Tyler Cowen on Life and Fate

Nov 25 2024

41kAK7456L._SY445_SX342_-188x300.jpg Life and Fate might be the greatest novel of the 20th century or maybe ever. Tyler Cowen talks about this sprawling masterpiece and its author, Vasily Grossman, with EconTalk's Russ Roberts.

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0:37	Intro. [Recording date: November 4, 2024.] Russ Roberts: 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 EconTalk. He was last here in November of 2023, discussing who is the greatest economist of all time. Our topic for today is Vasily 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 a 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. This episode is also available on Tyler's podcast, Conversations with Tyler. Tyler, welcome back to EconTalk. Tyler Cowen: Thank you, Russ. Is it a spoiler to tell them who won the war and the Battle of Stalingrad? Russ Roberts: I was thinking of that. I think we can reveal that. Tyler Cowen: Okay, that's fine. Let's start then. You have some introduction.
1:37	Russ Roberts: Well, I wanted to just say a little bit about Grossman and the book very briefly. Vasily Grossman was born in 1905 in Berdichev. Berdichev at the time was part of the Russian Empire. It eventually, in 1922, after the Revolution became part of the Soviet Union. He rose to some fame as a war correspondent. He covered the Battle of Stalingrad. People, when they talk about this book, Life and Fate say it's about the Battle of Stalingrad. No, it's not. It takes place around the time of the Battle of Stalingrad. There is some war in the book, but that is, I think, a very misleading summary of what the book is about. So, he wrote the book after World War II. The book was arrested by the KGB [Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti/Committee for State Security] 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. 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 with friends. Eventually, the book was smuggled out in 1980 and published Switzerland, published in the Soviet Union in 1988. Grossman died in 1964 unaware that his book had survived. And, just one other biographical note which is relevant because of the nature of the book: his mother was killed in 1941 when the Nazis overran Berdichev. Berdichev was a town of about a little over 50,000 people. About 40,000 were Jews. It had had 80 synagogues. And, his mother died in that Soviet--in the murders there. And, his mother is an important part of this book in a fictionalized role, and we'll talk about that. Tyler, give us your short initial assessment of this book. Tyler Cowen: Amongst Soviet authors, he is the GOAT [Greatest of All Time], one could say--if you 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, 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 Tolstoy's War and Peace, 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 [Union of Soviet Socialist Republics]. There's a central family in both stories. The notion of what is fate or destiny is highly important to Tolstoy 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, 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 Tolstoy's War and Peace, which is sometimes called the greatest novel ever. So, that is a pretty amazing achievement.
5:27	Russ Roberts: Yeah; I think I mentioned on the air in an earlier episode: when I was reading it, I enjoyed the first a hundred pages. After 200, it got a little better. Somewhere around 300 or 400, I couldn't put it down. There are so many passages that move you to tears or to an incredible emotional reaction. It's not a traditional novel akin to War and Peace or akin to other Russian novels such as The Brothers Karamazov, or In the First Circle, which we talked about here on the program previously. It is what our guest talking about In the First Circle, Kevin McKenna, called polyphonic. Here's how he described it. He said, Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn are so similar. Dostoevsky 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 as everything that happens in the novel, the polyphonic structure of a Dostoevsky or a Solzhenitsyn is that there is not a main, central character. There is a cast--and by cast, I would say perhaps 5 to 8 central characters, as well as perhaps 3 to 4 central major themes. And so, everything [is] kind of a fugue of characters. A fugue of plot.... End of quote. In the case of Grossman and Life and Fate, I would say there are eight to 10 main characters. There's about a hundred characters overall, and that can be discouraging when you start the book. But, if you keep reading, you'll realize that only the eight to 10 who are the main ones are going to reappear over and over again--and often dozens or hundreds of pages apart when they reappear. But, as you point out, Tyler, there are so many interesting intellectual and emotional themes of the book. It really spans an enormous part of the human experience. And, in that sense, you could argue it's the greatest novel of the 20th century; and for me, one of the greatest novels of all time--certainly one of the greatest I've ever read. Tyler Cowen: I think another influence--and Grossman himself cites him repeatedly--is Chekhov. So, the chapters in Grossman often are mirroring Chekhov short stories, but they're woven together in a way that Chekhov short stories are not. 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. Russ Roberts: Yeah. The Chekhov part is there are just so many numerous vignettes--unforgettable vignettes--of characters struggling with betrayal, struggling with the State bearing down on them, whether it's the Nazis or the Communists.
8:23	Russ Roberts: One of the themes you didn't mention that reverberates throughout the book is the parallels between the Nazis and the Communists. They're both, in many ways, fascist authoritarian states. But, what he's really interested in is how they grind the individual down and how the individual stands athwart that grinding--stands and says, 'Stop. No. I'm a human being.' I found that, when I thought about the title--you know, you'd think: 'Well, why isn't it called Life and Death?' Or, 'Freedom and Fate?' And for Grossman, life is really about freedom. So, in a certain sense, the title Life and Fate for me is very much--not the only--but one of the central themes of the book, which is how human beings caught in the throes and the gears of the State manage to maintain their freedom and their essential humanity despite that brutal reality. Tyler Cowen: 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. Russ Roberts: Yeah. I'm not sure I disagree with that. I wasn't suggesting that they were equivalent: it's just that they have certain powerful equivalencies that the characters in the book find repellent. The idea to the Communists that they have a brother in the Nazis, the idea that to the Nazis they have a brother in the Communists is extremely disturbing. And, so, Grossman forces a number of his characters to confront those similarities. But, I agree, it's a very patriotic book. It's a very Russian book. There's a lot of talk in his biography and people who write about him how much he was pro-regime, how much his antagonism to the regime and the Soviet regime changed, how it grew over time, and like his characters. And, it's a very autobiographical book--which is bizarre, but it's a very autobiographical book. The main character, Viktor Shtrum, is a physicist, a world-class physicist. And, Grossman himself was a chemist--not a world-class chemist as far as I know--but he identified with Shtrum's marital problems, his problems of keeping faith with his conscience. And, in that sense, I think he's overwhelmingly certainly on the side of the Russians; but I don't think he has any romance about Communism. Tyler Cowen: 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's some degree of negotiability built into the system. So if you look, say, when the Nazi commander Liss is interrogating Mostovskoy, Liss just keeps on asking questions. There's no dialogue. Nothing can happen. There's no real questions. There are no real answers. And, Mostovskoy 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 Katzenelenbogen is interrogating Krymov, a scene which goes on for quite a while, they talk back and forth. It's weird, it's sick, it's twisted. There's torture involved. But, actually, Krymov comes away from that scene alive. He at least learns something. And also, you have figures, one of them is Viktor, another is Novikov, the tank commander. Maybe they're imperfect, but they're not just all bad by any means-- Russ Roberts: Oh, for sure-- Tyler Cowen: They're virtuous in significant ways. And, fascism in this novel cannot create that. Even the non-believers in fascism--what's the fellow's name? Russ Roberts: Ikonnikov? Tyler Cowen: No, no, no. He's a German. Do I have this in my notes? [It's Lieutenant Peter Bach, per Cowen's remark at time mark 18:15 in this episode--Econlib Ed.] He doesn't really believe in Nazism, but he ends up going around raping Russian women. And, that's the fascist version of someone who is not a believer. It's not nearly as good as the Soviet version. So, I think 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 Viktor is saved by this weird intervention from Stalin, which makes no sense. But, there's some outcome possible other than just death and destruction.
