today is November 4th 2024 and my guest is Economist author podcaster and blogger Tyler Cowen of George Mason University this is Tyler's 19th appearance on econ talk he was last here in November of 2023 discussing who is the greatest Economist of all time our topic for today is vasil Grossman's Masterpiece life and fate we will minimize spoilers but I'd encourage you to read the book before listening if that's your habit as
I've suggested you may want to read this on the Kindle which makes it a little easier to follow the characters because it's easy to search for them if you forget who they are uh this episode is also available on Tyler's podcast conversations with Tyler Tyler welcome back to econ talk thank you Russ is it a spoiler to tell them who won the war in the Battle of Stalingrad I was thinking of that I think we can reveal that okay that's
fine let's start then you you have some introduction uh well I wanted to just say a little bit about Grossman and the book very briefly uh Gman basil Gman was born in 1905 in bichev British at the time was part of the Russian Empire it eventually in 1922 After the Revolution became part of the Soviet Union uh he rose to some Fame as a war correspondent he covered the battle of Stalingrad people when they talk about this book life and faith say
it's about the Battle of Stalingrad no it's not uh it takes place around the time of the battle of of Stalingrad there is some war in the book uh but that is I think a very misleading uh summary of what the book's about the book was uh so he wrote the book after World War II uh the book was arrested by the KGB in 1961 they came to his house they took the manuscript they took all the typewriter ribbons for those of you who
are older than a certain age will know what that is um they tried to find other copies they ended up digging up the garden of a friend of Grossman's but did not find any other copies he was successful in hiding a couple of
copies uh with friends it eventually uh the book was smuggled out in uh 1980 and published in Switzerland published in the Soviet Union in 1988 Grossman died in 1964 unaware that his book was uh had survived uh and just one other
biographical note which uh is relevant because of the nature of the book uh his mother was killed in 1941 when the Nazis overran bichev pitv was a town of about a little over 50,000 uh people about 40,000 were Jews had had 80 synagogues and his mother died in that uh Soviet uh in the murders there and uh his mother is an important part of this book in a fictionalized role and and we'll talk about that uh Tyler give us give us your
um your short initial assessment of this of this book amongst Soviet authors he is the goat one could say to refer to our earlier episode but this to me is one of the very few truly Universal novels so the title itself life and fate it is about life and fate but it the novel is about so much more so it's about war it's about slavery it's about love motherhood fatherhood childbirth rape friendship science politics how many novels if any can you
think of that have all of those worlds in them in an interesting and insightful manner very few the one that comes closest to it is in fact his model that's TL's work in peace you know a three-word title with an and in the middle and two important Concepts they're both about war they're both about the invasions of Russia or USSR there's a central family in both Stories the notion of what is fade or destiny is
highly important to TL stoy as it is to Grossman though they have different points of view Napoleon plays a significant role in War and Peace in life and fate Hitler and Stalin make actual appearances in the novel which I
find shocking when I read it like here they are on the page and it's actually somewhat plausible so uh he's modeling this I think after War and Peace he actually pulls it off which is a miracle I think it is a novel comparable in
quality and scope and import to tul sto's War and Peace which is sometimes called the greatest novel ever so that is a pretty amazing achievement yeah I think I mentioned on the air in an earlier episode when I was reading it uh you know I enjoyed the first 100 Pages after 200 it got a little better somewhere around 3 or 400 I couldn't put it down um there are so many passages that move you to tears or to incredible emotional
reaction um it's not a traditional novel akin to war in peace or akin to other Russian novels such as the brothers katof were in the first Circle which we talked about here on the program uh previously it is what uh Our Guest uh talking about in the first Circle Kevin McKenna called polyphonic here's how he described it he said dovi and Sol jinon are so similar dovi is famous for what is called the Polyphonic structure of
his novels that is rather than having as we are used to in the west one Central main character who kind of stands as the centerpiece of everything that happens in the novel the ponic structure of adust inent is that there is not a main
Central character there is a past I would say perhaps 5 to eight Central characters as well as perhaps three to four Central major themes and so everything is kind of a Fugue of characters a Fugue of plot in the case
of Gro end of quote in the case of Grossman and life and fate I would say there are 8 to 10 main characters there's about a hundred characters overall and that can be discouraging uh when you start the book but if you keep reading you'll realize that only the 8 to 10 who are the main ones are are going to reappear over and over again and often dozens or hundreds of pages apart when they they um they they reappear but as you point out Tyler
there are so many interesting intellectual and emotional themes of the book it it really spans an enormous part of the human experience and in that sense you could argue it's the greatest novel of the of the 20th century and one of for me one of the greatest novels of all time one of the greatest I've ever read I think another influence and Grossman himself cites him repeatedly is czechav so the chapters and Grossman
often are mirroring checkov short stories but they're woven together in a way that checkov short stories are not uh but the notion of how is it you tell a narrative during a war that is so big and important and tragic I take to be one of his Central Endeavors and that too is something he mostly pulls off yeah the check off part is there are just so many numerous vignettes um Unforgettable vignettes of of characters struggling with betrayal
struggling with the state bearing down on them whether it's the Nazis or the Communists um one of the them you didn't mention that that reverberates throughout the book is the parallels between the Nazis and the Communists uh
they're both you know in many ways fascist authoritarian States but what he's really interested in is their how they grind the individual down and how the individual stands a thwart that grinding stands and says stop no I'm a
