Freedom's Road

I attended a talk given by philosopher Giovanni Maddalena on Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate. For those who don't know this author and his masterpiece, see the Wikipedia article here. According to the Soviet censors, this novel had to be suppressed (it was) because to release it would have been "as bad as dropping an atom bomb" on Soviet society.

Why? Dr. Maddalena explained the novel's main theme as the meaning of freedom. Grossman was initially a loyal Communist Party member and successful Soviet writer. But over the years he changed his views about the Soviet political and social system. Not only did his act of writing, because he sought the truth, cause reflection and awakening, Grossman's own morally checkered life prompted soul-searcing. When the Germans invaded the Ukraine in 1942, Grossman, a Jew, failed to save his mother before the Einsatzgruppen murdered her (and so many others). And, after the war, Grossman did not have the moral stamina to resist pressure to sign an anti-Jewish screed in the "Jewish plot" fomented by Stalin shortly before his death.

Grossman decided to write a novel that dealt with reality -- how people really are -- not how they are according to Soviet ideology. This perspective got his novel confiscated by the censors when he finished it in 1961. Since Grossman died of cancer in 1964, he never saw the novel published. It was smuggled out of the Soviet Union and first published in Russian in Switzerland in 1981, and much later into other languages, including English.

The immediate setting of the novel is the cataclysmic battle between the German and Soviet forces at the Battle of Stalingrad. But the larger setting includes the Nazi death camps and the political struggles and turmoil throughout the Soviet Union and its territories.

According to Maddalena, the book articulates four levels or degrees of human freedom. Freedom in its first dimension is expressed in the human desire to be free from domination. Freedom is experienced in the appreciation of one's human faculties to reason and to imagine ideals free of oppression. Such freedom is possible because the "eternal" has the ability to shine through the blackness of tyranny into the human soul.

In the novel, this freedom was found only in losing, not winning, military battles. The Germans found freedom when the shackles of the ideological world view that enslaved them were broken, which occurred only when they began to lose the war. The Soviets likewise found freedom in being overcome (initially) by the Germans. Reeling and off-balance, they threw off the bonds of Soviet military ideology and battled as they were in reality, revealing strength and creativity.

Freedom is experienced, thinks Maddalena, at a second, higher level when a human being is able to express himself. Since human beings are relational, they can only be who they are in dialogue. Conversation, interaction with the world and human beings, is necessary for freedom. Ideology, says Grossman, snuffs out conversation. The ideologue treats a part as the whole, and in doing so eschews expressing himself of herself. Only the partial truth is expressed. This is slavery, which the Soviet system preferred. Grossman's book, depicting free expression, was anathema to such a regime, an "atom bomb."

Freedom is even richer, says Grossman, for it includes the expression of truth. In Grossman's world, truth and falsity were constant bedfellows, consisting of what you observed, and the meaning Soviet ideology assigned to it. Grossman insisted that truth is one. It cannot contradict itself. And you cannot be free unless you can know and express that one truth.

One begins to appreciate truth in silence. Things appear there. A passage in the book depicts the silence appearing out of a lapse in shooting. The tick-tock of a clock was suddenly noticeable; crickets chirped, water dripped . . . Things began to appear as what they were. Truth can be spotted when the ambient noise, which includes the noise of ideology, fades into silence.

Another sign of this third level of freedom -- a freedom that touches truth -- is the occurrence of "random acts of kindness." Freedom is experienced when a human being is capable of acting contrary to expectations. Since expectations are often imposed by ideology, a free act is often seen as irrational. Grossman gives the example of a woman who, instead of attacking a fallen and starving German soldier, offered him a loaf of bread. This seemingly irrational spurt of kindness shows that, for Grossman, the human being is capable of recognizing the humanity of man, and acting out of goodness in this recognition, despite ideological expectations. In such acts freedom to be true is seen.

And still, for Grossman, there is a higher, a fourth level of freedom. This is realized when the human being immerses himself in asking the perennial questions about existence: not only questions relating to the day-to-day, but questions concerning nature and science, and our origin and destiny. Asking essentially unanswerable questions leads the human being into the presence of being itself, which is mystery. The questions, being asked, lead us outside of our ability to control, and into a realm of humility, dependence and acceptance. This is freedom in its highest realization for we are no longer living life in accordance with our own will, but according to a higher one, a higher "fate."

Ultimately, freedom is about opening a space in which we can be who we are. Who we can be is described by the degrees of freedom that we embody: freedom from domination, freedom to express ourselves, to be truthful, and to dwell with the ultimate, if unanswerable, questions of existence.

Today we face the same struggle as Grossman faced in his day to be free in a culture punctured by ideological warfare. How can we realize freedom? That question, when asked of Dr. Maddalena, like the questions that characterize the highest level of freedom mentioned earlier, received no direct answer from him. But can I suggest that the signposts along freedom's road may be found in Life and Fate?