14:07	Russ Roberts: Yeah. I want to come back to the torture theme, the scenes in the Lubyanka with Krymov. I've read a lot of Solzhenitsyn. I've read all the Gulag. I've read many of his novels. I've read about a lot of scenes in Lubyanka. I can't say I feel like I've been there, but it's familiar to me. It's the prison where people were tormented--not merely tortured, but tortured until they confessed, often; sometimes tortured until they confessed things that weren't true, sometimes tortured until they confessed about loved ones or comrades or colleagues. It's an unbearable, 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 almost--yes, they tortured their victims and 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 confessed to wasn't true, but they did it out of love for the system. And, all the purge, the show-trials of the 1930s, which in 1937 keep coming back into this book, and the purges before that where Stalin's opponents were systematically killed. None of them were killed at night by the firing squad or with a murderer. They all confessed. And, what Grossman captures--which 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. I would make a distinction--it's a Dostoevskyan distinction--between the Church and its practitioners, right? It reminds me of the Grand Inquisitor scene. The people, 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 doctrine that inspired the believers. But, the idea of giving up that doctrine is so painful to the adherents that they confess to things they didn't do because they have to believe that as a system, the Church still stands--in this case, a secular church, the Church of Communism. Do you feel that? Tyler Cowen: 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 may not believe they're fully guilty. But if you think of Krymov, if you reread the earlier parts of the book, he does in fact whine about his colleagues. It's in such a minor way, but that looms larger and 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-- Russ Roberts: Yeah-- Tyler Cowen: And of course, the indirect reference to Dostoevsky. And how the system ex ante 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, how an army battalion operates, how chains of command to 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 is the German I was referring to in my earlier comment. Russ Roberts: Yeah. And, I should just mention, as you've already alluded to, there are many historically real characters in the book mixed in with the fictional ones, and the list of characters distinguishes those.
18:34	Russ Roberts: And, there's another parallel between the Soviet and the Nazi systems that I found just fascinating. Each side has its own hall monitors--in the middle of a war. So, you're fighting a war. It's life or death. And yet, there's a Commissar--meaning an operative of the Communist Party on the Russian side, Soviet side. And on the German side, you've got the SS [Schutzstaffel, translated as 'Protective Echelon.' Elite guard of the Nazi regime--Econlib Ed.] And, they're both looking to uncover sins of--errors and dogma errors. They're looking for heresy. Whether it's negative remarks about Stalin or Hitler or 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 Novikov, 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 it, at least in Grossman's version, was really eye-opening for me. Tyler Cowen: Yeah, absolutely. One thing I found striking in the book is just how many literary references there are. And they all seem relevant. So, one thing I did was when reading through, I tried to note what was mentioned twice. So, Tolstoy is mentioned more than once. But, there's this Chekhov short story called "The Bishop," which, it's not only mentioned twice, but we're told, '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 Chekhov story that he takes greatest care to point us to. And I think so much of the novel is about motherhood. It's Vera giving birth that is heralding the turn of the tide with the Battle of Stalingrad itself. It's when life is again possible that the Soviets start to win. Russ Roberts: That's a great insight. Viktor, 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 a Nazi death camp. It's quite powerful. It goes on for, I don't know, 10 pages or so. Tyler Cowen: One of the best parts of the book, maybe the most moving, yeah. Russ Roberts: 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 murders of Berdichev in 1941 that I mentioned earlier. This is just stunning. 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. They're in the back of a collection of Grossman's we're going to talk about in a future episode, called the Road. And, they're deeply moving. He believed--and said, I think, in the letters--that his mother would be eternal because of Life and Fate. Which makes it even more poignant that at the time of his death he didn't know that the book would survive. But he clearly--motherhood is a major theme of the book. Sophia's scene--the doctor in the death camp--is also overwhelming. And he clearly--he was fascinated by maternal love. Tyler Cowen: 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 Chekhov 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 in these people, in essence without names. Russ Roberts: That's beautiful. I didn't have any thoughts on that other than that I was expecting something more dramatic. I like how you've made that different. I wondered whether he had had a chance to really edit the final version before it was confiscated. But, I like your ending better. Tyler Cowen: I think it's deliberately not dramatic. It's as far from drama as you can get, in a way. Russ Roberts: Yeah. It's nice. Tyler Cowen: Stendhal is also mentioned several times, A Charter House of Parma, which is a book about war and individual fate. And, I strongly suspect all of the literary references have some meaning to Grossman. So, there's Dante and Swift and Homer and Huck Finn, 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. Russ Roberts: Yeah. Yeah, it's really a nice way to put it. There's no clean narrative thread, and it captures the chaos of war that way. There are characters who move away, come back; they're often homeless. They're thrown out of their own houses, they're forced to take in a border who is richer than they are, more connected than they are, and they're pushed into a smaller room in the back. They leave their family and yearn to come back. So, there is this constant theme of journey and home. And, everyone in the book is unsettled, not just by the war. Their own emotional journey is troubled. Viktor's marriage, as Grossman's marriage was, is deeply complicated. There's a lot of betrayal in the book as well. And, at the same time, there's a lot of kindness.
25:09	Russ Roberts: And, I'll just mention this, because you say it may be the most powerful passages of the book. There's so many. One of my favorite passages--I'm not going to read it, I don't want to spoil it--but it's about an act of senseless kindness. An act of kindness that a Russian woman does for a German soldier that she actually says out loud to her friends--she says she can't explain it. And, this idea of senseless kindness standing in the universe up against evil--he says it explicitly. Let me see if I can find this passage. Hang on. Here it is. He says, The private kindness of one individual towards another; a petty, thoughtless kindness, an unwitnessed kindness. Something we could 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. That's another theme of the book. And, even when we might weight evil in its magnitude dwarfing these small acts, he takes them and he elevates them. He makes them shine for us so that in his view, they're the whole thing. Tyler Cowen: Tanner Greer said on Twitter, he thinks kindness is the central theme of the novel. Russ Roberts: Who said that? Tyler Cowen: Tanner Greer. I don't know if you know him or not. There's also a part on page 283 where Grossman gives what I think is just his intellectual, ideological solution to the whole mess. And of course, he cites Chekhov. So, let me just read a short part here. Chekhov 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 Tolstoy is also an intolerant fanatic. But Chekhov says, "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...." Russ Roberts: Yeah. Tyler Cowen: And, that I think is his bottom line. And that, too, comes from Chekhov. And, then he cites Chekhov's book about prison camp, "Sakhalin Island," which is also a fantastic story. Russ Roberts: Yeah. What other themes did you want to mention that we haven't talked about? Tyler Cowen: It's the notion of what 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 gets reset, and then something else happens and something else happens. And, he is 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.
28:59	Russ Roberts: Well, it's funny. 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. I did not find it a dark read. Let me expand on that a little bit, and 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, he talks about it explicitly in a few places. He talks about the desire to live even when you think it's, quote, "hopeless." He talks about how people do things that are not going to have an impact for months and maybe years, even though they think they're about to die; but they do them anyway. The human circus or whatever you want to call it--parade--goes on. But, it's weird to say this: I didn't find it a particularly dark book. I was not depressed or down. I found it a nice example of what I talked about with Susan Cain: I found it a very bittersweet book because there's a lot of life in it. Do you agree with that? Tyler Cowen: I don't find many things depressing. It is tough to read; and I think most ordinary readers, if you just polled 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. Russ Roberts: Yeah. Tyler Cowen: 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 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 Pasternak or Prokofiev or Shostakovich or Grossman. Those are not the people he killed. Babel was killed. But, the geniuses 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. Russ Roberts: It's really interesting. Obviously, he was ruthless with respect to his political rivals, including people who-- Tyler Cowen: It's[?] just kulaks, right? He killed-- Russ Roberts: Yeah. Oh no, his best friends. Tyler Cowen: Many millions of kulaks. Russ Roberts: Yeah. No, I'm talking about his colleagues from the early days of the Revolution. He brutally killed them, and as I said earlier, he killed them after having them confess first, which I don't know if that was gilding the lily or not for him--whether that added to the delight that he found in that. But, I don't know if he protected his geniuses. He certainly didn't generally let them thrive. He forced them to conform to his own movement standards. Tyler Cowen: There's a page--we mentioned it when we agreed to do this: it's page 217--on artificial intelligence [AI]. Russ Roberts: Yeah, it is. Tyler Cowen: What did you make of that? Russ Roberts: Oh, I loved it. I don't agree with every word of it, but it's so--I don't know if it's prescience, the right word, but it was eerie. It was one of the two most intellectually interesting things in the book for me--as opposed to literary emotional power. We'll come back to the second in a second. Do you want to read that passage? It's a great passage. It's the whole chapter. It's only a couple paragraphs. Tyler Cowen: 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 its 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. Russ Roberts: Yeah. Tyler Cowen: There was of course throughout the 1960s, a Soviet obsession with artificial intelligence. 