human being I found that when I thought about the title uh you know you'd think well why isn't it called life and death or freedom and fate um and for Grossman life is really about Freedom so in a certain sense the title
life and fate for me is very much one of the not the only but one of the central themes of the book which is how human beings caught in the in the throws of and and the the gears of the state managed to maintain their their freedom
and their essential Humanity despite that that brutal brutal uh reality this is where I think we might disagree because I disagree with everything else I've read about this book including Grossman's the main Grossman biography so if I had to name a central theme of the book I think it's in a funny way a patriotic book arguing that communism for all of its horrible faults is actually better than Fascism and explaining or showing to us why it
is better than Fascism and I have a riff on that which I'll do but let me just put that out on the table and hear your immediate reaction I I I don't I'm not sure I disagree with that I wasn't suggesting that they were uh equivalent it's just that they have certain powerful equivalencies that that the characters in the book find repellent the idea that the com to the Communists that that they have a brother in in a in the Nazis the idea that to
the Nazis they have a brother in the Communists would be is extremely disturbing and so Grossman forces number of his characters to confront this those similarities but I agree it's a very patriotic book it's a very Russian book um there's a lot of talk in his biographies biography and in his uh and people who write about him you know how much he was Pro regime how much his antagonism to the regime and the Soviet
regime uh changed over how it grew over time uh and like his characters and it's a very autobiographical book which is bizarre but it's a very autobiographical book the main character Victor Shrum is a is a c is a physicist a world-class physicist and uh gr himself was a chemist not a world-class chemist as far as I know but he identified with strum's strum's marital problems his problems of keeping faith with his conscience and um
in that sense I I think he's overwhelmingly certainly on the side of the of the Russians but I don't think he has any romance about communism I think what he sees as the fundamental difference is that for him fascism is ultimately just a philosophy of death so he says on page 94 man and fascism cannot coexist but the feature about communism and he's under no Illusions about its evils as you just said is there some degree of
negotiability built into the system so if you look say when the Nazi Commander leas is interrogating MAV oy leas just keep keeps on asking questions there's no dialogue nothing can happen there's no real questions there are no real answers and mcoy simply ends up being killed the other characters going to the camps they're simply killed there is no negotiation but if you look at the main Soviet interrogation scene when catenin
Bogan is interrogating kov a scene which goes on for quite a while they talk back and forth It's it's weird it's sick it's twisted there's torture involved but actually kov comes away from that scene alive he at least learns something and also you a figures one of them is Victor another is novakov the tank commander uh maybe they're imperfect but they're not just all bad by any means they're they're virtuous in significant ways and
fascism in this novel cannot create that even the non-believers and fascism uh what's the fellow's name um aov no no no he he's a German he's uh do I have this in my notes he he doesn't really believe in Nazism but he ends up going around raping Russian women and that's the the fascist version of someone who's not a Believer not nearly as good as the Soviet version uh so I think you know he knows he rooted for the USSR to win the war and in part
in this novel he's trying to explain to himself how could you root for such a horrible society and how could it have been on the side of the Allies which of course we would have been rooting for at the time and that I think is part of his answer the central idea of negotiability that it never quite goes away under communism and even Victor is you know saved by this weird intervention from Stalin which makes no no sense but there's some outcome
possible other than just death and destruction yeah I want to come back to the torture theme the scenes in the lubiano with kof um I've read a lot of soul niton I've read all the gag I've read many of his novels I've read about a lot of scenes in the lubian you know I I've I've uh can't say I feel like I've been there but it's it's familiar to me it's the prison where where uh people were tormented not merely tortured but tortured until they
confessed often sometimes tortured till they confessed things that weren't true sometimes tortured until they confessed uh about loved ones or comrades or colleagues it's an unbearable uh tragic place and having read all that before I felt reading Grossman's account an awareness of how hard it was to stay on your principles it's it's almost yes they tortured their victims and they they extracted confessions under torture
but by the end you feel like Grossman captured this idea that for many of them they were glad to confess even though they knew what they did wasn't what they confessed to wasn't true but they did it out of love for the system and all the purge uh the show Trials of the of the 30s which in 1938 just and 37 keep coming back into this book all the tri and the and the the purges before that where Stalin's opponents were
systematically killed none of them were killed at night with the firing squad or with a with a murderer they all confessed and and what Grossman captures which is I've never really read it with this level of intensity the willingness of people to confess even though they know it's not true what they're confessing to because they think the system itself is worth preserving they have a you know I would make a distinction it's ad DOI and
distinction between the church and its its practitioners right it's a little bit reminds me the grand Inquisitor scene the people who the officers of the church and here I'm talking about not any particular church but any religious
Dogma they're flawed they've lost the original uh doctrine that inspired the Believers but the idea of giving up that Doctrine is so painful to the to the adherence that they confess the things they didn't do because they have to
believe that the system the church still stands in this case a secular church the church of Communism do do you feel that it's a profound book on the psychology of confession and I think another element of how people come to confess is that in part they believe they are guilty they they may not believe they're fully guilty but if you think of kov if you rad the earlier parts of the book he does in fact whine about his colleagues
