Translating Life and Fate (with Robert Chandler)

Robert Chandler: Hello, glad to be speaking to you.

Robert Chandler: There’s no general answer. I suppose really it’s just a step at a time. It’s perhaps easier to talk about Stalingrad because that’s more recent and it was also more complex. I had very little idea what was involved to begin with. I had read in several places that there were nine different complete versions of the novel in the archives in Moscow.

When the historian Jochen Hellbeck had encouraged me to use the archival version, I just thought that was a non-starter because I was not going to be living long enough to collate nine different versions of the long novel. So, I expected to be staying with a version that was finally printed.

But, two things happened.

First, I realized that there were actually three different versions–only moderately different versions–published in the course of five or six years. So, in 1952 whilst Stalin was still alive, a heavily censored version was published. In 1954, a slightly less censored version was published–so that was after Stalin’s death. In 1956 when the Khrushchev Thaw had begun, a considerably freer version was published. So, I could get a clear idea from the differences between those versions, what kind of things were unacceptable to the censors and what kind of things Grossman was clearly wanting to insert when he could.

I then, also, got a very helpful guidance from a scholar in Moscow, Yury Bit-Yunan, pointing out that there weren’t actually nine complete versions. That there was–or one version that had got lost anyway, an early typescript that was clearly the freest and really most interesting and original. Then two or three versions that were somewhat more Grossman trying to accommodate editorial demands. And then there were other bits that were just–they weren’t complete versions. There were sort of 40 pages that got added in at a late point.

Anyway, from comparing those three published versions, I understood what Grossman wanted and basically what was being omitted. What was being deleted by the censors was everything undignified. It’s the Battle of Stalingrad. This is a kind of grand Soviet triumph, so nothing but absolute dignity and nobility was acceptable. So, all Grossman’s jokes, all Grossman’s sort of moments of irony, all the bits where kind of an important [?] was being a bit silly, being frivolous or selfish or being more interested in getting hold of some good foods than he should have been–they were all edited out from the earlier versions. Even Grossman’s frequent mentions of lice and fleas and things, 90% of them were being edited out.

So, it was quite clear–it was a real education in the nature of Soviet censorship, much more a matter of tone rather than just subject matter. So, I felt I had enough understanding that I could now look at the early typescript and decide which bits from it should deserve to be included in our version.

Robert Chandler: Very different indeed. Stalingrad–I can never really answer these questions very well because some periods I’m working consistently, sometimes I’m being interrupted–certainly at least two and a half years or so that I was working on Stalingrad most of the time. Life and Fate was a rather odd story. I spent a very long time feeling depressed and achieving very, very little indeed and getting way, way behind.

Then I had a extraordinary offer. A French translation was published and got rave reviews. And, my contract was with the English publisher who had sold the rights to Harper & Row in America. Normally I wouldn’t have been getting any money from Harper & Row at all, but Harper & Row got very excited by the reviews of the French translation. And–I think this was probably about February of whatever year it was–they offered me $10,000 extra if I completed the book by the beginning of September. Seven-and-a-half if I finished it by mid-September, and five if I finished it by the end of September.

So, I am not very good at just sort of sitting at a desk and working for hours on end. I need physical exercise if my brain is to function. I rented a cottage–a flat by the sea in Cornwall–and basically was a hermit for four months. So, I kind of swam and walked every day. The rest of the time I was working. So, I did at least two-thirds of the novel in about four or five months and actually translated it working much better than I had done previously. And I got the seven-and-a-half thousand dollars.

Robert Chandler: Probably not so very different. I mean more intense. Grossman is someone I can, most of the time, quite happily spend a lot of time with because he does seem a–I mean even the most awful passages of his writing, like the Treblinka article and the account of the terror famine in “Everything Flows”–even in those pieces, I always have a sense that he is not out to hurt the reader.

He’s not like some readers–sorry, he’s not like some writers imagining that if he throws his pain at the reader, it will make life easier for him. He just knows that there is an important story that needs to be told, and he’s telling it. He didn’t particularly go out of his way to–fate led him to these places like Stalingrad and Treblinka. He’s not out to hurt the reader.