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 was that book about the science city in Siberia 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 was swept up in that mania. But, I think what he says on this page is true, except for the memory being faultless. We know that's not true. There are still hallucinations. Russ Roberts: Yeah. Well, today. We'll get there, maybe. Tyler Cowen: Yeah. Russ Roberts: And, he wrote that in probably late 1950s--sometime in the 1950s. Which, you talk about the Soviet interest in AI. There wasn't much 'I' in AI in those early days, but he was fascinated clearly. But, that page doesn't really change much of the book, if at all. He just threw that in there because he was interested in it. But, it gets at-- Tyler Cowen: Well, it's not thrown in there. It's there for a reason-- Russ Roberts: Yeah. Tell me-- Tyler Cowen: Let's talk about that reason-- Russ Roberts: Tell me. Tyler Cowen: Well, the very last sentence on that page, which is its own paragraph, quote, "Fascism annihilated tens of millions of people." So, before that, he's mentioning that the AI machine will be so large--he didn't know Moore's Law--that it might take up the entire surface of the earth. And, 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 section. Russ Roberts: No, I think that's fair. I think that's fair. Tyler Cowen: So, he's saying fascism doesn't go away. It comes back in many forms. There are always forces that can 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 Eliezer [?Eliezer Yudkowsky?]. Russ Roberts: Or, a worrier about technology. I think his worries about the analogy he's making there between Fascism and technology, that they enslave us--I don't think enslave us the way our phones enslave us--but they have the potential to be a system. I think of the "man of system"--the Adam Smith quote from The Theory of Moral Sentiments--this idea that if you have a view of the world that you want to impose on the chessboard of the human experience, you're going to do some bad things. And, I take it to be in that spirit. Tyler Cowen: Note also that the middle paragraph where he's 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. Russ Roberts: Yeah, just like I am a little bit. And, yeah, fair enough. I didn't mean to suggest it didn't belong at all. It's just a wonderful little interlude. And, I think I was overwhelmed by the fact that it seems like most of it could have been written yesterday.
37:04	Russ Roberts: The other part that I just was fascinated by was his comparison of Fascism to quantum mechanics and the cutting edge of physics. What were your thoughts on that analogy? And, forgetting this particular example--I want your thoughts on that--but this idea 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 all kinds of ways. That's a very provocative idea. Tyler Cowen: I think it's the same theme. So, I read him as basically a humanist like Chekhov, fairly skeptical about science. So, Viktor, yes, you could say is the hero or certainly center of the novel. But, what ends up happening is Viktor--this is not too much of a spoiler because we know what did happen--ends up helping Stalin build nuclear weapons. And, he can't be too thrilled by that. 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 Viktor 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, there's more betrayal 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.
38:48	Russ Roberts: Viktor'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 the characters are--they're in a Gulag, but it's a privileged Gulag because they're doing research that benefits the State, which puts them, as the prisoners, in a very unpleasant ethical situation, which is really the essence of that book. In this case, another thing that Grossman captures, I thought, with such accuracy and lets you feel it, is the exhilaration of scientific discovery. Viktor makes a discovery. The exact nature of it isn't described, but he's clearly on the cutting edge. 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 an incredible part of the human experience. He's so alive after that. And his mood so oscillates with his ability to do that or not do it depending on whether he's in a favored status with respect to the regime. And, so I think that's just so much more part of his psychological trials and tribulations: the ability to have that freedom or lose it clashing with the pressure the regime puts him under to serve its own purposes. That to me is an enormous part of his character's dilemma. Tyler Cowen: I think Grossman is 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 at 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 was 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 Viktor, 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--I don't think--'heartwarming' isn't the word, but a bit less inspirational than one could otherwise make it out to be. Russ Roberts: Fair enough. Tyler Cowen: We can't get rid of science, and Grossman himself is never quite reassured about science. And, that one page about AI is put in there to tell us that. Russ Roberts: That's nice. No, I agree with that. It's very nice, Tyler. He's got an essay, "In the Road," which we may talk about in a future episode, where he looks at a painting of Raphael's called the Sistine Madonna. And, in the Sistine 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. There's a lot more to say about that. But, in that essay, Grossman talks explicitly about the hydrogen bomb--this essay was written in 1955--and he clearly, which is about the time I think he was writing some of this book. So, you're a hundred percent right that the potential for human beings to be extinct and destroy themselves is very much in his consciousness. Tyler Cowen: One thing I've been thinking about is the question: to what extent is this a 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. So, 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. Russ Roberts: 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--Stalin--accused Jewish doctors of trying to kill him. And there was--so, there's a strong anti-Semitic thread in Soviet and in Russian life. It's not a Jewish novel, 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, with a Russian culture. So in that sense--and in a certain sense, I think it's the ultimate Russian novel. It's polyphonic; it's about life and fate. So, there's really few things more Russian than that. And yet, at the same time 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 espoused. And, it's painful for some of the characters. They try to hide their Jewishness at times. And, of course, we have the Shoah, the Holocaust, going on at the same time. Which, an editor would probably, might've said to him, 'you know, the book has got a lot in it already. Do you need to put that in?' But, he did. He did need to put that in. And so, that's a good question, Tyler. Tyler Cowen: It strikes me as more Jewish than you're making it out to be. Russ Roberts: Why? Tyler Cowen: Not in the religious sense-- Russ Roberts: No-- Tyler Cowen: 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. Russ Roberts: Oh, for sure. Tyler Cowen: He must have been brought up learning it. 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. And that she so much relates to this, it tells me something. Because she's uneasy with a lot of what you might call purely Russian fiction--including Tolstoy, very uneasy with Tolstoy. It's only one data point that we're thinking about. Russ Roberts: Yeah, that's interesting. I was going to say, when you talked about the twists and turns, that makes it more of a Yiddish novel. Tyler Cowen: Well that, of course, it was the Pale[?hell?] of Settlement. Russ Roberts: Yeah. It wasn't written in Yiddish, but there's a certain--I'll say it a different way to take it a little more seriously. There's a certain fatalism in Jewish fate, a feeling that we are endlessly the punching bags of the rest of the world, and that is our fate. Obviously, we're living in a moment that's--where the world's a little different, with the current situation in Israel. But I think the characters in Life and Fate obviously do feel that they are beleaguered. And, there's a certain Yiddish flavor to that that I can't explain. Tyler Cowen: But also, consider the Book of Job. 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 Viktor, in fact? Not entirely clear, even though he's the center--mostly a sympathetic character. Who really is doing right under the eyes of God is highly unclear, I think, in Life and Fate. Russ Roberts: Oh, I agree.
47:20	Russ Roberts: But it's just--we shouldn't 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 indirectly, implicitly. But, what it means to be a human being and to live a life that is defensible--whether it's to God or to your friends or to whomever--is a central part of this book. And, Grossman himself--again, no spoilers here--but look up Grossman's entries in Wikipedia articles that were written about him, that had been written about him. There's a nice article in 2006 in The New Yorker by Keith Gessen. Grossman himself did some things he was deeply ashamed of. He was ashamed, I think as far as we know, that he didn't get his mother out of Berdichev, and that she'd perished there at the hands of the Nazis in 1941. He does sign some things publicly that benefit the regime that I think he regrets. And Viktor goes through very similar throes of conscience. Tyler Cowen: Let me talk a bit about how I read this book. Russ Roberts: Yeah. Tyler Cowen: Which was extremely absorbing, highly worthwhile, but it was tough. One thing I did that helped more than anything else was an extensive use of large language models [LLM], in particular the 01 version of GPT [Generative Pre-trained Transformer]. 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 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 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. Check your other sources.' I don't know why, but other than that, it was flawless and highly useful. Russ Roberts: Well, she doesn't get a lot of airtime and she hasn't written about a lot, so it might have had trouble finding any kind of references to her. As you point out, she plays a very powerful symbolic role, but she doesn't take up a lot of pages. I'll just mention--I mentioned the essay a minute ago--the Sistine Madonna; I asked ChatGPT what it was about. And it totally got it wrong. It said it was about beauty and art. That is not what it is about at all. 'Claude' got it right exactly, which is just maybe neither here nor there other than it's good to have sometimes two LLMs [large language models] to ask questions of. I found my reading of 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 Karamazov, I read it over a fairly long period of time. But the last 300 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. As I said, you might get discouraged. But, I found myself more, if I may say so, engrossed in it, engrossed in a Grossman novel. There's no--there's almost no, very little narrative suspense. We know how the Battle of Stalingrad turns out: the tide turns. And, I found it interesting that Novikov, I think is part of the lead tank group going into Ukraine. And, he's very excited to reclaim Ukraine for the Soviets and take it back from the Germans. It was a slightly eerie shadow of the current moment. But, I just kept going. 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 show notes. I don't have it. But, when I said, 'We're reading this book. You should get started. It's going to air soon.' He wrote back, he said, 'I'm on page 12, and all the characters are named Stroganov. I need more time.' The names are Tyler Cowen: Who is the other? Yeah. Russ Roberts: Yeah. The names are hard. The names are hard. Tyler Cowen: 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 200 or 300 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 had paid more attention or had 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.
