SOURCES
These stories are not as rigorously grounded in historical fact as my Seven Dreams books. Rather, the goal here was to write a series of parables about famous, infamous and anonymous European moral actors at moments of decision. Most of the characters in this book are real people. I researched the details of their lives as carefully as I could. However, this is a work of fiction. Poetic justice has I hope been rendered, both to them and to their historical situations (which got stripped down into parables, then embellished here and there with supernatural cobwebs). To give one especially glaring example, see my note immediately following this section: “An Imaginary Love Triangle: Shostakovich, Karmen, Konstantinovskaya.” I apologize for any offense which I may have given to the living, and I repeat: This is a work of fiction.
Under such circumstances it would be a sterile exercise in didacticism to list sources of anything other than direct quotations. But I’ve tried to be as accurate in the small details (for instance, “the sound of our footsteps, which I loved, and love still, despite everything”48), and as fair to the historical personages involved as possible. It is probably needless to state that the social systems described here, together with all their institutions and atrocities, derive entirely from the historical record.
The chronology was for the convenience of the reader who may be unfamiliar with some of the names and events mentioned. My publisher persuaded me to cut it, on account of the wartime paper shortage. There is no compelling need to consult it; however, it might have furnished some eerie instances of German and Russian synchronicities.
I prepared the list of patronymics for those of you who have trouble keeping track of Russian names and nicknames.
Military terminology need not trouble the reader overmuch here, especially since its seeming specificity was so often illusory during World War II. The number of soldiers in a divison or a regiment, for instance, varied not only according to whether that regiment were German, Soviet, Romanian, Italian, etcetera, but also according to how much it had been bled to death. As the war went on, formations tended to become under official strength. (An instance of non-equivalence: When the German attempt on Moscow, Operation Typhoon, was halted in the winter of 1941, ninety-five Soviet divisions—eight hundred thousand men—stopped seventy-seven and a half German divisions—a million men.) After several attempts at drawing up a nice little chart for you, I finally despaired. The relative equivalence of ranks in the armies concerned was less problematical, but often still not exact. The only matter which does require specific elucidation is this: In Axis (and most Allied) usage, the word front refers to the immediately contested area between two armies. In Soviet usage, however, a front could be an operational grouping, similar to a Nazi army group. During the Great Patriotic War the Soviet Union formed and dissolved fronts according to the requirements of each situation. There were never less than ten, and never any more than fifteen. To minimize confusion I have capitalized the term when using it in a Soviet sense. Thus, the Volkhov Front is “Volkhov Region Red Army Group,” whereas the Volkhov front is the frontline area of the Volkhov area.
Regarding the Ring Cycle, Parzival, Eschenbach’s Tristan and Isolde, the Nibelungenlied and the Norse songs of the Poetic Edda, it should be noted that the names and acts alter in variations of the stories: Hogni is Hagen, and Gunther Gunnar; Brynhild spells her name “Brunnhilde” whenever she finds herself in a Wagner opera. Guthrún may metamorphose into Kriemhild or Grimhild, or vanish entirely. Siegfried wins Brunnhilde for Gunther by riding through a wall of flame, or else he has already done this, awoken her and pledged troth before he ever met Gunther. In either case, the relationship between Siegfried and Gunther is a constant: vainglorious complacency on the one hand, with a hint of illicit intimacy between Siegfried and Brunnhilde, and envious, resentful dependency on the other. I have tried to respect the appropriate consistencies and inconsistencies.
When the plurals of German nouns happen to be identical with the singulars (“Gauleiter,” “Nebelwerfer,” etc.), I thought it best to Anglicize them with an s, especially in such parallelistic constructions as: “Our Nebelwerfers against their Katyushas, what an unresolved problem!”
The moral equation of Stalinism with Hitlerism is nothing new. V. Grossman made that point first and best in his novel Life and Fate. Here it is merely a point of departure. (What is totalitarianism? In 1945, shortly before his own death in an air raid, the horrible Roland Freisler, judge of the Nazi “People’s Court,” says to his condemned adversary what a Stalinist could also say: “Only in one respect are we and Christianity alike: We demand the entire man!”—Helmuth James von Moltke, Letters to Freya 1939-1945, ed. & trans. by Beate Ruhm von Oppen [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990; orig. German ed. 1988], p. 409.)
A great number of my visual descriptions, both in straightforward prose and in metaphors, derive from the illustrations in Irina Antonova and Jorn Merkert, comp., Moskva-Berlin Berlin-Moskau 1900-1950 (Moscow: Galart [a supposed coproduction with Prestel-Verlag in Munich and New York; I haven’t seen the latter but if it ever comes out it would be preferable for the reader who can’t sound out Cyrillic]; 1996). This is a spectacular book.
Descriptions of Third Reich uniforms, weapons and other militaria, particularly on the Ostfront, make occasional reference to Nigel Thomas, The German Army 1939-45 (3): Eastern Front 1941-43, illus. Stephen Andrew (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, Men-At-Arms ser. no. 326, 1999); Bruce Quarrie, Fallschirmjäger: German Paratrooper 1935-45, illus. Velmir Vuksic (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, Warrior ser. no. 38, 2001); Robin Lumsden, A Collector’s Guide to Third Reich Militaria, rev. ed. (Surrey: Ian Allan Publishing, 2000 rev. repr. of orig. 1987 ed.); Werner Haupt, A History of the Panzer Troops 1916-1945, trans. Dr. Edward Force (West Chester, Pennsylvania: Schiffer Publishing, Ltd., 1990; original German ed. 1989).
Descriptions of the airplanes of all sides are based on the pretty color foldouts in The Gatefold Book of World War II Warplanes (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, by arr. w/ Brown Packaging Books Ltd., 1995). For details on the sources of technical specifications to Soviet airplanes, see the appropriate note to “Elena’s Rockets.”
My occasional descriptions of the handwriting of German and Russian writers and composers derive from the samples which appear in Marianne Bernhard, comp., Künstler-Autographen: Dichter, Musiker, bildende Künstler in ihren Hand-schriften (Dortmund: Die bibliophilen Taschenbücher, Harenberg Kommunikation, 1980). The exception is the handwriting of Shostakovich, which I have described based on facsimiles reproduced in various biographies, etcetera.
ix Shostakovich epigraph: “The majority of my symphonies are tombstones.”—Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitry Shostakovich as Related to and Edited by Solomon Volkov, trans. Antonina W. Bouis (New York: Limelight Editions repr. of 1979 Harper & Row ed.), p. 156. (Henceforth cited, for the sake of argument, as Shostakovich and Volkov.)
48
Guy Sajer,