He does seem like a wise guide. I had sometimes thought of him, particularly with regard to Treblinka, I have thought of him as a kind of Vergil figure leading Dante through Hell. So, I can, even on those painful subjects, with very few exceptions I don’t find it overwhelming.

Robert Chandler: It’s sort of hard to remember those days because [inaudible 00:11:47] able to find things out on the Internet, and this was the early 1980s. I didn’t have much research material with me. I mean, there were a few people I remember–it’s at least one brigadier whom I could ask about military matters, but that was by post.

There was a good, much older translator, Harry Willetts, who Collins-Harper engaged to check through the translation. He corrected a few errors. There were factual errors which I made then, which I wouldn’t make now, especially perhaps with German proper names and so on because I’m not familiar with them. I sometimes misunderstood–I think, misunderstood place names and so on. There was time for minor factual errors to be corrected during the editorial process.

Robert Chandler: Russian-English dictionaries are very poor. They still are. Grossman doesn’t use–he doesn’t actually use that many unusual words.

Yes, I mean it is a huge, huge difference from then to the present day, because nowadays, there’s a very, very good, very welcoming and generous email forum called Seelang’s. That’s S double E lang’s: Slavonic and East European languages and it’s several thousand people. Most of them or a high proportion are American academics, Russianists in different universities. Quite a number of them were brought up in the Soviet Union. I am notorious for the huge number of questions I ask on that forum, which people enjoy. People actually are extraordinarily helpful and do actually enjoy being asked questions. How I managed to do Life and Fate without such, without that at my fingertips, it’s hard to remember.

Robert Chandler: In that case I actually, I didn’t do the book in the order of pages. I did all the Shtrum chapters; then I did all the Novikov chapters.

Robert Chandler: Then I did each thread. Of course, that couldn’t be quite consistent because the threads sometimes [inaudible 00:16:07] together, but nevertheless, I found that a little bit easier in that time.

Robert Chandler: With–as regard to names, there’s a nightmare chapter in Stalingrad, which is–I’m sure I’ve made a great deal easier for the English reader than it would have been for a Russian reader. There’s a chapter in Stalingrad where Shtrum is with a crowd of very, very senior ministers and engineers and so on in Moscow. They’re discussing the relocation of industry to the East–the Urals and Siberia. There are probably about a dozen men, [inaudible 00:17:09] men; and Grossman seems to me excessive. Russians tend anyway to have a rather excessive fear of repetition, but Grossman seemed to be going out of his way to refer to the same person in four or five different ways.

So, one point it would be ‘the engineer from the Urals,’ and then a page later, the same man would be referred to by a surname. Another page later it might be ‘the bespectacled engineer.’ I did have to do a kind of table of all the different ways in which a particular character was being referred to. People go on a lot about sort of being faithful to eccentricities in the original and so on: There’s absolutely no way I was going to reproduce that literally. So, I did, in my translation, refer to people more consistently, not to make matters more difficult than necessary for the reader.

Robert Chandler: I think many people are much too afraid of repetition. Yeah, I share your feelings about, so-called elegant repetition. I mean, there’s a particular annoying thing which annoys me in a lot of Russian writers is they seem afraid of just using a simple word like he ‘said’ or he ‘answered.’ There were endlessly–it’ll be he ‘says,’ he ‘pronounced,’ he ‘utters.’ ‘Goodness me,’ he exclaimed. ‘I don’t believe it,’ he astonished. Use astonished as a way of introducing speech where it’s doubling up. If the man is saying, ‘I don’t believe it,’ we don’t need to make that explicit in the verb as well. So, no, in that case I certainly just go for ‘he said,’ which seems much less obtrusive.

Robert Chandler: I don’t think there’s humor that I failed to bring in. I’m interested by what you say and wondering whether there perhaps is more humor in Stalingrad. I was surprised–my much elder brother was tremendously enthusiastic about Stalingrad. He really, really loved it. And then, to my surprise, seemed to just find Life and Fate, unrelentingly grim and not really to enjoy it at all. I wonder whether humor is a part of it.