52:57	Russ Roberts: So, I read this version. I'm holding this up for YouTubers. Tyler Cowen: Yeah, me too, same. Russ Roberts: Same print, same publisher. It's New York Review Books Press, who issued a lot of Grossman. It's about 872 pages. We haven't actually mentioned that. It's really long. And, I should also mention there's a prequel, 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 Fate people say it's about Stalingrad. But, he wrote a book called Stalingrad, in English anyway, that's also about 900 pages. I may read that next. It's funny. When I finished the book, I had the exact same urge; and I'm not a re-reader the way you are Tyler. I thought, 'I want to read this again, and I want to do justice to it.' 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, this collection of shorter pieces that he wrote, 'in preparation for our conversation.' But, I wanted to read it again. I will. I hope I will read it again. Tyler Cowen: The great, great novels from the 1920s--there's Thomas Mann, there's Proust, there's James Joyce from around that time--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 claim to be the best novel of a very, very important century. Russ Roberts: Yeah. Tyler Cowen: 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 this podcast with Russ, would I keep on going?' Just was never a question. So, in that sense, it was a page-turner for me. Russ Roberts: I want to make sure I say this, Tyler: I'm very grateful you agreed to do this because--I think the quote is from William F. Buckley. 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. I feel it would have been a loss for me not to have finished it. 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 profusely--and then 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 re-highlight those in the Kindle version because they were so good. It's a compulsion I have. It doesn't really make sense. But, I'm glad I read it both ways. They were both helpful. Tyler Cowen: Did you ever get in touch with Robert Chandler, the translator? Russ Roberts: I did. He's scheduled. Tyler Cowen: And, what did you learn? Russ Roberts: He's scheduled to appear on this program shortly. 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 the art of translation. And, obviously, we'll talk a little bit about Life and Fate in passing. But, I'll put an ad in for The Road. The Road has short stories of Grossman. It has his remarkable essay on Treblinka. It's about a 40, 50 page essay on entering Treblinka. He was the first journalist to enter a death camp. And, it is-- Tyler Cowen: That's a must read for anyone. Russ Roberts: It's an incredible, incredible essay. But, the short stories are really lovely. The short story "The Road" is a short story from the perspective of a donkey. And it's interesting--Tolstoy 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 some way, this idea that this dumb--meaning mute--creature, that its observations of the human being might be more accurate than our own and give us insight is a beautiful idea. And, it's also peppered with lovely pieces from Chandler with biographical detail. So, I can't imagine what it's like to--I'll ask him--but to translate a book of this size, which of course Russian translators are doing this all day long. Constance Garnett and others are translating very large books from a very different language. It 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 interested. Tyler Cowen: 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 to her friends all the time; everyone laughs. I get an English translation: it's not funny. I suspect the joke in fact was funny. The Russian jokes don't translate well. That's what I want you to ask him. Russ Roberts: Will do. Tyler Cowen: But, another thought I had, and 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 Tolstoy--Dostoevsky, Scriabin, it's fanatical. Of different sorts. Obviously, Bolsheviks were fanatical. And, this novel is extremely anti-fanatical. It's like Montaigne in France, right? It's like Chekhov 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. Russ Roberts: I feel a certain fanaticism about certainly Solzhenitsyn, certainly about Dostoevsky. I can think of a few things that are fanatical about Tolstoy. What comes to mind? Tyler Cowen: Well, his views on everything were extreme. Russ Roberts: It's true. Tyler Cowen: Beethoven, Shakespeare, religion, property. It's hard to think of a more fanatical human being. Russ Roberts: Sex, God, marriage. Yeah, it's true. Tyler Cowen: Sure. That's true. He'd make a great podcast guest, but where would you even start? Dostoevsky, clearly a fanatic. From the biography, from his works, if you read Armenian Sketchbook, which is 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 Chekhov. And, when you're from the smaller part of the empire, you're probably going to be less fanatical. It's a bit like Americans and Canadians perhaps. And that to me really shone through in Life and Fate, the anti-fanaticism.
1:00:19	Russ Roberts: Let me ask you a personal question. Tyler Cowen: Yeah. Russ Roberts: I really like that, by the way. And, it's a certain detachment, is the way I would describe it. His anti-fanaticism takes the form of a detachment of the observer who hovers over his characters and describes them calmly without overdoing it. I'm less fanatical than when I was younger. Would that be true of you? Tyler Cowen: Of course. It's true for almost everyone. Russ Roberts: Is it? Tyler Cowen: 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? Russ Roberts: What do you mean, 'right?' Expand. Tyler Cowen: Well, we each know some people who just went crazy, often in non-libertarian directions. Some of them become, oddly enough, fans of Putin while we're on the Russian topic. Or they just stop believing in scientific argument and discourse. But, the saner thing to do--and you see this with many people from the Progressive Left as well--is just to become more moderate, more uncertain, to have better epistemic practices, and take a broader swathe of history more seriously. And, I think Grossman 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 for the Russian and 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. Russ Roberts: So, I have a couple of fanaticisms. I've got my libertarian flavor and my religious observance, and they've both become tempered in some dimension as I've gotten older. I don't think it's to avoid insanity, by the way. I'm curious-- Tyler Cowen: It wasn't why you did it, but if you hadn't done it-- Russ Roberts: Yeah, maybe. But, I'm curious-- Tyler Cowen: The people who don't do it can just get worse. Right? Russ Roberts: I'm curious why you think that is. Why do you think people--because I don't think it's true, by the way. You did suggest it might not be. It's not obvious to me that people get less fanatic as they get older. In fact, 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. I think I've been spared that. But why do you think that happens? Tyler Cowen: I think I should have said it's a bimodal distribution: that you go one way or another. Look at it this way. In the simplest Bayesian 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 define belief as a random walk. So, 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 being more dogmatic or less moderate. But, again, that's not what we see from the moderates, either. Russ Roberts: I wonder how much of it is the fact that it's really convenient to have a system, right? It gives you something to shove into the box. You've got this black box that you take the world's events, 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. I think a lot of people love the box. It's a great source of comfort, whether it's religion or ideology or other things. And, maybe there's just something peculiar about me. When you're younger, certainty is deeply comforting because the world is a bit too complicated to deal with. It still is, but I'm just less certain. Tyler Cowen: There's also a more charitable interpretation of what you're describing. So, think of yourself as working through problems. Which is fine, right? 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 Bayesian 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's structures to how you work through things. And, they are going to apply certain trends that go on for periods of time.
1:05:54	Russ Roberts: Do you want to say anything else about this book, about it as a--will it persist with you? Will you think about--I mean, I found a number of the stories and vignettes I think will stick with me for a long, long time. I haven't talked about--many, many of them that I loved, I did not talk about. Listener, you will have to read them for yourself and make your own list. But, this book will haunt me. And, part of it is because I am reading it recently. I am not haunted by a lot of the books I read when I was younger because I've forgotten most of the haunting parts and I read this recently. But, it's quite an achievement in that way. I think it will last with me. Do you want to add anything else? Tyler Cowen: 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, there's no higher endorsement I can give to a novel than that. Russ Roberts: I guess. Today has been Tyler Cowen. Tyler, thanks for being part of EconTalk. Tyler Cowen: 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. Russ Roberts: Ditto.

