Was this really in the paper? I couldn’t suppress the thought while reading The Volga rises in Europe† The compiled war reports of the Italian writer Curzio Malaparte, who reported from the Soviet front between 1941 and 1943, are astonishing in many ways. Not least because of the wry echo in the present; today’s paper talks about the same places, the same rivers, the same war suffering – Malaparte, near Dnipro: ‘and always dead, burned houses, hordes of ragged prisoners of war, with the eyes of a sick dog…’
It is noteworthy that the Corriere della Sera printed the reports at all, although a passage of censorship has been cut here and there. Malaparte (1898-1957) went along with the German army – Mussolini’s Italy had sided with Hitler after all – but refused to ‘lower himself to propaganda’, as he writes in his foreword (from 1951). In his own reports he found “the only objective judgment of the German war against Russia”; on modesty you will be the author of successful novels like kaputt and The skin don’t get caught quickly.
‘Worker morality’
His reports show a growing sympathy for the Soviet fighters. Malaparte admires the efficiency of their army, in which each performs his task like the workers in a factory. After twenty years of the Soviet Union, there is a real ‘worker morality’ among the troops, which fascinates Malaparte immensely. He calls the army ‘Communism’s greatest industrial creation’. At the same time, he is amazed at their ‘indifferent’ (because non-religious) attitude towards death: ‘They know that they will die like a piece of stone, a piece of wood. A machine.’
The writer vehemently opposes the opposition between ‘Asian’ Russia and the ‘European’ West propagated by the Germans. He refuses to dismiss Bolshevism as an Asian phenomenon. In his view, the war is a clash of two forces in Western civilization, of bourgeois morality and worker morality, the oldest and most modern European spirit.
After months of ‘inopportune’ reporting from the front in Romania, Moldova and Ukraine, the German authorities had had enough. Malaparte had to return to Italy, according to Goebbels, where he was put under house arrest by Mussolini for four months. In March 1942 he was allowed to return to the front, this time to Finland (also an ally of Germany), to defeat the siege of Leningrad from the Karelian Isthmus – the second part of The Volga† There he remained until the fall of Mussolini in July 1943.
In his foreword, Malaparte leaves no doubt that he was very right in the war, with his sympathies for the Soviets. By the way, he himself was quite a twister, or rather a non-conformist. In the 1920s he was a member of the fascist party, after the war he sought affiliation with the communists. (He was exiled and imprisoned several times for his beliefs.) A few days before his death, he converted to the Catholic faith. But whoever he joined, he always remained headstrong – and so changed his mind quite often.
Painting with words
As a reader, don’t be put off by the smug tone in the introduction. The Volga rises in Europe is an exceptional book. Not because of the socio-political analyses, on which there is of course a lot to argue with, but because of the literary power of the reports.
In some ways the pieces are not inferior to his masterly war novel kaputt (1944), which originated at the same time. Just like in that book, Malaparte paints with words, as his regular translator Jan van der Haar describes it in The Volga† The language used ranges from raw and realistic to surreal and poetic. You will find all those colors in the expert translation.
The reports are never straightforward; Malaparte is not necessarily concerned with the bookkeeping of the battle. The writer wants to search for the ‘deeper meaning, the secret meaning of this war’. He does this in his reflections on Russian work ethics, but – fortunately – mainly by seeing, listening and smelling.
His very first report, from the Romanian Galati, starts with a page and a half of landscape description: ‘Galati emerges from the lagoons between the Prut and the Danube, and breathes the smell of mud, fish, rotten reed forests (…) up to the mountains of Dobruja. the great delta of the Danube is all sparkling water.’ Soon another scent dispels the peaceful image: ‘a heavy air, a heavy, greasy air. The stench of cadavers buried in the mud.’
Everything in this world has been touched by war, conflict dominates all perception. “Clouds of gray little birds skim over the grain with the whistle of machine-gun bullets,” writes Malaparte. Red clouds over a green landscape in Bessarabia are like ‘posters of communist propaganda’.
I would recommend this book for the imagery alone. A sunset is like ‘bleeding gums at the edge of the horizon’, bombed houses roar with fear and flee from their own doors (well, that last image was borrowed from Machiavelli). White soldier’s feet stick out of the gray-green of a uniform like skinned tree branches. “I think Daphne’s feet must have been like that in the critical phase of the metamorphosis.”
wry beauty
The writer does not hesitate to describe horrors, but even those are often of a wry beauty. In one of the most beautiful reports, Malaparte describes how he first saw the languishing Leningrad from a small plane – he could not get any closer to the ‘workers’ fortress’, as he calls the city: ‘Now the aircraft rose, gained in height to to emerge from the fog again. And when it was clear a little later and the sky again arched freely and cleanly above us, we saw a pink spot in front of us, a rose petal that lay in the course of our aircraft. As it prevents fading light in the mist from gaining strength and bouncing back at unbelievable distances, the Leningrad fire seemed remarkably close to us. That rose leaf moved, curled up, seemed to breathe.’
It is precisely the distance from the drama that creates alienation here. From the air, the conflict becomes something abstract, almost an illusion. But also in his reports from Romania and Ukraine, where Malaparte keeps his nose up to date, you feel the same alienation, the unimaginable life in that war – in every war. What happens there seems to be outside reality.
The thrill is strongest in a bizarre scene on frozen Lake Ladoga, where Malaparte sees human faces silhouetted in the ice shelf. The bodies are washed away with the first thaw, their features are caught for a moment. Who is familiar with kaputt, will immediately think of the frozen horse heads towering over the same lake – just as unforgettable. Other events and characters will also be familiar. For example, the Spanish count De Foxà reappears, also a flamboyant novel character.
The fate of the Jews gets in The Volga not very much attention, other than in kaputt: The novel contains one of the first literary descriptions of the Holocaust. The massacre in Romanian Iasi (“You feel that something bad is about to happen, you feel it in the air, on your skin, on your fingertips”) did not make the headlines in June 1941.
Curzio Malaparte: The Volga rises in Europe. Translated from the Italian by Jan van der Haar. Koppernik; 304 pages; € 24.50.