in such a minor way but that looms larger en larger in his mind as they talk to him and he starts wondering well have I in fact done something against the system when confronted with the power of the interrogator and of course
the indirect reference to dovi and how the system exante takes advantage of what a Christian might call original sin to put people in positions where they almost cannot help but confess because they believed something to begin with
and then the theme that passivity underlies how so many social structures operate the novel is quite profound on including how the camps operate uh how an army battalion operates how chains of command operate in the military that the default of passivity is responsible for so much of social order even when that social order can be very very bad by the way it's Lieutenant Peter Bach who's the German I was referring to in my earlier
comment and I should just mention as as you've already alluded to there are many historically real characters in the book mixed in with the fictional ones um and the list of character distinguishes those and there's another parallel between uh the Soviet and the Nazi systems that I found just fascinating each side has its own uh Hall monitors in the middle of a war so you're fighting a war uh it's life or death and yet there's a
commissar meaning an operative of the of the Communist party on the Russian side Soviet side and on the German side you've got the s and they're both looking to uncover uh sins of of you know dog do errors and dogm and they're looking for heresy whether it's negative remarks about Stalin or Hitler or it's Pro something nice about the Jews they're all looking for things to crack down on and it's such a handicap in a war and
novakov of course has incredible moments of this but the idea that you would hamper your war effort with ideological Purity questions and that both sides did at least in Grossman's version uh was really eye opening for me yeah
absolutely one thing I found striking in the book is just how many literary references there are and they they all seem relevant so one thing I did was when reading through I tried to note what was mentioned twice so TL sto is
mentioned more than once but there's this check of short story called The Bishop which it's not only mentioned twice but we're told you know you must go away and read the bishop so of course I went away and read the bishop and the bishop is about dying and it's about what is transient in life it's about the fragility of a social reputation it's about a mother child Bond and that when the bishop who was well known in his
lifetime dies people were not sure he had ever been there but the one person he had been real to was his mother and that was more important than his social role as a bishop and that's the checkov story that he takes greatest care to
point us to and I think so much of the novel is about motherhood it's ver giving birth that is heralding the turn of the tide with the Battle of Stalin grad itself it's when life is again possible that the Soviet start to
win it's a great Insight um Victor the main character sort of one of the main characters in the book receives a letter from his mother on her way to her death in um in a Nazi death camp it's quite powerful it goes on for I don't know 10 pages or so one of the best parts of the book maybe the most moving here and Grossman writes this really imagining what his own mother would have written had she been able to write to him before her death in
the in the murders of bichev in 1941 that I mentioned earlier this is just stunning um Grossman wrote two letters to his mother his actual Mother after her death one he wrote nine years after his mother died and one he wrote 20 years after his mother died right before his own death and we have those letters um they're in the back of uh of a collection of grossmans we're going to talk about in a future episode called the
road and they're deeply moving um he believed and said in his letter I think in the letters that his mother would stay would be Eternal because of life and fate which makes it even more poignant that at the time of his of his
death he didn't know that the book would would survive but he clearly uh motherhood is a major theme in the book uh Sophia's uh scene the doctor in in the death camp uh is also overwhelming and um he clearly um he was fascinated
by maternal love what do you make of the fact that the very final chapter is characters who have no names whatsoever that reminds me a bit of the check off story so I took that to be well in some longer run none of the particular identities of these individuals will be remembered that simply the life and fate of humanity goes on and its people in essence without names that's beautiful I I didn't have any thoughts on that other
than that I was expecting something more dramatic I like how you've you've made that uh different I wondered whether he had a chance to really edit the final version before it was confiscated but I like your ending better I think it's deliberately not dramatic it's as far from drama as you can get in a way yeah that's nice stendal is also mentioned several times a Charter House of parman which is a book about war and individual
fate and I strongly suspect fact all of the literary references have some meaning to Grossman so there's Dante and Swift and Homer and huckin which are all about Journeys and he's taking us like on our journey through this war through this battle through Soviet and Nazi life I think that's another way he thought of the book Dante with the rungs of Hell obviously we're seeing the 20th century version of the rungs of hell and so on
yeah yeah it's an un it's um really a nice way to put it there's no clean narrative thread and it captures the the chaos of war that way they characters who who move away come back they're always they're often homeless they're they're they're thrown out of their own houses they're forced to take in a border who's richer than they are more connected than they are and they're pushed into a a smaller room in the back um they leave
their family uh and yearn to come back so there's this there is this constant theme of Journey and home uh and everyone's everyone in the book is unsettled uh not just by the word their own emotional um journey is is is troubled
uh Victor's marriage as Grossman's marriage was is deeply complicated uh um there's a lot of betrayal in the book as well and at the same time there's a lot of kindness and uh I'll just mention because my it you say you know maybe the
most powerful passage of the book there there's so many uh one of my favorite passages I'm not going to read it I want to spoil it but it's about an act of Senseless kindness uh an act of kindness that a Russian woman does for for a German soldier that she actually says out low to her friends I can't you know she says I can't she can't explain it um and this idea of Senseless kind is standing in the universe up against evil he says it
