For twenty days I worked in the archive, and in just four months, with alacrity untypical of me, I wrote Berlin, May 1945. I was very conscious that I needed to get it finished in time for publication in the anniversary May 1965 issue of Znamya, which meant I needed to submit it in March. The publication in Znamya, under the title ‘Berlin Pages’, was followed by my book Berlin, May 1945. All the official items, documents, reports, diaries and letters reprinted in the book, both from the Soviet side and from the German, were being published for the first time.
What sort of reception did the book get?
A completed book, for as long as it has life, plays a role in its author’s destiny and can bestow unexpected gifts on him or her. It brought me my meeting with Marshal Zhukov. It caused a sensation in the USSR and internationally. In our country twelve editions of Berlin have appeared, the latest only in 2006, and in total over 1,500,000 copies have been sold. It has been translated and published in over twenty countries and serialized in newspapers in Poland, Finland, Switzerland, Yugoslavia and Hungary; in Italy four issues of the magazine Tempo had my portrait on the cover.
The historians took an interest. Most notably, Lev Bezymensky corresponded with and interviewed the participants of the history I described, worked on the topic, and in 1968 published his book The End of a Legend.
When your book was being published, was there any niggling from censors about the documents?
Mostly over Goebbels. In the diary he allows himself unflattering remarks about the Soviet people, and gets the date of the Germans crossing the Dnieper wrong – he says it was on the second day of the war, but our historians say we held out longer than that. In the first days after the attack on the USSR Goebbels in his diary is a bit ‘put out’, as I expressed it, because the British sank the Bismarck.
Goebbels’ diary is of recurring interest for you. It was only in the mid-1990s that you put it behind you by writing Goebbels: A Portrait Based on the Diary.
Even in the hectic days in the bunker, in the feverish sorting through of documents that might give us a clue to the main issue of where Hitler was, it was obvious to me that this was probably our most important find, only there was just no time to spend even an hour or two reading it, because it plainly had no relevance to tracking down Hitler. It dealt only with the years before the war and the first weeks of the invasion of the USSR. At that moment we had more pressing concerns. Then front headquarters went off the notion of translating the diaries.
I was even afraid that they might have been lost, but when I encountered the last notebook in the archive I was persuaded that they were safe in our archives. As I said, my publishing of extracts from this last notebook alerted German historians to the whereabouts of these volumes of the diary, and eventually, in the late 1980s, the Munich Institute for Contemporary History published the handwritten diaries of Goebbels in four volumes. More than half of that publication was the notebooks we discovered back then in Goebbels’ office in the Führerbunker.
The institute invited me to conduct a seminar and presented me with these four thick volumes. I was writing a novella at the time and did not suppose I would be immersing myself in studying them. It seemed that all this was an old story and it was time to say goodbye to it, even though I was bound to it by personal involvement and by things that remained unsaid.
However, circumstances in the world, and especially in our country, encouraged and obliged me to return to them. I was amazed how Goebbels exposes his real self in the diaries. It would hardly be possible to describe the kind of politician Nazism brought to prominence more graphically than he did himself: a fanatic and mountebank, careerist and criminal, one of those wretched individuals to whose will the German people surrendered themselves, condemning themselves to the insanity of war.
The diary dissipates the mystical haze which those who write about Nazism periodically try to envelop it in and reveals it as a criminal political conspiracy. Something that seemed impossible happened to Germany: ridiculous individuals seized power.
The diary enables us to trace the alterations in Goebbels’ personality, to picture more clearly the genesis of Nazism with its cult of violence, its cult of the Führer, Hitler’s fatal seductiveness and how totally destructive he was for everyone.
In this difficult and laborious work on the portrait of Goebbels, in which you helped with the translation, I was very aware of the need to stress to the reader the danger of pernicious phenomena which, with the connivance of the state, encourage the proliferation of nationalistic forces in our country, forces that threaten Russia with self-destruction.
You know, when you and I were working on Goebbels’ diaries, I was not fully aware of how topical they were, the pressing need for the didactic pathos of your book. It seemed all that was already a thing of the past and could never happen again. I was wrong.
Goebbels and the discovery of Hitler’s remains are documentary topics to which you returned from a sense of responsibility to history. You personally are drawn more to the first period of the war, the time of a self-sacrificing people’s war and of Rzhev, to which you became so attached. You wrote your novellas, February, Winding Roads and Raking the Embers about that, and your collection of stories, Near Approaches, an unexpectedly modern montage of fragments. You once let slip something. You said, ‘I have never really returned from the war.’ What you experienced has never let you go. You went off to the war as a young student, Lena Kagan, and came back as the writer, Yelena Rzhevskaya. Rzhev was your destiny, both in the war and in your writing. I see nothing coincidental in that. In one of his conversations with you, Yury Dikov called Rzhev ‘the conscience of the war’. That is so akin to the pain that motivates you.
As I have said, I started out in 1946 with stories about Rzhev. Then I wrote about life in peacetime, roaming far from my own experiences into literary fiction. But what I had lived through would not let go. The last time I wrote about material quite detached from my life was when I submitted a story to Novy mir in 1961.
Since then what I have written has been not so much autobiographical as based on my own experiences. That was not what I first set out to do, but I found that my life was so full of impressions (as probably everybody’s is) that it squeezed out the adventitious, the borrowings, and that it was better to transfigure experience into prose unfettered by biography.
From a distance the war seemed to become more allusive, more visual. For many years I was pigeon-holed as writing what we call ‘war literature’. That is not entirely accurate because I do not write about pitched battles; I write about the world in wartime, about life in wartime.
In some ways it is harder and in others easier to write about the war. It is harder because much about war is monotonous, starting with people’s clothing. But it is easier because the plot is self-propelling. The war itself is the plot.
But you write wonderful prose about life before the war in Punctuation Marks; and about returning from the war. And you have promised to continue your novella, Hearth and Home. You looked even further back, into the history of your family and your ancestors in the cycle Byways of Memory. It is so enchanting, about how life is precious in itself, and there is no need for a plot.