Russ Roberts on Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate

30:04I'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. There was, of course, throughout the 1960s, a Soviet obsession with artificial intelligence. that we often forget in the West. But they, as a regime, were convinced it was going to be the future.

30:45It pops up a great deal in Soviet science fiction. There's 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. Yeah. Well, today. We'll get there maybe. Today. And he wrote that in probably late 1950s, sometime in the 1950s, which you talk about the Soviet interest in AI.

31:22There wasn't much eye in AI in those early days. But he was fascinated, clearly. 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 out. I don't think it's it's not thrown in there it's there for a reason let's talk about that reason. Tell me. Well look 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.

32:01There 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. No, I think that's fair. I think that's fair. 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 eleaser. Or a worry about technology. I think his worries about the analogies he's making there between fascism and technology that they enslave us.

32:45I don't think it enslaves us the way our phones enslave us, but they have the potential to be a system. You know, 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. 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.

33:24And the machine for him eventually becomes all powerful. It becomes a kind of God, can create humans in its image that are in a way superior. And I think he's terrified by this. Yeah, just like I am a little bit. 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. 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 how—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.

34:20It comes into our culture in all kinds of ways. That's a very provocative idea. 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 he's 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.

34:59And Victor is co-opted by something that Grossman himself does not quite believe in. And the scientific mentality is part of the problem. So the way science operates in the novel and in this society, 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. Victor's character deals relentlessly and painfully with the ethical dilemmas of being a favored citizen of the state. Very similar to In the First Circle where 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.

35:52You know, in this case, another thing that Grossman captures, I thought, with such accuracy and lets you feel it is the exhilaration of scientific discovery. Victor 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 just – 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.

36:39And 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. But I think Grossman's also writing at a time where many, many intelligent people think science perhaps is about to end the world. So there's that possibly apocryphal story that some of the people 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.

37:21A nuclear war would come. It's an extremely common view amongst the elite. And I think he held a Soviet version of that. And that pops up in the novel that, yes, you're rooting for Victor, but there's something about the logic of what went wrong that can so easily end up being recreated, but at a more destructive level. And that's in the background of this novel. But I think it's another reason why maybe I find it a bit less, I don't think heartwarming isn't the word, but a bit less inspirational than one could otherwise make it out to be. Fair enough. We can't get rid of science. Grossman himself is never quite reassured about science.

38:03And that one page about AI is put in there to tell us that. That's nice. I agree with that. It's very nice, Tyler. He's got an essay in The Road, which we may talk about in a future episode, where he looks at a painting of Raphael's called 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 it was written in 1955.

38:50And he clearly, which is about the time I think he was writing some of this book. So you're 100 % right that the potential for human beings to be extinct and destroy themselves is very much in his consciousness. One thing I've been thinking about is the question, to what extent is this Soviet novel, Jewish novel, Ukrainian novel, or Russian novel? And often it's thought of as a Russian novel. I'm not sure how much it is, because he's clearly not ethnic Russian. 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.

39:41Well, 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 so there was a strong anti-Semitic thread in Soviet and 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 with a Russian culture. So in that sense, 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.

40:21And 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 Nazi, the Holocaust going on at the same time, which an editor would probably might have said to him, you know, the book's got a lot in it already. Do you need to put that in? But he did. He did need to put that in. So that's a good question, Tyler. It strikes me as more Jewish than you're making it out to be.

40:59Not in the religious sense, but the notion of how tragedy is possible and how tragedy can befall you in quite arbitrary ways or the sudden twists and turns of fate come very much from the Hebrew Bible, I think. He probably was aware of that, but he must have been brought 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.

41:45That's only one data point, but worth thinking about. 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. Well, that, of course, hell of settlement. It wasn't written in Yiddish, but 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 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.

42:31But 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 Victor, 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. I agree. 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.

43:20And Grossman himself, again, no spoilers here, But look up Grossman's entries in Wikipedia. Articles that were written about him that have 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 Pradichov and that she'd perish there at the hands of the Nazis in 1941. he does sign some things publicly that benefit the regime that he, I think, regrets. And Victor goes through similar, very similar throes of conscience. Let me talk a bit about how I read this book, which was extremely absorbing, highly worthwhile, but it was tough.

44:12One thing I did that helped more than anything else was an extensive use of large language models, in particular the O1 version of GPT. So whenever I would come across a name and not feel I had a full command of what that person had done, I would just ask GPT, give me the account of what this person did in the book. I did that dozens of times, as you mentioned, many characters. I didn't catch any hallucinations, actually. It was extremely useful. I 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.

44:59I don't know who Vera is. You know, check your other sources. I don't know why, but other than that, it was flawless and highly useful. Well, 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 Chet GPT what it was about, and it totally got it wrong. It said it was about beauty and art. It 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 to ask questions of.

45:43I 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, grossed 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.