uh explicitly see if I can let me see if I can find this this passage it's um he says the private kindness of one individual towards another a petty thoughtless kindness an unwitnessed kindness something we would call senseless kindness a kindness outside any system of social or religious good but if we think about it we realize that this private senseless incidental kindness is in fact Eternal it is extended to everything living even to a
mouse even to a bent branch that a man straightens as he walks by it's um that's another theme of the book and he he even when we might wait evil in its magnitude dwarfing uh these small acts he he takes them and he elevates them he he he makes them Shine for us so that in his view they're the they're the whole thing Tanner Greer said on Twitter he thinks kindness is the central theme of the novel there's also a part on page 283
where grman gives what I think is just his solu his intellectual ological solution to the whole mess and of course he cites COV so let me just read a short part here COV is the bearer of the greatest Banner that has been raised in the Thousand Years of Russian history the banner of a true Humane Russian democracy of Russian freedom of the Dignity of the Russian man our Russian humanism has always been cruel intolerant sectarian and he talks about
the partisans the Fanatics and he thinks TL story is also an intolerant fanatic but COV says quote let's put God and all these Grand Progressive ideas to one side let's begin with man let's be kind and attentive to the individual man and that I think is his bottom line and that too comes from czechav and then he cites Cav's book about prison camp saken Island which is also a fantastic story what other themes did you want to
mention that that we haven't talked about it's the notion of people will put up with and how they deal with it of how they will keep on absorbing indignities and the sort of set point you could say it it gets reset and then something else happens and something else happens and he's so psychologically astute in presenting that in a wide variety of settings for different people whether it's interrogation torture being
in the camp seeing your child suffer it's one of the hardest things about this novel to read there's so many instances of it and any one of them is heartbreaking and you keep on seeing it again and again I take it you found that
hard as well well it's funny when you just I think anyone listening to this what we've said so far would say boy this is a depressing book right it's about death and War Death under the Nazis death under the Communists I did
not find it depressing uh I did not find it a dark read the the and let me expand on that a little bit then I want your reaction yes people go through horrible things but one of the themes of the book is the resilience of the human spirit and um and he talks about it explicitly in a few places he talks about the desire to live even when you think uh it's it's quote hopeless you know he talks about how people do things that
are not going to have an impact for months and and maybe years even though they think they're about to die but they do them anyway that you know the human circus or whatever you want to call it uh parade goes on but I don't
find it it's weird to say this I I didn't find it a particularly dark book I was not depressed or down I found it a nice example of of what I talked about with Susan Kan I found it a very Bittersweet book because there there's a
lot of life in it how would you um you agree with found I don't find many things depressing it is tough to read and I think most ordinary readers if you just pulled them they would say this is depressing but that the book itself exists is part of the ultimate reason why it's not depressing that the book managed to survive and that's a testament to some of the negotiable elements in the Soviet system even though they tried to destroy it you have
to wonder how hard did they try when you read the stories of how it survived it seems maybe they could have destroyed it if they had truly wanted to and one thing I'm struck by you know the r the terror reign of Stalin more generally for all the terrible things he did he had some modest tendency to protect his Geniuses whether it was Pak or prfv or shastovich or grman uh those are not the people he killed uh Bobble was
killed but uh the genius tend to survive and they're able to do something however Twisted it may have been or whatever circuitous path it had to go through to come out and be shown to the public maybe Shostakovich is the clearest example of that it's really interesting I obviously he was ruthless with respect to his political Rivals um including just coock right he killed yeah oh no yeah I'm talking about his his
colleagues from the the early days of the Revolution he brutally killed them as and as I suggested he as I said earlier he he killed him after having them confess first which I don't know if that was uh gilding the Lily or not for
him whe that added to the to the Delight that he um found in that but uh I don't know if he protected his his Geniuses he he certainly didn't generally let them Thrive he forced them to to conf formed to his own movement
standards this a page we mentioned it when we agreed to do this it's page 2117 an artificial intelligence what did you make of that oh I loved it you know I don't agree with every word of it but it's so um I don't know if it's pressence the right word but it's it it it was Eerie it was one of the two most intellectually interesting things in the book uh for me as opposed to you know literary uh emotional power we'll we'll come back to the
second in a sec you want to read that passage it's a great passage it's a whole chapter this the whole chapter it's only a couple paragraphs I'll read part of it quote an electronic machine may carry out mathematical calculations remember historical facts play chess and translate books from one language to another it is able to solve mathematical problems more quickly than man and it's memory is faultless is there any limit
to progress to its ability to create machines in the image and likeness of man it seems that the answer is no and there's more but that's just the opening part there was of course throughout the 1960s a Soviet obsession with artificial intelligence that we often forget in the west but they as a regime were convinced it was going to be the future it pops up a great deal in Soviet science fiction there's that book about the science City
in Iberia that was created by the Soviets there's a whole chapter in that book about what they were trying to do with AI it was one of their top priorities obviously they didn't get very far but Grossman is showing he he
was swept up in that Mania but I think what he says on this page is true except for you know the memory being faultless we know that's not true there are still hallucinations yeah well today well we'll get there maybe today yeah and he