Time

Podcast Episode Highlights

0:37

Intro. [Recording date: November 4, 2024.]

Russ Roberts: 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 EconTalk. He was last here in November of 2023, discussing who is the greatest economist of all time.

Our topic for today is Vasily 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 a 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.

This episode is also available on Tyler's podcast, Conversations with Tyler.

Tyler, welcome back to EconTalk.

Tyler Cowen: Thank you, Russ.

Is it a spoiler to tell them who won the war and the Battle of Stalingrad?

Russ Roberts: I was thinking of that. I think we can reveal that.

Tyler Cowen: Okay, that's fine. Let's start then. You have some introduction.

1:37

Russ Roberts: Well, I wanted to just say a little bit about Grossman and the book very briefly. Vasily Grossman was born in 1905 in Berdichev. Berdichev at the time was part of the Russian Empire. It eventually, in 1922, after the Revolution became part of the Soviet Union. He rose to some fame as a war correspondent. He covered the Battle of Stalingrad. People, when they talk about this book, Life and Fate say it's about the Battle of Stalingrad. No, it's not. It takes place around the time of the Battle of Stalingrad. There is some war in the book, but that is, I think, a very misleading summary of what the book is about.

So, he wrote the book after World War II. The book was arrested by the KGB [Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti/Committee for State Security] 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. 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 with friends. Eventually, the book was smuggled out in 1980 and published Switzerland, published in the Soviet Union in 1988. Grossman died in 1964 unaware that his book had survived.

And, just one other biographical note which is relevant because of the nature of the book: his mother was killed in 1941 when the Nazis overran Berdichev. Berdichev was a town of about a little over 50,000 people. About 40,000 were Jews. It had had 80 synagogues. And, his mother died in that Soviet--in the murders there. And, his mother is an important part of this book in a fictionalized role, and we'll talk about that.

Tyler, give us your short initial assessment of this book.

Tyler Cowen: Amongst Soviet authors, he is the GOAT [Greatest of All Time], one could say--if you 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, 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 Tolstoy's War and Peace, 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 [Union of Soviet Socialist Republics]. There's a central family in both stories.

The notion of what is fate or destiny is highly important to Tolstoy 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, 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 Tolstoy's War and Peace, which is sometimes called the greatest novel ever. So, that is a pretty amazing achievement.

5:27

Russ Roberts: Yeah; I think I mentioned on the air in an earlier episode: when I was reading it, I enjoyed the first a hundred pages. After 200, it got a little better. Somewhere around 300 or 400, I couldn't put it down. There are so many passages that move you to tears or to an incredible emotional reaction.

It's not a traditional novel akin to War and Peace or akin to other Russian novels such as The Brothers Karamazov, or In the First Circle, which we talked about here on the program previously. It is what our guest talking about In the First Circle, Kevin McKenna, called polyphonic. Here's how he described it. He said,

Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn are so similar. Dostoevsky 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 as everything that happens in the novel, the polyphonic structure of a Dostoevsky or a Solzhenitsyn is that there is not a main, central character. There is a cast--and by cast, I would say perhaps 5 to 8 central characters, as well as perhaps 3 to 4 central major themes. And so, everything [is] kind of a fugue of characters. A fugue of plot....

End of quote.

In the case of Grossman and Life and Fate, I would say there are eight to 10 main characters. There's about a hundred characters overall, and that can be discouraging when you start the book. But, if you keep reading, you'll realize that only the eight to 10 who are the main ones are going to reappear over and over again--and often dozens or hundreds of pages apart when they reappear.

But, as you point out, Tyler, there are so many interesting intellectual and emotional themes of the book. It really spans an enormous part of the human experience. And, in that sense, you could argue it's the greatest novel of the 20th century; and for me, one of the greatest novels of all time--certainly one of the greatest I've ever read.

Tyler Cowen: I think another influence--and Grossman himself cites him repeatedly--is Chekhov. So, the chapters in Grossman often are mirroring Chekhov short stories, but they're woven together in a way that Chekhov short stories are not. 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.

Russ Roberts: Yeah. The Chekhov part is there are just so many numerous vignettes--unforgettable vignettes--of characters struggling with betrayal, struggling with the State bearing down on them, whether it's the Nazis or the Communists.

8:23

Russ Roberts: One of the themes you didn't mention that reverberates throughout the book is the parallels between the Nazis and the Communists. They're both, in many ways, fascist authoritarian states. But, what he's really interested in is how they grind the individual down and how the individual stands athwart that grinding--stands and says, 'Stop. No. I'm a human being.' I found that, when I thought about the title--you know, you'd think: 'Well, why isn't it called Life and Death?' Or, 'Freedom and Fate?' And for Grossman, life is really about freedom. So, in a certain sense, the title Life and Fate for me is very much--not the only--but one of the central themes of the book, which is how human beings caught in the throes and the gears of the State manage to maintain their freedom and their essential humanity despite that brutal reality.

Tyler Cowen: 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.

Russ Roberts: Yeah. I'm not sure I disagree with that. I wasn't suggesting that they were equivalent: it's just that they have certain powerful equivalencies that the characters in the book find repellent. The idea to the Communists that they have a brother in the Nazis, the idea that to the Nazis they have a brother in the Communists is extremely disturbing. And, so, Grossman forces a number of his characters to confront those similarities.

But, I agree, it's a very patriotic book. It's a very Russian book. There's a lot of talk in his biography and people who write about him how much he was pro-regime, how much his antagonism to the regime and the Soviet regime changed, how it grew over time, and like his characters. And, it's a very autobiographical book--which is bizarre, but it's a very autobiographical book. The main character, Viktor Shtrum, is a physicist, a world-class physicist. And, Grossman himself was a chemist--not a world-class chemist as far as I know--but he identified with Shtrum's marital problems, his problems of keeping faith with his conscience. And, in that sense, I think he's overwhelmingly certainly on the side of the Russians; but I don't think he has any romance about Communism.

Tyler Cowen: 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's some degree of negotiability built into the system.

So if you look, say, when the Nazi commander Liss is interrogating Mostovskoy, Liss just keeps on asking questions. There's no dialogue. Nothing can happen. There's no real questions. There are no real answers. And, Mostovskoy 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 Katzenelenbogen is interrogating Krymov, a scene which goes on for quite a while, they talk back and forth. It's weird, it's sick, it's twisted. There's torture involved. But, actually, Krymov comes away from that scene alive. He at least learns something.

And also, you have figures, one of them is Viktor, another is Novikov, the tank commander. Maybe they're imperfect, but they're not just all bad by any means--

Russ Roberts: Oh, for sure--

Tyler Cowen: They're virtuous in significant ways. And, fascism in this novel cannot create that. Even the non-believers in fascism--what's the fellow's name?

Russ Roberts: Ikonnikov?

Tyler Cowen: No, no, no. He's a German. Do I have this in my notes? [It's Lieutenant Peter Bach, per Cowen's remark at time mark 18:15 in this episode--Econlib Ed.] He doesn't really believe in Nazism, but he ends up going around raping Russian women. And, that's the fascist version of someone who is not a believer. It's not nearly as good as the Soviet version.

So, I think 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 Viktor is saved by this weird intervention from Stalin, which makes no sense. But, there's some outcome possible other than just death and destruction.

14:07

Russ Roberts: Yeah. I want to come back to the torture theme, the scenes in the Lubyanka with Krymov. I've read a lot of Solzhenitsyn. I've read all the Gulag. I've read many of his novels. I've read about a lot of scenes in Lubyanka. I can't say I feel like I've been there, but it's familiar to me. It's the prison where people were tormented--not merely tortured, but tortured until they confessed, often; sometimes tortured until they confessed things that weren't true, sometimes tortured until they confessed about loved ones or comrades or colleagues. It's an unbearable, 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 almost--yes, they tortured their victims and 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 confessed to wasn't true, but they did it out of love for the system. And, all the purge, the show-trials of the 1930s, which in 1937 keep coming back into this book, and the purges before that where Stalin's opponents were systematically killed. None of them were killed at night by the firing squad or with a murderer. They all confessed.

And, what Grossman captures--which 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.

I would make a distinction--it's a Dostoevskyan distinction--between the Church and its practitioners, right? It reminds me of the Grand Inquisitor scene. The people, 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 doctrine that inspired the believers. But, the idea of giving up that doctrine is so painful to the adherents that they confess to things they didn't do because they have to believe that as a system, the Church still stands--in this case, a secular church, the Church of Communism. Do you feel that?

Tyler Cowen: 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 may not believe they're fully guilty. But if you think of Krymov, if you reread the earlier parts of the book, he does in fact whine about his colleagues. It's in such a minor way, but that looms larger and 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--

Russ Roberts: Yeah--

Tyler Cowen: And of course, the indirect reference to Dostoevsky. And how the system ex ante 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, how an army battalion operates, how chains of command to 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 is the German I was referring to in my earlier comment.

Russ Roberts: Yeah.