I mean, there’s a certain amount of irony I can think of from Life and Fate. I mean the difference between the two novels is that Stalingrad is much closer to–there are a lot of passages in it which are quite close to repetitions or paraphrasing of passages from his wartime notebooks. There’s a lot of little funny incidents, funny turns of speech in Stalingrad which are clearly just real-life things that he witnessed.

Life and Fate is–it’s more distant from the reality of the time. It is much more of a kind of serious moral and philosophical statement. In a way, Stalingrad is a more of a novel, and Life and Fate, more of a sort of, as I said, a philosophical and moral study. So, perhaps–yeah, perhaps there is less humor in it.

Robert Chandler: It’s not really for me to judge. It’s a long time since I read The First Circle. So, probably you’re right; but I can’t say any more.

Robert Chandler: It used to get very, very oversimplified indeed, as if Grossman were simply a good Stalinist and then suddenly he metamorphosed. That’s absolutely not true. I mean, he was, all the way through his career, he was always pushing at the boundaries of what was acceptable.

So, the wartime articles he wrote for Red Star–which we’re translating at present–I mean, he was writing for a military newspaper. He was obviously not going to be criticizing Stalin in it. But there’s actually remarkably little mention of Stalin.

There’s a very interesting story that the editor of Red Star–the very good David Ortenberg, who was editor till I think summer 1943–and he commissioned Grossman to write an article titled “Tsaritsyn–Stalingrad”. Now, there’s some city on the Volga that during the war was called Stalingrad. Until 1924, it was called Tsaritsyn, and it’s now called Volgograd. So, that’s one and the same city.

So, Ortenberg was really inviting and expecting Grossman to write an article about how Stalin, who did play an important role in defending Tsaritsyn, from the whites in the Civil War: That’s why part of the rationale for changing its name to Stalingrad.

So, Ortenberg was expecting Grossman to be drawing a parallel between Stalin defending Tsaritsyn in 1919, I think, and the Red Army defending Stalingrad in 1942. And, Grossman wrote an article without mentioning Stalin.

So, he was being challenging all the time. The Red Star editors were–Ortenberg got fired anyway, so the editing probably got worse. They were messing up his articles a great deal. There were–Grossman complaints about this bitterly in some of his letters. So, they were often adding ultra-patriotic bits to them. I mean, Grossman really did the minimum of the kind of Soviet grandiose style.

He certainly–I mean, I’m sure his feelings about the system were ambivalent towards the end.

I mean, I remember giving a talk once at Pushkin House in London. I was talking quite a lot about Grossman, drawing parallels between Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany. And I remember this very, very sweet Russian woman coming up to me and saying that she just couldn’t quite understand how on the one hand what I’d just been saying could be true, and yet that Grossman right to the end of his life would enjoy singing patriotic Red Army songs when people have been eating and drinking together. And Grossman would enjoy singing these patriotic songs. It was his world.

I mean–of course if it’s–however much he might draw parallels between Hitler and Stalin, nevertheless, it was Hitler who had annihilated millions of Jews; and the Soviet Union was his world. Sorry–was Grossman’s world. People have contradictory feelings.

Robert Chandler: Absolutely. It was–actually, the very first chapter of Life and Fate I translated was the dialogue between the SS officer, Liss, and the old Bolshevik, Mostovskoy. I translated that for what was then the rather important journal–I mean, it’s still going, but it was more important at the time than is now–Index on Censorship. So, they published my translation of that chapter, and along with a kind of summary, a kind of article of mine about the novel. So that’s what got a publisher interested. And I did–I mean, I find that dialogue absolutely riveting, myself.

Robert Chandler: Yeah, absolutely.

Robert Chandler: Not necessarily. An interesting example is the terror-famine chapter in Everything Flows.

Robert Chandler: That is absolutely crystal clear. It was very straightforward to translate. The woman who is narrating the chapter, just she keeps repeating the word, ‘I saw.’ So, kind of, ‘I saw this.’ ‘I saw that.’ And ‘I saw this.’ It’s absolutely straight. There’s no backtracking, no sort of saying something and then qualifying it. It’s absolutely straight narrative. It was emotionally overwhelming, but it was actually very easy to translate because it was so simple and clear.