wrote that in probably late 1950s uh sometime in the in the 1950s which um you talk about the Soviet interest in AI there wasn't much I in AI in those early days but um he was fascinated clearly but and that that page doesn't really change much of the book at all he just threw that in there because he was interested in it I don't think it's throw it's not thrown in there it's there for a reason let's talk that
reason yeah tell me Well the very last sentence on that page which is its own paragraph quote fascism annihilated tens of millions of people so he before that he's mentioning that the the AI machine will be so large he didn't know Mo's law that it might take up the entire surface of the Earth and uh some there might not be room for humans on Earth I think is what he's saying so I think he's worried about artificial intelligence and he views it
as potentially the new fascism that's how I took the no I think that's fair I think that's fair uh so he's saying fascism doesn't go away it it comes back in many forms there are always forces that could enslave or destroy Mankind and he worried I'm speculating here about his own regime's Embrace of the AI program so he's like an early ilaser or a worry about technology I think I think the you his worries about the analogy making there between
Fascism and technology that they they enslave us I don't think enslaves us the way our phones enslave us but they have the potential to be a system uh and I you know I think of the the man of system the the Adam Smith quote from the theory of moral sentiments this idea that uh if you have a view of the world that you won't impose on the chessboard of The Human Experience uh you're going to do some bad things and I I take it to be in that
spirit note also that the middle paragraph where he talking about humans he cites first childhood memories a bit later on a Mother's tenderness thoughts of death so the main themes of the novel are being echoed by this interlude where he is contrasting humans to the machine and the Machine for him eventually becomes all powerful it becomes a kind of God can create humans in its image that are in a way Superior and I think he's
terrified by this yeah just like I am a little bit uh and yeah fair enough I didn't mean to suggest it was a it didn't belong at all um it's just a wonderful little interlude and and I think I was overwhelmed by the fact that it seems
like most of it could have been written yesterday um the other part I that I just was fascinated by was his uh comparison of fascism to uh quantum mechanics and the cutting of physics what were your thoughts on on that that
analogy and how and the part forgetting this particular example I want your thoughts on that but this idea that that scientific metaphor and scientific narrative and the way we see our role in the universe doesn't just affect the progress of science it comes into our culture in in all kinds of ways that that's a very provocative idea I think it's the same theme so I read him is basically a humanist like czechav
fairly skeptical about science so Victor yes is you could say his here our certainly center of the novel but what ends up happening is Victor this is not too much of a spoiler because we know what did happen ends up helping stall and build nuclear weapons and he he can't be too thrilled by that uh he may see a positive side that the motherland could be defended against future fascists but I think he has strongly mixed feelings about that
and Victor is co-opted by something that Grossman himself does not quite believe in and the scientific mentality is part of the problem so the way science operates in the novel and in this Society uh there's more betral in science than anywhere else you're highly at risk in science and I don't think he feels that's entirely accidental to science or fully the fault of communism Victor's character deals relentlessly and painfully with
the ethical dilemmas of being a favored citizen of the state very similar to in the first Circle where um the characters are they're in a goog but it's a privileged goog because they're doing research that benefits the state which puts them as the prisoners in a very unpleasant ethical situation which is the essence of that book you know in this case another thing that that Grossman captures I thought with such accuracy
and and lets you feel it is the exhilaration of scientific discovery Victor makes a discovery the exact nature of it isn't described uh but he's clearly on The Cutting Edge and and as you say it may lead to many things but it's mainly a theoretical Discovery and there's an ego part to it but most of it's just he's just pushed out the frontiers of human knowledge and it's it's an incredible part of The Human Experience he's just
he's so alive after that and his mood so oscillates with his ability to do that or not do it depending on his whether he's in a favored status with respect to the regime and so I think that's just so much more um part of his
psychological trials and tribulations the ability to have that freedom or lose it clashing with his with the pressure the regime puts him under to serve its own purposes uh that to me is is an enormous part of his his character's
um dilemma but I think Grossman's also writing at a time where many many intelligent people think science perhaps is about to end the world so there's that possibly apocryphal story that some of the people the Rand Corporation the decision theorists not all of them put money into their retirement accounts because they thought it wouldn't be necessary a nuclear war would come it an extremely common view amongst the elite
and I think he held a Soviet version of that and that pops up in the novel that yes you're rooting for Victor but there's something about the logic of what went wrong that can so easily end up being recreated but at a
more destructive level and that's in the background of this novel but I think it's another reason why maybe I find it a bit less uh I don't think heartwarming isn't the word but a bit less inspirational than one could otherwise make it out to
be we can't get rid of Science and uh he's Grossman himself is never quite reassured about science and that one page about AI is put in there to tell us that that's nice I agree with that it's very nice Tyler he's got a uh
an essay in the road which we may talk about in a future uh episode where he looks at a painting of Raphael's called cistin Madonna and in the cistin Madonna Mary is holding the baby Jesus and pushing him forward and she does it it's a very
Grossman painting because it's about a mother's love for her child and her willingness to put the Child In Harm's Way uh there's a lot more to say about that but in that essay Grossman talks explicitly about the hydrogen bomb say it was written in 1955 uh and he clearly which is about the time I think he was writing some of of this book so it's you're you're 100% right that the potential for human beings to be extinct uh and Destroy