And, I should just mention, as you've already alluded to, there are many historically real characters in the book mixed in with the fictional ones, and the list of characters distinguishes those.

18:34

Russ Roberts: And, there's another parallel between the Soviet and the Nazi systems that I found just fascinating. Each side has its own hall monitors--in the middle of a war. So, you're fighting a war. It's life or death. And yet, there's a Commissar--meaning an operative of the Communist Party on the Russian side, Soviet side. And on the German side, you've got the SS [Schutzstaffel, translated as 'Protective Echelon.' Elite guard of the Nazi regime--Econlib Ed.] And, they're both looking to uncover sins of--errors and dogma errors. They're looking for heresy. Whether it's negative remarks about Stalin or Hitler or 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 Novikov, 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 it, at least in Grossman's version, was really eye-opening for me.

Tyler Cowen: Yeah, absolutely.

One thing I found striking in the book is just how many literary references there are. And they all seem relevant. So, one thing I did was when reading through, I tried to note what was mentioned twice. So, Tolstoy is mentioned more than once. But, there's this Chekhov short story called "The Bishop," which, it's not only mentioned twice, but we're told, '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 Chekhov story that he takes greatest care to point us to. And I think so much of the novel is about motherhood. It's Vera giving birth that is heralding the turn of the tide with the Battle of Stalingrad itself. It's when life is again possible that the Soviets start to win.

Russ Roberts: That's a great insight. Viktor, 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 a Nazi death camp. It's quite powerful. It goes on for, I don't know, 10 pages or so.

Tyler Cowen: One of the best parts of the book, maybe the most moving, yeah.

Russ Roberts: 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 murders of Berdichev in 1941 that I mentioned earlier. This is just stunning. 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. They're in the back of a collection of Grossman's we're going to talk about in a future episode, called the Road. And, they're deeply moving. He believed--and said, I think, in the letters--that his mother would be eternal because of Life and Fate. Which makes it even more poignant that at the time of his death he didn't know that the book would survive.

But he clearly--motherhood is a major theme of the book. Sophia's scene--the doctor in the death camp--is also overwhelming. And he clearly--he was fascinated by maternal love.

Tyler Cowen: 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 Chekhov 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 in these people, in essence without names.

Russ Roberts: That's beautiful. I didn't have any thoughts on that other than that I was expecting something more dramatic. I like how you've made that different. I wondered whether he had had a chance to really edit the final version before it was confiscated. But, I like your ending better.

Tyler Cowen: I think it's deliberately not dramatic. It's as far from drama as you can get, in a way.

Russ Roberts: Yeah. It's nice.

Tyler Cowen: Stendhal is also mentioned several times, A Charter House of Parma, which is a book about war and individual fate. And, I strongly suspect all of the literary references have some meaning to Grossman.

So, there's Dante and Swift and Homer and Huck Finn, 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.

Russ Roberts: Yeah. Yeah, it's really a nice way to put it. There's no clean narrative thread, and it captures the chaos of war that way. There are characters who move away, come back; they're often homeless. They're thrown out of their own houses, they're forced to take in a border who is richer than they are, more connected than they are, and they're pushed into a smaller room in the back. They leave their family and yearn to come back. So, there is this constant theme of journey and home. And, everyone in the book is unsettled, not just by the war. Their own emotional journey is troubled. Viktor's marriage, as Grossman's marriage was, is deeply complicated. There's a lot of betrayal in the book as well. And, at the same time, there's a lot of kindness.

25:09

Russ Roberts: And, I'll just mention this, because you say it may be the most powerful passages of the book. There's so many. One of my favorite passages--I'm not going to read it, I don't want to spoil it--but it's about an act of senseless kindness. An act of kindness that a Russian woman does for a German soldier that she actually says out loud to her friends--she says she can't explain it.

And, this idea of senseless kindness standing in the universe up against evil--he says it explicitly. Let me see if I can find this passage. Hang on. Here it is. He says,

The private kindness of one individual towards another; a petty, thoughtless kindness, an unwitnessed kindness. Something we could 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.

That's another theme of the book. And, even when we might weight evil in its magnitude dwarfing these small acts, he takes them and he elevates them. He makes them shine for us so that in his view, they're the whole thing.

Tyler Cowen: Tanner Greer said on Twitter, he thinks kindness is the central theme of the novel.

Russ Roberts: Who said that?

Tyler Cowen: Tanner Greer. I don't know if you know him or not.

There's also a part on page 283 where Grossman gives what I think is just his intellectual, ideological solution to the whole mess. And of course, he cites Chekhov. So, let me just read a short part here.

Chekhov 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 Tolstoy is also an intolerant fanatic. But Chekhov says, "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...."

Russ Roberts: Yeah.

Tyler Cowen: And, that I think is his bottom line. And that, too, comes from Chekhov.

And, then he cites Chekhov's book about prison camp, "Sakhalin Island," which is also a fantastic story.

Russ Roberts: Yeah. What other themes did you want to mention that we haven't talked about?

Tyler Cowen: It's the notion of what 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 gets reset, and then something else happens and something else happens. And, he is 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.

28:59

Russ Roberts: Well, it's funny. 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. I did not find it a dark read. Let me expand on that a little bit, and 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, he talks about it explicitly in a few places. He talks about the desire to live even when you think it's, quote, "hopeless." He talks about how people do things that are not going to have an impact for months and maybe years, even though they think they're about to die; but they do them anyway. The human circus or whatever you want to call it--parade--goes on.

But, it's weird to say this: I didn't find it a particularly dark book. I was not depressed or down. I found it a nice example of what I talked about with Susan Cain: I found it a very bittersweet book because there's a lot of life in it. Do you agree with that?

Tyler Cowen: I don't find many things depressing. It is tough to read; and I think most ordinary readers, if you just polled 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.

Russ Roberts: Yeah.

Tyler Cowen: 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 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 Pasternak or Prokofiev or Shostakovich or Grossman. Those are not the people he killed. Babel was killed. But, the geniuses 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.

Russ Roberts: It's really interesting. Obviously, he was ruthless with respect to his political rivals, including people who--

Tyler Cowen: It's[?] just kulaks, right? He killed--

Russ Roberts: Yeah. Oh no, his best friends.

Tyler Cowen: Many millions of kulaks.

Russ Roberts: Yeah. No, I'm talking about his colleagues from the early days of the Revolution. He brutally killed them, and as I said earlier, he killed them after having them confess first, which I don't know if that was gilding the lily or not for him--whether that added to the delight that he found in that.

But, I don't know if he protected his geniuses. He certainly didn't generally let them thrive. He forced them to conform to his own movement standards.

Tyler Cowen: There's a page--we mentioned it when we agreed to do this: it's page 217--on artificial intelligence [AI].

Russ Roberts: Yeah, it is.

Tyler Cowen: What did you make of that?

Russ Roberts: Oh, I loved it. I don't agree with every word of it, but it's so--I don't know if it's prescience, the right word, but it was eerie. It was one of the two most intellectually interesting things in the book for me--as opposed to literary emotional power. We'll come back to the second in a second. Do you want to read that passage? It's a great passage. It's the whole chapter. It's only a couple paragraphs.

Tyler Cowen: 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 its 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.

Russ Roberts: Yeah.

Tyler Cowen: There was of course throughout the 1960s, a Soviet obsession with artificial intelligence. 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 was that book about the science city in Siberia 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 was swept up in that mania. But, I think what he says on this page is true, except for the memory being faultless. We know that's not true. There are still hallucinations.

Russ Roberts: Yeah. Well, today. We'll get there, maybe.

Tyler Cowen: Yeah.

Russ Roberts: And, he wrote that in probably late 1950s--sometime in the 1950s. Which, you talk about the Soviet interest in AI. There wasn't much 'I' in AI in those early days, but he was fascinated clearly. But, that page doesn't really change much of the book, if at all. He just threw that in there because he was interested in it. But, it gets at--

Tyler Cowen: Well, it's not thrown in there. It's there for a reason--

Russ Roberts: Yeah. Tell me--

Tyler Cowen: Let's talk about that reason--

Russ Roberts: Tell me.

Tyler Cowen: Well, the very last sentence on that page, which is its own paragraph, quote, "Fascism annihilated tens of millions of people."

So, before that, he's mentioning that the AI machine will be so large--he didn't know Moore's Law--that it might take up the entire surface of the earth. And, 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 section.

