An Armenian Sketchbook (2 page)

A letter written two weeks later, on December 30, tells us more about Grossman’s difficulties with the author of the novel:

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 titled
Dobro 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 several times, that we have used for the present translation. It should be noted, however, that we cannot be certain that it reflects Grossman’s final wishes in every detail. We cannot take it for granted that every passage missing from the 1965 version was omitted at the insistence of an editor or censor; Tvardovsky was a skilled editor and, for all we know, Grossman may have willingly agreed to some of the cuts he suggested.

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:

—
YURY BIT-YUNAN

and
ROBERT CHANDLER

September 2012

I
FIRST
glimpsed Armenia from the train, early in the morning: greenish-gray rock—not mountains or crags but scree, flat deposits of stone, fields of stone. A mountain had died, its skeleton had been scattered over the ground. Time had aged the mountain; time had killed the mountain—and here lay the mountain’s bones.

To one side of the railway stretched endless barbed wire, several lines deep. It took me a while to realize that we were following the Turkish border. I saw a little white house, and beside it, a little donkey—not one of our own donkeys but a Turkish donkey. There were no people anywhere. The Turkish soldiers must have all been asleep.

Armenian village houses are low, flat-roofed rectangles built out of large slabs of gray stone. There is no greenery; the houses are surrounded not by trees and flowers but by dense scatterings of gray stone. The houses seem not to have been built by human hands. Sometimes a gray stone comes to life and begins to move. A sheep. The sheep too must have been born from stone; probably they eat powdered stone and drink the dust of stone. There is no grass anywhere, no water, nothing but flat, stony steppe—nothing but large, jagged gray, greenish, or black stones.

The peasants are wearing the uniform of all Soviet working folk: thick wadded jackets, gray or black. The men are like the stones they live among; their faces are dark both from a natural swarthiness and from being unshaven. Many are wearing long white woolen socks, pulled up over their trousers. The women wear gray scarves wound around their heads, covering their mouths and their foreheads down to their eyes. Even these scarves are the color of stone.

Then I see a couple of women in bright-red dresses, in red blouses, red waistcoats, red sashes, and red head scarves. Every part of their dress is a different red, crying out piercingly in its own red voice. These are Kurds—wives to men who have been breeding cattle for thousands of years. Perhaps this is their red mutiny against gray centuries amid gray stone.

A young man in the compartment with me keeps comparing the heavenly fertility of Georgia with the stones of Armenia. He is full of criticisms—if the conversation turns to the seven-kilometer railway tunnel built straight through the basalt, he says, “
That
was built back in the reign of Nicholas II.” He tells me about opportunities for buying dollars or imperial gold coins; he tells me the black-market exchange rate. It seems he really envies more serious wheeler-dealers.

Later the young man tells me about a craftsman who fashions metal wreaths adorned with metal leaves. Apparently even the most modest of Yerevan funerals is attended by two or three hundred people—and there are usually almost as many wreaths as people; this creator of funeral wreaths has become rich. The young man treats me to a pomegranate. He bought it in Moscow. But the journey from Moscow to Yerevan is a long and huge country in its own right. When we boarded the train at the Kursk station, my fellow traveler was clean-shaven; by the time we reached Yerevan his face was covered with black beard.

O
N A HILL
above Yerevan stands a statue of Stalin. No matter where you are in the city, you can clearly see the titanic bronze marshal. If a cosmonaut from a far-off planet were to see this bronze giant towering over the capital of Armenia, he would understand at once that it is a monument to a great and terrible ruler.

Stalin wears a long bronze greatcoat, and he has a forage cap on his head. One of his bronze hands is tucked beneath the lapel of his greatcoat. He strides along, and his stride is slow, smooth, and weighty. It is the stride of a master, a ruler of the world; he is in no hurry. Two very different forces come together in him, and this is strange and troubling. He is the expression of a power so vast that it can belong only to God; and he is also the expression of a coarse, earthly power, the power of a soldier or government official.

This magnificent god in a greatcoat is, of course, the work of Merkurov.[
1
]

It may be his best work. It may even be the finest monument of our time. It is a monument to our epoch—a monument to the epoch of Stalin. Stalin’s head seems to touch the clouds. The statue itself is seventeen meters high; together with the building on whose roof it stands, it is seventy-eight meters. When the monument was being assembled and parts of the vast bronze body were still lying on the ground, workers could walk through Stalin’s hollow leg without bowing their heads.

This monument towers over Yerevan and the whole of Armenia. It towers over Russia, over the Ukraine, over the Black and the Caspian seas, over the Arctic Ocean, over the forests of eastern Siberia, over the sands of Kazakhstan. Stalin and the state are one and the same.

This monument was erected in 1951. Scientists, poets, distinguished shepherds, vanguard workers, students, schoolchildren, and Old Bolsheviks all gathered at the foot of the bronze giant. The orators, naturally, gave speeches about the greatest, wisest, most brilliant, most dearly loved of all great, wise, brilliant, and dearly loved fathers and teachers. Every head bowed before the master, the leader, the builder of the Soviet state. Stalin’s state was the expression of Stalin’s character. And Stalin’s character was the expression of the state he had built.

I arrived in Yerevan at the time of the Twenty-second Party Congress,[
2
] when the city’s most beautiful street, a broad straight street lined on either side with plane trees and lit by a central row of streetlamps, was renamed; I arrived when it was decided that Stalin Prospect should become Lenin Prospect.

My Armenian companions, one of whom had been among the distinguished figures entrusted many years before with the task of unveiling the statue of Stalin, seemed very uneasy when I praised the titanic monument.

Some expressed themselves elegantly: “Let the metal used to construct this monument return to its noble primordial condition.”

Others abused Stalin—not so much for the terrible crimes and mass killings of 1937 as for being a nobody. They called him an ignoramus, a boaster, an upstart.

My attempts to say a word about Stalin’s role in the creation of the Soviet state were in vain. My companions would not concede that he had played even the slightest role in the construction of heavy industry, in the conduct of the war, in the creation of the Soviet state apparatus: Everything had been achieved regardless of him, in spite of him. Their lack of objectivity was so glaring that I felt an involuntary urge to stand up for Stalin. This absolute lack of objectivity might be said to resemble nothing so much as the lack of objectivity these same people had shown during Stalin’s life, when they had been so supremely worshipful of his mind and strength of will, of his foresight and genius. Their hysterical worship of Stalin and their total and unconditional rejection of him sprang from the same soil.