themselves is very much uh in his consciousness one thing I've been thinking about is the question to what extent is this Soviet novel Jewish novel Ukrainian novel or Russian novel and often it's thought of as a Russian novel I'm not sure how much it is because he's clearly not ethnic Russian uh so how H how does the Patriotic side of this differ from how a Russian writer would have presented the same
I've been pondering I don't have a clear answer but that's another undercurrent in the book that it's very subtly not entirely Russian per se well his jewishness was not always front and center in his mind and he was forced to confront it as the Holocaust arrived and eventually as the Soviets you know Stalin accused Jewish doctors of trying to kill him and there was uh so there was there's a strong anti-Semitic thread in in Soviet and Russian
life um it's not a Jewish novel uh I don't think I wouldn't call it that but it is written by a Jewish Ukrainian living in a Soviet state so in that sense uh with a Russian culture so in that sense in a certain sense I think
it's the ultimate Russian novel uh it's polyphonic it's uh it's about uh life and fate so there's really few things more Russian than that and yet at the same time uh he writes as a Jew and the Jewish parts of the book which are not
that many but he gives you a flavor of what it's like to live in a place where anti-Semitism can be openly uh espoused and it's painful for some of the characters they try to hide their jewishness at times uh and of course we have the showah the Nazi the Holocaust going on at the same time which you know an editor would probably might have said to him you know the book's got a lot in it already you need to put that in but
he did uh he did need to put that in uh and um so that's a good question Tyler it strikes me as more Jewish than you're making it out to be not in the religious sense no but the notion of how tragedy is possible and how tragedy can befall you in quite arbitrary ways or the sudden twists and turns of Fate come very much from the Hebrew Bible I think he probably was aware of that but he must have been brought stop learning it
uh and for me it's a highly Jewish novel not only by any means it's a universal novel above everything else it's interesting to me my wife Natasha a Jew from the Soviet Union this and Master and Margarita are her two favorite novels uh and that she so much relates to this uh it tells me something because she's uneasy with a lot of what you might call Purely Russian fiction including tuloy very uneasy with tolto uh it's only one data point but
worth thinking about yeah that's interesting I I was going to say when you talked about the twists and turns it's that makes it more of a Yiddish novel well that's of course pal of settlement yeah it wasn't written in yish um but there's a certain um I'll say it a different way to take it a little more seriously there's a certain fatalism in Jewish fate of feeling that that we are the um endlessly the punching bags of of the
rest of the world and we are that is Our Fate uh obviously we're living in a moment where that's uh the world's a little different with the current situation in Israel uh but I think the characters uh in in life and fate
obviously do feel that they are um baguer and that that has a certain there's a certain flavor to that that I can't explain but but also consider the Book of Job you know who is it who can himself or herself actually defend what he or she
has done in the eyes of God is another underlying theme in this book and is it Victor in fact not entirely clear even though he's the center mostly a sympathetic character uh who who who really is doing right under the eyes of God is highly clear I think in life and fate oh I agree but it's just I don't we shouldn't misle mislead readers there's very little God in this book he doesn't mention God a lot God looms over the book to some
extent uh indirectly implicitly um but what it means to be a human being uh and to live a life that is defensible whether it's to God or to your friends or to who whomever is a central part of this book and um grman himself again not no spoilers here but look up Grossman's entries in Wikipedia articles that were written about him that have been written about him uh there's a nice article in 2006 in the New Yorker uh by Keith gessen uh grman
himself did some things he was deeply ashamed of uh he was ashamed I think as far as we know that he didn't get his mother out of bichev and that she' perished there at the hands of the Nazis in 1941 he does sign some things publicly uh that benefit the regime that he I think regrets and Victor goes through similar um s very similar throws of conscience let me talk a bit about how I read this book yeah which was extremely
abs absorbing uh highly worthwhile but it was tough one thing I did that helped more than anything else was an extensive use of large language models in particular the 01 version of GPT so whenever I would come across a name and not feel I had a full command of what that person had done I would just ask GPT give me the account of what this person did in the book I did that dozens of times as you mentioned many characters I didn't catch any
hallucinations actually it was extremely useful I I don't think I could have read the book nearly as well as I read it without doing that interestingly there's one character where it just failed it it delivered for me dozens of times but when I asked it about Vera like tell me the story of Vera it just gave me back the oh I'm a large language model I don't know who Vera is you know check your other sources I don't know why but other than
that it was Flawless and highly useful well um she doesn't get a lot of air time and she hasn't written about a lot so it might have had trouble finding any kind of references to her uh as you point out she plays a a very powerful
symbolic role but she doesn't take up a lot of pages uh I'll just mention I mentioned the essay a minute ago the cine Madonna I asked chat GPT what it was about and it totally got her wrong uh it said it was about beauty and art
it is not what it is about at all uh Claude got it right exactly uh which is just um maybe neither here nor there other than it's good to have sometimes two uh llms to to to ask questions of I found my reading the book was very inconsistent I struggled in the early Pages as I mentioned to get my momentum going you know when I read Brothers car M off I read it over a fairly long period of time but the last three or 400
pages I read in a couple days because they were so it's such a page Turner this book is not a page Turner uh as I said you might get discouraged uh but I found myself more if I may say so engrossed uh in it uh engrossed in a Grossman novel there's no there's almost no very little narrative uh suspense uh we know how the Battle of Stalingrad turns out uh the tide turns and and I found it interesting that the um novakov I think is part of the lead