The absolute opposite to that in the same book is the equivocations of the main character, the scientist who is looking back on his past. And he is constantly sort of trying to be honest, and then running away from being honest. He’ll be saying–he keeps using the word–instead of, ‘I saw,’ it’s ‘Kazalas,’–‘It seemed.’ ‘It seemed to me.’ Then he was, ‘Oh, did it really seem to me?’ And, ‘It had seemed.’

Getting the tense right was terribly difficult in English, because in Russian, they actually only have present, future, and past. So, sometimes when you’re translating you have to think a lot, whether it should be ‘it seemed,’ ‘it had seemed,’ whatever.

So, those kind of equivocations were–which Grossman was very, very skilled at in other chapters as well where he says something and then he kind of backtracks or his character backtracks. So, those are the ones that are difficult to translate.

Robert Chandler: A great many of Grossman’s works do bring in the theme of maternal love. You’ve mentioned the scene in the gas chamber where an unmarried, childless female doctor in a way kind of adopts this little eight-year-old boy on the way to the gas chamber. One of her dying thoughts as she’s holding this little boy is, ‘I’ve become a mother.’ Grossman does repeatedly manage to sort of find maternal love, occasionally, but different versions, sometimes reversing the generations in the most terrible situations.

So, there’s another story where there’s a lonely old school teacher, a Jewish school teacher, who is about to be shot. The Jews from that city have all been led out to an execution site, and he is feeling very, very lonely, deeply lonely. A child who he knows comes up behind him and puts–I think it’s her arms, I can’t quite remember–puts her hands over his eyes and says, ‘Don’t look.’ I.e., don’t look at the Jews being executed, being shot just ahead of us. So, there you’ve got a little child playing the parental role. It’s what I meant by the generations being reversed.

He’s constantly finding those kind of situations. He’s finding those relationships in the most ghastly situations.

There’s a very touching article by Grossman’s daughter, Katia, who didn’t write a great deal about her father; but she wrote an article about the story called “A Mama.” And she points out that there are about, I think, eight or nine kind of mothers and adoptive mothers and nurses playing a maternal role. So, different substitute mothers of one kind or another.

So, at one level, it’s a very bleak story centered on the family of Yezhov, the chief, the head of the NKVD [Narodnyy komissariat vnutrennikh del, People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs] at the height of Stalin’s purges in the late 1930s. So, it’s at one level about this evil figure, Yezhov, and also it is about maternal tenderness. There are a huge number of tender maternal figures in it.

One of the other striking things about the relationship with a mother is that, I mean, Grossman clearly felt a huge weight of guilt that in the very first weeks of the war, he could have traveled to Byadichev and fetched his mother and brought her back to relative safety in Moscow. She couldn’t do that on her own. She was partly disabled. And in any case, at that point, people didn’t realize how quickly the Germans were going to advance.

Grossman didn’t fetch her partly because his wife didn’t want that–which was later a cause of bitterness between husband and wife. But anyway, however much Grossman may have blamed his wife, he certainly blamed himself, and he did. I mean, usually guilt is a fairly incapacitating feeling. I think it’s rather unusual that Grossman was able to turn this weight, to really use this weight of guilt in such a positive way.

So, in Life and Fate, when Shtrum, after he’s been sort of blessed by Stalin and Stalin has realized the importance of nuclear research, when Shtrum is in a fortunate position again and he capitulates and signs a letter–signs an official letter criticizing [?] Jews–Shtrum feels deeply ashamed of himself. And he prays to his mother, ‘Next time, give me your strength. Lend me your strength, Mother.’ So, he is seeing his mother as a source of strength.

Robert Chandler: I missed a word then, some kind of what on his part?

Robert Chandler: Right, right. I mean, some biographers have written rather critically of Grossman’s wife. She did do a great deal of rather heroic work typing out his manuscripts, even the chapters in Life and Fate that are based on Grossman’s unfaithfulness to her. It’s a bit like Tolstoy’s wife. She did, I think, put up with quite a lot from him.