Russ Roberts: No, I think that's fair. I think that's fair.

Tyler Cowen: So, he's saying fascism doesn't go away. It comes back in many forms. There are always forces that can 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 Eliezer [?Eliezer Yudkowsky?].

Russ Roberts: Or, a worrier about technology. I think his worries about the analogy he's making there between Fascism and technology, that they enslave us--I don't think enslave us the way our phones enslave us--but they have the potential to be a system. I think of the "man of system"--the Adam Smith quote from The Theory of Moral Sentiments--this idea that if you have a view of the world that you want to impose on the chessboard of the human experience, you're going to do some bad things. And, I take it to be in that spirit.

Tyler Cowen: Note also that the middle paragraph where he's 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.

Russ Roberts: Yeah, just like I am a little bit. And, yeah, fair enough. I didn't mean to suggest it didn't belong at all. It's just a wonderful little interlude. And, I think I was overwhelmed by the fact that it seems like most of it could have been written yesterday.

37:04

Russ Roberts: The other part that I just was fascinated by was his comparison of Fascism to quantum mechanics and the cutting edge of physics. What were your thoughts on that analogy? And, forgetting this particular example--I want your thoughts on that--but this idea 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 all kinds of ways. That's a very provocative idea.

Tyler Cowen: I think it's the same theme. So, I read him as basically a humanist like Chekhov, fairly skeptical about science. So, Viktor, yes, you could say is the hero or certainly center of the novel. But, what ends up happening is Viktor--this is not too much of a spoiler because we know what did happen--ends up helping Stalin build nuclear weapons. And, he can't be too thrilled by that. 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 Viktor 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, there's more betrayal 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.

38:48

Russ Roberts: Viktor'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 the characters are--they're in a Gulag, but it's a privileged Gulag because they're doing research that benefits the State, which puts them, as the prisoners, in a very unpleasant ethical situation, which is really the essence of that book.

In this case, another thing that Grossman captures, I thought, with such accuracy and lets you feel it, is the exhilaration of scientific discovery. Viktor makes a discovery. The exact nature of it isn't described, but he's clearly on the cutting edge. 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 an incredible part of the human experience. He's so alive after that.

And his mood so oscillates with his ability to do that or not do it depending on whether he's in a favored status with respect to the regime. And, so I think that's just so much more part of his psychological trials and tribulations: the ability to have that freedom or lose it clashing with the pressure the regime puts him under to serve its own purposes. That to me is an enormous part of his character's dilemma.

Tyler Cowen: I think Grossman is 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 at 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 was 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 Viktor, 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--I don't think--'heartwarming' isn't the word, but a bit less inspirational than one could otherwise make it out to be.

Russ Roberts: Fair enough.

Tyler Cowen: We can't get rid of science, and Grossman himself is never quite reassured about science. And, that one page about AI is put in there to tell us that.

Russ Roberts: That's nice. No, I agree with that. It's very nice, Tyler.

He's got an essay, "In the Road," which we may talk about in a future episode, where he looks at a painting of Raphael's called the Sistine Madonna. And, in the Sistine 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. There's a lot more to say about that. But, in that essay, Grossman talks explicitly about the hydrogen bomb--this essay was written in 1955--and he clearly, which is about the time I think he was writing some of this book. So, you're a hundred percent right that the potential for human beings to be extinct and destroy themselves is very much in his consciousness.

Tyler Cowen: One thing I've been thinking about is the question: to what extent is this a 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. So, 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.

Russ Roberts: 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--Stalin--accused Jewish doctors of trying to kill him. And there was--so, there's a strong anti-Semitic thread in Soviet and in Russian life. It's not a Jewish novel, 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, with a Russian culture.

So in that sense--and in a certain sense, I think it's the ultimate Russian novel. It's polyphonic; it's about life and fate. So, there's really few things more Russian than that.

And yet, at the same time 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 espoused. And, it's painful for some of the characters. They try to hide their Jewishness at times. And, of course, we have the Shoah, the Holocaust, going on at the same time. Which, an editor would probably, might've said to him, 'you know, the book has got a lot in it already. Do you need to put that in?' But, he did. He did need to put that in. And so, that's a good question, Tyler.

Tyler Cowen: It strikes me as more Jewish than you're making it out to be.

Russ Roberts: Why?

Tyler Cowen: Not in the religious sense--

Russ Roberts: No--

Tyler Cowen: 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.

Russ Roberts: Oh, for sure.

Tyler Cowen: He must have been brought up learning it.

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. And that she so much relates to this, it tells me something. Because she's uneasy with a lot of what you might call purely Russian fiction--including Tolstoy, very uneasy with Tolstoy. It's only one data point that we're thinking about.

Russ Roberts: Yeah, that's interesting. I was going to say, when you talked about the twists and turns, that makes it more of a Yiddish novel.

Tyler Cowen: Well that, of course, it was the Pale[?hell?] of Settlement.

Russ Roberts: Yeah. It wasn't written in Yiddish, but there's a certain--I'll say it a different way to take it a little more seriously. There's a certain fatalism in Jewish fate, a feeling that we are endlessly the punching bags of the rest of the world, and that is our fate. Obviously, we're living in a moment that's--where the world's a little different, with the current situation in Israel. But I think the characters in Life and Fate obviously do feel that they are beleaguered. And, there's a certain Yiddish flavor to that that I can't explain.

Tyler Cowen: But also, consider the Book of Job. 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 Viktor, in fact? Not entirely clear, even though he's the center--mostly a sympathetic character. Who really is doing right under the eyes of God is highly unclear, I think, in Life and Fate.

Russ Roberts: Oh, I agree.

47:20

Russ Roberts: But it's just--we shouldn't 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 indirectly, implicitly. But, what it means to be a human being and to live a life that is defensible--whether it's to God or to your friends or to whomever--is a central part of this book.

And, Grossman himself--again, no spoilers here--but look up Grossman's entries in Wikipedia articles that were written about him, that had been written about him. There's a nice article in 2006 in The New Yorker by Keith Gessen. Grossman himself did some things he was deeply ashamed of. He was ashamed, I think as far as we know, that he didn't get his mother out of Berdichev, and that she'd perished there at the hands of the Nazis in 1941. He does sign some things publicly that benefit the regime that I think he regrets. And Viktor goes through very similar throes of conscience.

Tyler Cowen: Let me talk a bit about how I read this book.

Russ Roberts: Yeah.

Tyler Cowen: Which was extremely absorbing, highly worthwhile, but it was tough.

One thing I did that helped more than anything else was an extensive use of large language models [LLM], in particular the 01 version of GPT [Generative Pre-trained Transformer].

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 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 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. Check your other sources.' I don't know why, but other than that, it was flawless and highly useful.

Russ Roberts: Well, she doesn't get a lot of airtime and she hasn't written about a lot, so it might have had trouble finding any kind of references to her. As you point out, she plays a very powerful symbolic role, but she doesn't take up a lot of pages.

I'll just mention--I mentioned the essay a minute ago--the Sistine Madonna; I asked ChatGPT what it was about. And it totally got it wrong. It said it was about beauty and art. That is not what it is about at all. 'Claude' got it right exactly, which is just maybe neither here nor there other than it's good to have sometimes two LLMs [large language models] to ask questions of.

I found my reading of 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 Karamazov, I read it over a fairly long period of time. But the last 300 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. As I said, you might get discouraged.

But, I found myself more, if I may say so, engrossed in it, engrossed in a Grossman novel. There's no--there's almost no, very little narrative suspense. We know how the Battle of Stalingrad turns out: the tide turns. And, I found it interesting that Novikov, I think is part of the lead tank group going into Ukraine. And, he's very excited to reclaim Ukraine for the Soviets and take it back from the Germans. It was a slightly eerie shadow of the current moment.

But, I just kept going. 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 show notes. I don't have it. But, when I said, 'We're reading this book. You should get started. It's going to air soon.' He wrote back, he said, 'I'm on page 12, and all the characters are named Stroganov. I need more time.' The names are

Tyler Cowen: Who is the other? Yeah.

Russ Roberts: Yeah. The names are hard. The names are hard.

Tyler Cowen: 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 200 or 300 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 had paid more attention or had 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.

52:57

Russ Roberts: So, I read this version. I'm holding this up for YouTubers.

Tyler Cowen: Yeah, me too, same.