tank group going into Ukraine and he's very excited to go to reclaim Ukraine for the Soviets and take it back from the Germans it was a slightly Eerie um shadow of the current moment uh but I um I just kept going I one of my one of my followers on Twitter I apologize to you because this is such a good joke and we'll put a link to it in the in the show notes I don't have it but he he he when I said we're reading this book you should get
started it's going to air soon he wrote back all the characters he said I'm on page 12 and all the characters are named stroken off I need more time the names the other yeah the Nam are hard the names are hard here's the other thing I did and this was difficult but once I finished it the next day I started over again at page one reread the whole thing I'm a big advocate of doing that and I realized I had understood very little of the first two
or three hundred Pages the first time I read it not that I didn't understand the words but I didn't understand how any of it fit into the story and I don't think you can it's not a question of well if I'd been a better reader or paid more attention or been less distracted by the dog I just think many books the best thing you do is read them twice directly in a row and as you get to the latter third of the book actually probably you could
stop you don't have to reread the last third but certainly the first half you just have to do it again so I read uh this version I'm holding this up for YouTubers um yeah me too same same print it's uh same publisher it's U New York Review books uh press who've issued a lot of um Rich a lot of Grossman um it's about 872 pages we we haven't actually mentioned that it's really long and I should also mention there's a
prequel uh which was issued initially under the title for just cause that you can read in English under the title of Stalingrad which is confusing because the life and F people say is about Stalingrad but he wrote a book called
Stalingrad in English anyway that's also about 900 Pages uh I may read that next it's funny when I finished the book I had the exact same urgin I'm not a reread the way you are Tyler I thought I want to read this again and I want to do
justice to it uh you know there there's a certain uh I felt a certain ethical virtue in honoring this man who had written this book and to give it even a second reading but I felt I should read the road these this collection of shorter pieces that he wrote in in preparation for our conversation but uh I wanted to read it again it's I will I hope I will read it again you know the the great great novels from the 20s there's Thomas M
there's PR there James Joyce from around that time uh I think it's hard to compare this to those but if you think of the somewhat latter part of the 20th century this has a claimed to be the best novel of a very very important Century uh and it's remarkable how few people know it I wouldn't say it's a page Turner but I never lost interest I would say that not once I was never thinking well if I wasn't doing doing
this podcast with with Russ what I keep on going just was never a question so in that sense it was a page Turner for me I want to make sure I say this Tyler I'm very grateful you agreed to do this because um I think the quote is from um William F Buckley I want to say it's I want to say it's Moby Dick I might get it wrong but he said he read it late in life and he said it would have made me really sad to have died without reading this book and
that's the way I feel about life and fate uh I feel it would have been a loss for me not to have finished it uh I read the book in a very strange way by the way I read it both on my phone on my Kindle app where I highlighted uh
profusely and then I read it on Shabbat on The Jewish Sabbath when I couldn't use my Kindle I read the paper version and you can see where I bent down page Corners I'm holding this up for YouTube Watchers I bent down page Corners
thinking naively I would go back and reh highlight those in the Kindle version because they were so good uh it's a compulsion I have it doesn't really make sense but um it's um I'm glad I read both way so was they were both helpful did you ever get in touch with Robert Chandler the translator I did he what did you learn he's scheduled to appear on this uh program shortly I I I want to talk to him about two things I want to talk to
him about the road which he edited he translated it and edited it and I also want to talk to him about uh the the art of translation um and obviously we'll talk a little bit about life and fate and passing but I'll put a I'll put an ad in for the road the road has short stories of Grossman it has his remarkable uh essay on trinka uh it's about a 40 50 page essay on entering trinka who's the first journalist to enter a death camp
and that's a must read for anyone it's it's it's an incredible incredible essay um but the short stories are are really are really lovely um uh the short story of the road is this is a short story from the perspective of a donkey which uh and it's interesting tolster wrote a wonderful short story called the pace Setter that is life from the perspective of a horse I assume Grossman was riffing on that in in some way this idea that
this dumb meaning mute creature uh that its observations of the human being might be more accurate than our own and give us Insight is really is a beautiful idea so that's and it's also peppered with lovely pieces from Chandler in uh in bi with with biographical detail so I can't imagine what it it's like to I'll ask him but I to translate a book of this size which of course you know Russian translators are doing this all day long constant
gett and and others uh are translating very large books from a very different language it's U must be a fascinating experience and I'm sure it took longer to translate than it took me to read it so I'll be I want you to I want you to ask him how funny is the book in Russian because in English it's basically not funny but I hear my wife tell jokes in Russian her friends all the time everyone laughs I get an English
translation it's not funny I suspect the joke in fact was funny so Russian jokes don't translate well that's what I want you to ask him well another thought I had on the question of how is this not quite a Russian novel though it's in the Russian language if I think of Tolstoy a lot in Russian culture he even says this about tolto dovi scriabin it's fanatical of different sorts uh obviously the Bolsheviks were fanatical
and this novel is extremely anti- fanatical it's like Montana in France right uh it's like COV is his model for how to be an anti- fanatic so part of what he's doing I think is trying to retell Tolstoy but from a humanist anti fanatical point of view I feel a certain fanaticism about certainly Sol niton certainly about dovi what do you find I can think of a few things that are fanatical about TL story what what comes to mind well his views on