Robert Chandler: I really love his last short stories, the ones he wrote after the typescript of Life and Fate was confiscated.

So, the three stories I particularly love are the title story, “The Road,” which is–it’s told from the point of view of a Italian mule that is dragging artillery shells from presumably Italy, all the way across Europe to Stalingrad. There’s a great deal of humor in it.

Robert Chandler: Perhaps fancifully. I see it as a mini Life and Fate that Grossman is trying to compensate for the loss of his novel by condensing it into a little tiny version. Some of that is very funny indeed. You get the sort of mule being quite philosophical, learning about concepts like infinity from crossing this vast Russian plain.

I love “The Dog,” which is about a mongrel dog that was caught on the Moscow streets and taken to a laboratory and ends up being the–I think, well, fictionally–the kind of first animal sent into space. Again, it’s got a lot of humor in it. The sort of basic plot is that this very, very emotionally detached scientist who is in charge of the mission under this dog, he gets deeply emotionally attached to the dog. He kind of imagines that when the dog comes back to earth after having been up in space, he is about to gaze into the dog’s eyes and see the secrets of cosmic space in them.

And, I was very struck that a friend of mine–a poet who at that time didn’t know much about Grossman–and I sent her a draft of that story when I was working on it. And she thanked me and said, ‘It’s really shamanic.’

Of course, I’m so used to thinking of Grossman as being quite a rationalist and someone who wrote a lot about the war and about difficult moral questions that I’d never really thought of as being shaman-like. It is very interesting sometimes getting the perspective of someone who [inaudible 00:53:09] of knowledge about Grossman.

And, the story we’ve already mentioned, “Mama”–extraordinary story where we, in a way, in the heart of evil, in the household of NKVD boss, Yezhov, we actually see Yezhov through totally innocent eyes: through the eyes of a five-year-old orphan whom his family have adopted.

That’s based on a real-life story. And through the eyes of the girl’s peasant nanny who doesn’t have a clue what’s going on in the country, politically. She actually–I think Grossman says she may have been the only person in the country who felt sorry for Yezhov because she could look in his eyes and see that something was wrong, but she didn’t understand anything on a grander scale.

I’d love to just read from the very first page of “The Dog,” which epitomizes sort of a lighter side of Grossman that sometimes gets rather forgotten. Gets forgotten not so much because there isn’t–there is lightness and humor in nearly all his work, but so much of his work is actually, the subject matter is very grim–like Stalingrad and Treblinka–it’s easier to think of Grossman himself being grim.

“The Dog”:

Her childhood was hungry and homeless; nevertheless, childhood is the happiest time of life.

Her first May–those spring days on the edge of town–was especially good. The smell of earth and young grass filled her soul with happiness. She felt a piercing, almost unbearable sense of elation; sometimes she was too happy even to feel like eating. All day long there was a warm green mist in her head and her eyes. She would drop down on her front paws in front of a dandelion and let out happy, angry, childish, staccato yelps; she was asking the flower to join in and run about with her, and the stillness of its stout little green leg surprised her and made her cross.

And then all of a sudden she would be frenziedly digging a hole. Clods of earth would fly out from under her little belly, and her pink and black paws would get almost burned by the stony earth. Her little face would take on a troubled look. She seemed not to be playing a game. She seemed to be digging a refuge, digging for dear life.

She had a plump, pink belly, and her paws were broad, even though she ate little during that good time of her life. It was as if she were growing plump from happiness, from the joy of being alive.

And then eventually winter comes. Life gets a bit more difficult, and we learn about how this dog learns to cope with the difficulties of city life:

She knew the murderous power of cars and trucks and had a precise knowledge of their different speeds. She knew how to wait patiently while the traffic went by, how to rush across the road when the cars were stopped by a red light. She knew the forward sweeping, all-destroying force of electric trains and their childish hopelessness. As long as it was a few inches away from the track, even a mouse was safe from them.

She knew the roars, whistles, and rumbles of jet and propeller planes, as well as the racket of helicopters. She knew the smell of gas pipes. She knew where she might find the warmth given off by hot water pipes running under the ground. She knew the work rhythm of the town’s garbage trucks. She knew how to get inside garbage containers of all kinds and could immediately recognize the cellophane wrapping around meat products and the waxed paper around cod, rockfish, and ice cream.

