the
miraculous tenderness of some foreign Romeo towards some Armenian
Juliet.’
Grossman proves an entertainingly philosophical, kindly companion; he
is a romantic, but he is also humorous. He surveys the capital. `And
so I go on building my own Yerevan. I absorb and inhale faces,
accents, the frenzied roar of cars being driven at speed by frenzied
drivers. I see a lot of people with big noses . . .’ (There are many
asides about noses, `huge, sharp, hooked noses’.)
He is aware that he speaks only two words of Armenian and that no one
was there to meet him when he arrived. But Grossman never complains;
he sees everything, the poverty, the chaos, the daily life, even the
towering statue of Stalin, `a great and terrible ruler’, as part of a
vivid, moving picture show. At a post office Grossman attempts to send
a few airmail letters, but fails, as there are no envelopes: `It took
some time to establish this, since the black-eyed young women . . .
did not speak any Russian. This led to everyone shouting, laughing and
waving their arms about.’ This is travel writing at its most
entertaining and informed; he has not taken his ego with him, only his
all-seeing curiosity.
Grossman is also sympathetic without being sentimental. His humanity
never burdens the text, which is handled with an inspired lightness of
touch. He watches his companions and fleshes out their individual
histories with the ease of a good listener. An observation about a
mule and a ewe gradually acquires an unnerving profundity. Grossman
briefly adopts the third person, and becomes the Russian translator.
Writing of himself at this remove, he notes: `He had noticed that
people and dogs, for some reason, walked in the road, while the
pavements were used mainly by sheep, calves, cows and horses.’
Initially friendly, the mule becomes aggressive towards the Russian
translator, who quickly realises that the mule is defending the ewe,
which is pressed up against the mule `asking for help and protection’.
Grossman detects that the sheep is aware `that the human hand
stretched out towards her was a bearer of death’. He considers the
ewe’s eyes, `rather like glass grapes’. He then develops this
apparently random observation in one of the most remarkable passages
in a singular work:
`There was something human about her – something Jewish, Armenian,
mysterious, indifferent, unintelligent. Shepherds have been looking at
sheep for thousands of years. And so shepherds and sheep have become
similar. A sheep’s eyes look at a human being in a particular way:
they are glassy and alienated. The eyes of a horse, a cat or a dog
look at people quite differently.
`The inhabitants of a Jewish ghetto would probably have looked at
their Gestapo jailers with the same alienated disgust if the ghetto
had existed for millennia, if day after day for five thousand years
the Gestapo had been taking old women and children away to be
destroyed in gas chambers.’
Grossman makes his point yet avoids turning his book into a polemic.
A visit to a village fills him with joy, as he joins in the fun even
though he doesn’t understand a word. Aside from all the stone, his
first and lasting impression of Armenia is of a mountain that had died
– `its skeleton had been scattered over the ground.’ And what he took
away with him `was a memory of stone’.
Grossman responds to the bustle of life. He also loves the stone
churches and chapels, many of which are in ruins. Among the
monasteries is the famous Geghard monastery, which appears to have
been gouged out of the mountainside. `This miracle born within stone
is the fruit of thirty years labour.’ For him, the ancient churches
and chapels of Armenia `embody perfection.’
In the course of a conversation with the Catholicos of All Armenians,
Grossman admits: `I probably laughed rather too loudly, and smiled too
exuberantly. There was no reason for me to seem so overjoyed.’ His
remarks to the Catholicos are translated by the writer whose novel he
is fashioning into a more literary work. The religious leader, no
doubt correctly, sees Grossman as an unbeliever, so they discuss
literature. Having intently studied Dostoyevsky, the patriarch
confides to Grossman `that without knowing Dostoyevsky it is
impossible to gain a serious and profound knowledge of the human
soul’. The writer that he most loved, though, was Tolstoy.
Elsewhere, Grossman recalls that Goethe once said that during 80 years
of life he had known 11 happy days. He ponders this and reckons that
among the many hundreds of sunrises and sunsets and many beautiful
scenes `only two or three enter a person’s soul with a miraculous
power and become for them what those happy days were for Goethe’.
Through majestic works such as Life and Fate, Everything Flows and The
Road: Stories, Journalism and Essays, Vasily Grossman, born in Ukraine
in 1905, established himself as a seer. His warm, seductive and
personal account of his Armenian trip was first published in 1965,
eight months after his death, in a censored version. This new revised
and well-annotated edition is not only a delight; it is also a subtle,
powerful testament about what it means to be fully human and aware of
all that means. It is great travel writing but, far more than that,
simply an extraordinary reading experience that brings a place and its
people gloriously alive.
Best of all, Vasily Grossman has not only written this book but is
living it in the company of the reader.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent.