经济学人下载:战争、和平与爱情

“Life and Fate”《生活与命运》

War, peace and love战争、和平与爱情

Vasily Grossman’s epic novel is transformed for the radio
瓦西里．格罗斯曼史诗般的小说被改编成广播剧

Sep 10th 2011 | from the print edition

Vasily Grossman vindicated
无辜的瓦西里·格罗斯曼

FEW novels have the foes and fans of “Life and Fate”, Vasily Grossman’s vast book about the Nazis and Soviets at war. The Soviet Communist Party’s ideology chief said it would be more damaging even than Boris Pasternak’s “Dr Zhivago”. That was a high accolade. Another was that the book itself was arrested. In 1961 the KGB confiscated the typescript and even, for good measure, the typewriter ribbon. Grossman, once a loyal party man and an acclaimed war correspondent, was spared jail. But he died four years later, fearing that his sprawling work would never be published (the authorities had said mockingly that it might happen in 200 years). Many years later Andrei Sakharov, a Soviet dissident, helped smuggle a microfilm copy to the West, where it was eventually published in English in 1985.

《生活与命运》是瓦西里．格罗斯曼描写纳粹和苏联战争的宏篇巨著，很少有小说有着它这样的书迷和敌人。苏联共产党的意识形态负责人说，这本书甚至比鲍里斯．帕斯捷尔纳克的《日瓦戈医生》更具破坏力。这是高度的称赞。另一个高度称赞是这本书本身的被查抄。1961年克格勃没收了打字稿，为了更加严防，甚至没收了打字机色带。格罗斯曼曾经是一名忠诚党的人，以及一名广受赞誉的战地记者，他幸免入狱。但四年后他去世时，仍在担心他散乱的作品永远不会出版，因为当局曾嘲讽地说，这本书的出版可能会在200年后。多年后，苏联持不同政见者安德烈．萨哈罗夫帮着走私了缩微胶片拷贝到西方，最后这本书于1985年以英文在西方出版。

The book was not an immediate success. For some years it was overshadowed by the better known work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and by the excitement of reform and then collapse in the Soviet Union. It is also intimidatingly long, with a swirling cast of scores of confusingly named characters. Hundreds of pages sometimes separate their appearances. The sweep of Grossman’s pen can exhaust the reader. True to its title, “Life and Fate” mixes gritty battlefield descriptions with acute psychological insights, wrenching dilemmas and deep philosophical reflections about the nature of good and evil. It is at once funny, gruesome, tragic, informative, romantic and disconcerting. The central message of horror jars with the simplistic but widely held notion that the war was a black-and-white struggle between beastly Nazis and their valiant adversaries.

这本书并没有立即获得成功。在出版后的几年，亚历山大．索尔仁尼琴的作品比较出名，人们对改革感到兴奋，接着是苏联解体，这些都使该书黯然失色。这本书也长得令人生畏，人物众多，名字容易混淆，让人昏乱。有时读过几百页才能搞清人物的来龙去脉。格罗斯曼下笔的拖沓可能会令读者厌烦。《生活与命运》文如其名，将敏锐的心理洞察力、痛苦的困境以及对善恶本质的深刻哲学思考与坚韧不拔的战场描述揉合在一起。本书集滑稽好笑、阴森可怕、悲剧色彩、内容翔实、罗曼蒂克和仓惶失措于一身。本书始终秉持苏德战争是残忍的纳粹和他们英勇的对手之间你死我活的斗争这样的观念，除此之外，中心思想就是恐怖，处理过于简单，产生了不和谐之感。