everything were extreme Boven Shakespeare religion property it's hard to think of a more fanatical human being sex sex god marriage yeah it's true he'd make a great podcast guest but where would you even start dovi clearly a
fanatic uh from the biography from his works if you read Armenian Sketchbook which is a also a great short book to read by him he just seems so much not a fanatic and that's the most inspiring thing for me about this novel that you
can be for him committed to principles and morality and not a fanatic and he's pulling that from checkov and when you're from the smaller part of the Empire uh you're probably going to be less fanatical it's a bit like Americans and Canadians perhaps uh and that to me really shown through in life and Fai the anti fanaticism let me ask you a personal question yeah I really like that by the way and it's a certain it's a certain
Detachment is the way I would describe it his anti fanaticism takes the form of a Detachment uh of the Observer who who hovers over his characters and and describes them uh calmly without over overdoing it um I'm less fanatical than when I was younger would that be true of you of course I mean it's true for almost everyone but especially if you have libertarian Roots well no it's not true of almost everyone but if you have
libertarian Roots you either go crazy or you become less extreme right what do you mean right expand well we each know some people who just went crazy often in non non- libertarian directions some of them become oddly enough fans of Putin while we're on the Russian topic uh or they just stop believing in scientific argument and discourse but the serer thing to do and you see this with many people from the progressive left as well
is just to become uh more more moderate more uncertain to have better epistemic practices and take a broader site of History more seriously and I think groman is doing that how much of History he's taking seriously not just the one point in front of his eyes Battle of Stalingrad but the AI section whether you agree or not he's looking to the Future he's definitely looking to the Russian in Soviet past as well the Ukrainian past Jewish history
the Hebrew Bible so it's spanning a lot and that's one reason why I think it's epistemically pretty non or anti fanatical and pretty rational so you I have a couple fanaticisms I've got my libertarian flavor uh and my religious
observance and they've both become tempered in some Dimension as I've gotten older uh I don't think it's to avoid Insanity by the way um I'm that wasn't why you did it but if you hadn't done it yeah maybe people who don't do
it can just get worse right I'm I'm curious why you think that is it why why do you think people because I don't I don't think it's true by the way you know you did suggest it might not be it's not obvious to me that people get
less fanatic as they get older in fact you know supposedly as people get older it's not my personal experience I'm grateful for that but a lot of people when they get older just get crankier and they get more obsessed with their
obsessions more fanatical about their fanaticisms um I think I've been spared that but why do you think it's it's um that happens I think I should have said it's a bodal distribution that you go one way or another look at it this way in the simplest basian model your views should be a random walk that the recent evolution of your views shouldn't predict where you'll end up tomorrow but that's not the case really with anyone
that I've ever met there's some kind of Trend in your views you're either getting more fanatical getting more moderate getting more religious more or less something and that to me is one of the most interesting facts about human belief is how hard it is to find belief as a random walk so what's what's wrong with all of us if you're getting more moderate all the time that's wrong too that's a funny kind of you could say
almost fanaticism where you ought to say well I see the trend so I'm just going to LEAP to where I ought to be and then the next day maybe 50% chance I'll take a step back toward you know being more dogmatic or or less moderate again that's not what we see from the moderates either I wonder how much of it is the fact that it's really convenient to have a system right gives you something to shove into the box you got this black
box that you take the world's events and you and you've decided how they should be processed and then something new comes along and you know how to deal with that because you've got this box you've got all these great examples from
the past and at some point for me I just started thinking that maybe the Box doesn't work all the time uh I think a lot of people love the box it it's a great source of comfort whether it's religion or ideology or other things uh
and and maybe there's just something um peculiar about me I when you know when you're younger certainty is deeply comforting because the world's a bit too complicated to deal with it still is but I'm just less certain there's also a more charitable interpretation of what you're describing so think of yourself as working through problems which is fine right and working through problems takes some time you can't every day pick
up a new problem so the problems you're working through as you I wouldn't say solve them but as you somewhat make progress on them that's going to give you some persistence in the Deltas of how your beliefs change and I'm not sure
you know the pure basian model might just be wrong it's so far from actual human practice maybe we shouldn't just damn humans for not meeting it but realize there structures to how you work through things and they are going to
imply certain trends that go on for periods of time I want to say anything else about this book um about it as a will it persist with you will you think about me I found a number of the stories and vignettes I think will stick with me for a long long time I have't talked about many many many of them that I loved I did not talk about reader you will have to listener you will have to read them for yourself and make your own
list but this book will haunt me uh and I wonder part of it's because I've you I'm reading it recently I I'm not haunted by um a lot of the books I read when I was younger because I've forgotten most of the haunting parts and and I read this recently but uh it's quite an achievement in that way I think it will it will last with me do you want to add anything else you're living under wartime conditions in a way that I am
not I would just say my reading opportunity costs are very high for me to read an 872 page book twice in a row and be glad I did it uh there's no higher endorsement I can give to a novel than that my guess today has been Tyler Cowen Tyler thanks for being part of econ talk Russ thank you for thinking of me for this and thinking I might be crazy enough to actually do it it's been a great great pleasure both the reading and the chatting with you d