Dialogues play an essential constructive role in Grossman’s novel Life and Fate and occur in diverse, even extreme, situations, inside and outside the Soviet Union (in the evacuees’ flats, in the bunkers in Stalingrad, in concentration camps, in the gas chambers). A multitude of human voices echoes everywhere and makes the sense of immense tragedy more anguishing. The monolithic conception of reality characterizing the worldview in totalitarian regimes, in Stalin’s Russia as in Hitler’s Germany, shatters under the action of a new awareness reached by people in search of freedom, not only from Nazism but also from their lives as they were before the war. Grossman’s attitude towards his characters resembles the author’s position on Dostoevsky’s novels. The analysis of dialogical interactions in Grossman’s novel can be approached in different ways. This essay is based on Bakhtin’s reading of dialogism in Dostoevsky’s novels and takes into consideration three dialogical situations in the life of the nuclear scientist Viktor Strum, one of Life and Fate’s protagonists: the one-to-one dialogue with Sokolov when he announces his great discovery, the famous multiple-voice, openhearted dialogue at Sokolov’s house in Kazan and Strum’s interior monologue during the compilation of a new personal questionnaire at night. It is precisely the centrality of dialogue in Grossman’s poetics which allows us to read his masterpiece in the wake of Dostoevsky.
По следам Достоевского: «диалогическое мироощущение» в романе «Жизнь и судьба»
PAOLINI, Sara
2016-01-01
Abstract
Dialogues play an essential constructive role in Grossman’s novel Life and Fate and occur in diverse, even extreme, situations, inside and outside the Soviet Union (in the evacuees’ flats, in the bunkers in Stalingrad, in concentration camps, in the gas chambers). A multitude of human voices echoes everywhere and makes the sense of immense tragedy more anguishing. The monolithic conception of reality characterizing the worldview in totalitarian regimes, in Stalin’s Russia as in Hitler’s Germany, shatters under the action of a new awareness reached by people in search of freedom, not only from Nazism but also from their lives as they were before the war. Grossman’s attitude towards his characters resembles the author’s position on Dostoevsky’s novels. The analysis of dialogical interactions in Grossman’s novel can be approached in different ways. This essay is based on Bakhtin’s reading of dialogism in Dostoevsky’s novels and takes into consideration three dialogical situations in the life of the nuclear scientist Viktor Strum, one of Life and Fate’s protagonists: the one-to-one dialogue with Sokolov when he announces his great discovery, the famous multiple-voice, openhearted dialogue at Sokolov’s house in Kazan and Strum’s interior monologue during the compilation of a new personal questionnaire at night. It is precisely the centrality of dialogue in Grossman’s poetics which allows us to read his masterpiece in the wake of Dostoevsky.
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