46:27And I found it interesting that the 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 so don't have it. And I said, we're reading this book. You should get started. It's going to air soon. He said, I'm on page 12 and all the characters are named Stroganoff. I need more time. The names are hard.

47:12The names are tough. The names are hard. Here's the other thing I did, and this was difficult, but once I finished it, the next day I started over again at page one, reread the whole thing, I'm a big advocate of doing that. And I realized I had understood very little of the first two or 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 been less distracted by the dog, I just think many books, the best thing you do is read them twice directly in a row.

47:52and as you get to the latter third of the book, actually, probably you could stop. You don't have to reread the last third, but certainly the first half. You just have to do it again. So I read this version. I'm holding this up for YouTubers. Yeah, me too. Same. Same print. It's the same publisher. It's New York Review of 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 a Just Cause that you can read in English under the title of Stalingrad, which is confusing because the life and faith people say it's about Stalingrad.

48:30But 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 rereader 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 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 hope I will read it again. You know, there's great, great novels from the 20s.

49:09There'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. 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. I want to make sure I say this, Tyler.

49:44I'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 I read it on Shabbat, on the Jewish Sabbath, when I couldn't use my Kindle. I read the paper version.

50:24And 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 both ways. They were both helpful. Did you ever get in touch with Robert Chandler, the translator? I did. And what did you learn? 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.

50:59And I also want to talk to him about the art of translation. And obviously, we'll talk a little bit about life and fate and 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— That's a must read for anyone. 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, which, and it's interesting, Tolstoy wrote a wonderful short story called The Pacesetter that is life from the perspective of a horse.

51:42I 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 really a beautiful idea. And it's also peppered with lovely pieces from Chandler with biographical detail. I can't imagine what it's like to, I'll ask him, but to translate a book of this size, which of course, you know, 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.

52:24And I'm sure it took longer to translate than it took me to read it. So I'll be interested. 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. So Russian jokes don't translate well. That's what I want you to ask him. Will do. But another thought I had on the question of how is this not quite a Russian novel, though it's in the Russian language. If I think of Tolstoy a lot in Russian culture, he even says this about Tolstoy.

53:03Dostoevsky, Scriabin. It's fanatical of different sorts. Obviously, the 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. I feel a certain fanaticism about certainly Solzhenitsyn, certainly about Dostoevsky. What do you find? I can think of a few things that are fanatical about Tolstoy. What comes to mind? Well, his views on everything were extreme. It's true.

53:45Beethoven, Shakespeare, religion, property. It's hard to think of a more fanatical human being. Sex, God, marriage. Sure. Yeah, it's true. It's true. He'd make a great podcast guest, but where would you even start? it. 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.

54:27It's a bit like Americans and Canadians, perhaps. And that, to me, really shone through in Life and Fate, the anti-fanaticism. Let me ask you a personal question. Yeah. 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? Of course. I mean, it's true for almost everyone. Is it? Especially if you have libertarian roots. Well, no, it's not true of almost everyone.

55:09But if you have libertarian roots, you either go crazy or you become less extreme, right? What do you mean, right? Expand. Well, we each know some people who just went crazy. Often in non-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.

55:53How much of history he's taking seriously, not just the one point in front of his eyes, Battle of Stalingrad, but the AI section, whether you agree or not, he's looking to the future. He's definitely looking to the Russian 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. So, you know, I have a couple 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.

56:35I don't think it's to avoid insanity, by the way. I'm curious. That wasn't why you did it, but if you hadn't done it. Yeah, maybe. But I'm curious. The people who don't do it can just get worse, right? 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.

57:15I think I've been spared that. But why do you think that happens? 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 find belief as a random walk.

57:52So 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. I wonder how much of it is the fact that it's really convenient to have a system, right? Gives you something to shove into the box. You've take the world's events and you've decided how they should be processed.

58:34And 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's a bit too complicated to deal with. It still is, but I'm just less certain. There's also a more charitable interpretation of what you're describing.

59:12So think of yourself as working through problems, which is fine, right? And working through problems take 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 imply certain trends that go on for periods of time.

59:51I want to say anything else about this book, about it as a, will it persist with you? Will you think about, I mean, I've had 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, many of them that I loved. I did not talk about. Reader, you will have to, listener, you will have to read them for yourself and make your own list. But this book will haunt me. Part of it's because I'm reading it recently. I'm 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've read this recently, but it's quite an achievement in that way.

1:00:33I think it will last with me. Do you want to add anything else? You're living under wartime conditions in a way that I am not. I would just say my reading opportunity costs are very high. For me to read an 872-page book twice in a row and be glad I did it, there's no higher endorsement I can give to a novel than that. My guest today has been Tyler Cowan. Tyler, thanks for being part of EconTalk. 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. Ditto. Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler.

1:01:14You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm at Tyler Cowan, and the show is at Cowan Convos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.