Russ Roberts: Same print, same publisher. It's New York Review Books Press, who issued a lot of Grossman. It's about 872 pages. We haven't actually mentioned that. It's really long. And, I should also mention there's a prequel, 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 Fate people say it's about Stalingrad. But, he wrote a book called Stalingrad, in English anyway, that's also about 900 pages. I may read that next.

It's funny. When I finished the book, I had the exact same urge; and I'm not a re-reader the way you are Tyler. I thought, 'I want to read this again, and I want to do justice to it.' 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, this collection of shorter pieces that he wrote, 'in preparation for our conversation.' But, I wanted to read it again. I will. I hope I will read it again.

Tyler Cowen: The great, great novels from the 1920s--there's Thomas Mann, there's Proust, there's James Joyce from around that time--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 claim to be the best novel of a very, very important century.

Russ Roberts: Yeah.

Tyler Cowen: 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 this podcast with Russ, would I keep on going?' Just was never a question. So, in that sense, it was a page-turner for me.

Russ Roberts: I want to make sure I say this, Tyler: I'm very grateful you agreed to do this because--I think the quote is from William F. Buckley. 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. I feel it would have been a loss for me not to have finished it.

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 profusely--and then 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 re-highlight those in the Kindle version because they were so good. It's a compulsion I have. It doesn't really make sense. But, I'm glad I read it both ways. They were both helpful.

Tyler Cowen: Did you ever get in touch with Robert Chandler, the translator?

Russ Roberts: I did. He's scheduled.

Tyler Cowen: And, what did you learn?

Russ Roberts: He's scheduled to appear on this program shortly. 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 the art of translation. And, obviously, we'll talk a little bit about Life and Fate in passing. But, I'll put an ad in for The Road. The Road has short stories of Grossman. It has his remarkable essay on Treblinka. It's about a 40, 50 page essay on entering Treblinka. He was the first journalist to enter a death camp. And, it is--

Tyler Cowen: That's a must read for anyone.

Russ Roberts: It's an incredible, incredible essay. But, the short stories are really lovely. The short story "The Road" is a short story from the perspective of a donkey. And it's interesting--Tolstoy 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 some way, this idea that this dumb--meaning mute--creature, that its observations of the human being might be more accurate than our own and give us insight is a beautiful idea. And, it's also peppered with lovely pieces from Chandler with biographical detail.

So, I can't imagine what it's like to--I'll ask him--but to translate a book of this size, which of course Russian translators are doing this all day long. Constance Garnett and others are translating very large books from a very different language. It 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 interested.

Tyler Cowen: 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 to her friends all the time; everyone laughs. I get an English translation: it's not funny. I suspect the joke in fact was funny. The Russian jokes don't translate well. That's what I want you to ask him.

Russ Roberts: Will do.

Tyler Cowen: But, another thought I had, and 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 Tolstoy--Dostoevsky, Scriabin, it's fanatical. Of different sorts. Obviously, Bolsheviks were fanatical. And, this novel is extremely anti-fanatical. It's like Montaigne in France, right? It's like Chekhov 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.

Russ Roberts: I feel a certain fanaticism about certainly Solzhenitsyn, certainly about Dostoevsky. I can think of a few things that are fanatical about Tolstoy. What comes to mind?

Tyler Cowen: Well, his views on everything were extreme.

Russ Roberts: It's true.

Tyler Cowen: Beethoven, Shakespeare, religion, property. It's hard to think of a more fanatical human being.

Russ Roberts: Sex, God, marriage. Yeah, it's true.

Tyler Cowen: Sure. That's true. He'd make a great podcast guest, but where would you even start? Dostoevsky, clearly a fanatic.

From the biography, from his works, if you read Armenian Sketchbook, which is 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 Chekhov. And, when you're from the smaller part of the empire, you're probably going to be less fanatical. It's a bit like Americans and Canadians perhaps. And that to me really shone through in Life and Fate, the anti-fanaticism.

1:00:19

Russ Roberts: Let me ask you a personal question.

Tyler Cowen: Yeah.

Russ Roberts: I really like that, by the way. And, it's a certain detachment, is the way I would describe it. His anti-fanaticism takes the form of a detachment of the observer who hovers over his characters and describes them calmly without overdoing it.

I'm less fanatical than when I was younger. Would that be true of you?

Tyler Cowen: Of course. It's true for almost everyone.

Russ Roberts: Is it?

Tyler Cowen: 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?

Russ Roberts: What do you mean, 'right?' Expand.

Tyler Cowen: Well, we each know some people who just went crazy, often in non-libertarian directions. Some of them become, oddly enough, fans of Putin while we're on the Russian topic. Or they just stop believing in scientific argument and discourse.

But, the saner thing to do--and you see this with many people from the Progressive Left as well--is just to become more moderate, more uncertain, to have better epistemic practices, and take a broader swathe of history more seriously.

And, I think Grossman 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 for the Russian and 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.

Russ Roberts: So, I have a couple of fanaticisms. I've got my libertarian flavor and my religious observance, and they've both become tempered in some dimension as I've gotten older. I don't think it's to avoid insanity, by the way. I'm curious--

Tyler Cowen: It wasn't why you did it, but if you hadn't done it--

Russ Roberts: Yeah, maybe. But, I'm curious--

Tyler Cowen: The people who don't do it can just get worse. Right?

Russ Roberts: I'm curious why you think that is. Why do you think people--because I don't think it's true, by the way. You did suggest it might not be. It's not obvious to me that people get less fanatic as they get older. In fact, 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. I think I've been spared that. But why do you think that happens?

Tyler Cowen: I think I should have said it's a bimodal distribution: that you go one way or another.

Look at it this way. In the simplest Bayesian 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 define belief as a random walk.

So, 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 being more dogmatic or less moderate. But, again, that's not what we see from the moderates, either.

Russ Roberts: I wonder how much of it is the fact that it's really convenient to have a system, right? It gives you something to shove into the box. You've got this black box that you take the world's events, 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. I think a lot of people love the box. It's a great source of comfort, whether it's religion or ideology or other things. And, maybe there's just something peculiar about me. When you're younger, certainty is deeply comforting because the world is a bit too complicated to deal with. It still is, but I'm just less certain.

Tyler Cowen: There's also a more charitable interpretation of what you're describing. So, think of yourself as working through problems. Which is fine, right? 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 Bayesian 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's structures to how you work through things. And, they are going to apply certain trends that go on for periods of time.

1:05:54

Russ Roberts: Do you want to say anything else about this book, about it as a--will it persist with you? Will you think about--I mean, I found a number of the stories and vignettes I think will stick with me for a long, long time. I haven't talked about--many, many of them that I loved, I did not talk about. Listener, you will have to read them for yourself and make your own list. But, this book will haunt me. And, part of it is because I am reading it recently. I am not haunted by a lot of the books I read when I was younger because I've forgotten most of the haunting parts and I read this recently. But, it's quite an achievement in that way. I think it will last with me. Do you want to add anything else?

Tyler Cowen: 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, there's no higher endorsement I can give to a novel than that.

Russ Roberts: I guess. Today has been Tyler Cowen. Tyler, thanks for being part of EconTalk.

Tyler Cowen: 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.

Russ Roberts: Ditto.

Tyler Cowen on Life and Fate

Kevin McKenna on Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet Union, and In the First Circle

Susan Cain on Bittersweet and the Happiness of Melancholy

READER COMMENTS

David

Nov 25 2024 at 12:59pm

Thucydides

Nov 25 2024 at 2:06pm

Todd K

Nov 25 2024 at 3:49pm

Luke J

Nov 27 2024 at 2:21pm

Eric V

Nov 28 2024 at 4:45pm

Joseph A.

Dec 8 2024 at 2:16pm

Luke J

Dec 11 2024 at 2:14pm

LEAVE A COMMENT

Tyler Cowen on Life and Fate

Kevin McKenna on Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet Union, and In the First Circle

Susan Cain on Bittersweet and the Happiness of Melancholy

READER COMMENTS

David

Nov 25 2024 at 12:59pm

Thucydides

Nov 25 2024 at 2:06pm

Todd K

Nov 25 2024 at 3:49pm

Luke J

Nov 27 2024 at 2:21pm

Eric V

Nov 28 2024 at 4:45pm

Joseph A.

Dec 8 2024 at 2:16pm

Luke J

Dec 11 2024 at 2:14pm

LEAVE A COMMENT

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