War, peace and love战争、和平与爱情

　　Vasily Grossman’s epic novel is transformed for the radio

　　瓦西里?格罗斯曼史诗般的小说被改编成广播剧

　　Sep 10th 2011 | from the print edition

　　Vasily Grossman vindicated

　　无辜的瓦西里·格罗斯曼

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

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

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

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

　　For Grossman, the Nazi and Soviet systems and ideologies had far more similarities than differences. Both were directed at crushing the ultimate qualities of kindness and individuality. Though he yearned for the defeat of the fascist invaders, he makes German soldiers out to be not monsters, but like their Soviet counterparts—humans consigned to an inhuman mincing machine. The zealots, bigots and creeps on both sides come across with equal clarity. His portrait of the state-sponsored anti-Semitism directed against the Soviet physicist, Viktor Shtrum, is especially chilling, set against the jovially run gas chambers on the other side of the front-line.

　　在格罗斯曼看来，纳粹和苏联在制度和意识形态上的相似之处远远大于不同之处。两者的最终目标都是摧毁仁慈的品质和个人特性。虽然他渴望打败法西斯侵略者，但在他的笔下德国士兵不是怪物，而是象苏联士兵一样的人，被训练成了残忍的杀人机器。双方的痴迷分子、偏执狂和卑鄙小人都同样清楚地跃然纸上。苏联针对苏联物理学家维克托?斯特垆坶发起的反犹太主义，在他的刻画之下令人特别心寒，堪比前线另一边快活运行的毒气室。

　　Eventually the book took off and “Life and Fate” is now considered one of the most important Russian novels of the last century. Some see it as a c ounterpart to Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” (though it is more readable). Its greatest devotees praise it even more extravagantly.

　　这本书最终飞黄腾达了，现在《生活与命运》被尊为上世纪俄罗斯最重要的小说之一。一些人把它与列夫?托尔斯泰的《战争与和平》相提并论，不过它更具可读性。极度热爱这本书的人对它的赞美更是不遗余力。

　　Now Radio 4, an important BBC domestic station, has taken the bold decision to dramatise the book and broadcast it over the course of a week, using every drama slot in the schedules and a cast of stars. Shtrum is played by Kenneth Branagh, his wife Lyuda by Greta Scacchi and his mother Anna by Janet Suzman. One highlight is when Anna reads, in a single 15-minute segment, a letter—in effect a lament for all east European Jewry—written while she is close to death in the ghetto in Berdichev, in Nazi-occupied Ukraine.

　　现在，英国广播公司重要的国内电台4台做出了大胆的决定，把这本书改编成广播剧，采用明星阵容，利用一切可以利用的戏剧时段，耗时一整周来播出它。斯特垆坶由肯尼斯?布拉纳饰演，他的妻子莉尤达由格里塔?斯卡奇饰演，而他母亲安娜的饰演者是珍妮特?舒兹曼。该剧的亮点之一是安娜的一个15分钟独白段，当时她在读一封信，这封信实际上是为东欧所有的犹太人恸哭，写这封信时她在纳粹占领下的乌克兰别尔季切夫犹太人区正濒临死亡。

　　Radio drama has its limitations. The grittiness of Grossman’s dialogue becomes a little bland in the well-modulated voices of the British actors. Sound effects and grumpy asides do not fully convey the lice and foul food of the ruin in Stalingrad, where a bunch of exhausted Russian soldiers resist an implacable German assault, while commissars fret about their lack of discipline.

　　广播剧有其局限性。格罗斯曼的对话坚忍不拔，英国演员抑扬顿挫的声音说出来的对话却变得稍嫌平淡。声音效果和脾气暴躁的旁白完全无法表达斯大林格勒的虱子和腐败食物的残迹，一群筋疲力尽的俄罗斯士兵在那里抵抗不共戴天的德国人的突袭，而政委对他们的缺乏纪律感到焦急。

　　It is not only descriptive passages that have suffered in the editing. Some of the characters and subplots have disappeared altogether. Purists will object to that. But a bit of pruning is justified. Grossman never had the chance to edit his novel as he wished: the edition published was only a late draft, with untidy and repetitive bits left in. Thanks to the BBC, the essence of “Life and Fate”—the lion-hearted tank commander, the diehard idealists, the love-struck pilot, the scheming party hacks and most of all Shtrum, betraying and betrayed—all come across powerfully: true to life and fate.

　　改编时不仅描述性的段落被剪辑了，一些人物和次要情节也一并消失了。纯粹主义者会反对这一点。但一些地方的修订是合理的。格罗斯曼从来没有机会如他所愿地编辑他的小说，出版的版本只是一份后期草稿，文字不够整洁，还有重复的部分留在里面。《生活与命运》的精髓是非常勇猛的坦克指挥官、倔强的理想主义者、爱情受创的飞行员、诡计多端的政客以及大多数姓斯特垆坶的人、出卖与背叛，幸亏英国广播公司，所有这些精髓都被强力再现，真实反映了生活与命运。

　　“Life and Fate” will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on September 18th-25th. A special edition of “Start the Week” on September 9th will discuss Grossman and his influence. Listeners can access the programmes for 14 days after they are broadcast at www.bbc.co.uk/radio4. “Life and Fate” by Vasily Grossman; NYRB Classics; 896 pages; $24.95. Vintage; ?9.99

　　《生活与命运》将于9月18日至25日在英国广播公司电台4台播出。9月9日特别版的“本周伊始”将讨论格罗斯曼和他的影响力。节目在www.bbc.co.uk/radio4上播出后听众可以访问该节目14天。《生活与命运》瓦西里?格罗斯曼著；NYRB经典出版社；896页；24.95美元；旧货珍品；9.99英镑。