A black electric cable sticking up out of the earth was more horrifying to her than a viper. Once she’d put a damp paw on a cable with a broken insulating jacket. This dog probably knew more about technology than an intelligent, well-informed person from three centuries before her. It was not merely that she was clever, she was also educated. Had she failed to learn about mid-20th century technology, she would have died. After all, dogs that wandered into the city from some village or other often lasted only a few hours.

I’d like to just mention that my late friend, Igor Golomstock–it was he who actually first put Life and Fate my way and said I should translate it–which initially I just laughed at him and said, ‘I don’t read books that long in Russian, let alone translate them.’ And in particular in this instance, I remembered him because, when I was compiling, when I was choosing stories for The Road, there was a moment when I began to sort of worry a bit that a huge proportion of the stories I’d chosen seemed to have to do with animals. And, was I being sentimental?

And so, Igor was one of the least sentimental people I’ve ever known.

So, I asked him–I gave him a list of stories, and he actually chose almost the same stories as I had. So, I felt confident that I wasn’t just being sentimental.

But, Grossman clearly was very fond of animals. I think that extract does try quite hard to sort of enter into their lives.

Robert Chandler: Oh, yes. It’s well known in Russia.

Robert Chandler: Grossman loved Chekhov. I’m sure that Chekhov was his favorite writer. He did read War and Peace several times during the war, so Tolstoy was important to him; but I think his love of Chekhov was deeper.

The Russian writer I love equally with Grossman is Andrei Platonov, who is, though a very, very different writer to Grossman, the two of them were very close friends, especially during the last 10 years or so of Platonov’s life. Platonov is a more unusual writer than Grossman. He uses language in a very, very unusual way. He’s a great deal harder to translate, which is why he’s less known in Western European countries than Grossman.

A lot of Russians, especially Russian writers, see Platonov as the greatest writer of the last century. And as I began to say, they–he and Grossman–their careers went in almost opposite ways. Grossman began as a journalist and towards the end of his life was writing more and more poetically and succinctly. Platonov began as a poet and writing very, very unusual prose, putting words together in unusual ways. And as his life went on, he wrote more and more simply and straightforwardly.

Late Grossman–I mean, stories like “The Mule”–there’s a definite influence of Platonov there. Grossman, he gave the main speech at Platonov’s funeral, and he was on the committee that was trying to get Platonov’s work published in the 1950s. I mean, both writers were on a borderline as far as the Soviet authorities were concerned. Platonov still more so. I mean, about half of Platonov’s work was not published at all during his lifetime, and the other half was published and fiercely criticized.

Robert Chandler: Yes, I certainly do. Constance Garnett is always something of a test case for me. If people say–there was a time when people were constantly sneering at her, and that immediately made me feel hostile towards them. She was a very, very and strong, courageous, independent woman. She translated probably four or five great writers well enough that people could recognize that they were great writers. That’s quite something.

It’s easy enough to pick holes in some passages from her work, because she translated a huge amount. She taught herself Russian, basically. She didn’t have all the kind of dictionaries available. She had the good sense–which a lot of translators don’t have–to get a Russian friend to check her work. She would be paying him to do that. I admire her immensely.

When I was translating stories for a Penguin Classics anthology of Russian short stories–19th and 20th century to begin with, because for the 19th century most of my choices were very standard choices like “The Queen of Spades” and “The Great Coat.” So, they had been translated quite a few times already. I would begin by having several different translations open on my desk. In that, almost always Constance Garnett was better in every way than the other ones. Sometimes she understood things correctly which the other translators then misunderstood. And if they’d bothered to look at her translation they would have not made that particular mistake. So, I do greatly admire her.

Of younger translators, I very much admire Boris Dralyuk, who has done outstanding translations of Isaac Babel, the contemporary Ukrainian writer–well, Ukrainian Russophone writer, Andrey Kurkov; and a great deal of poetry he’s done. He’s constantly unearthing unknown Russian emigrés who ended up in Los Angeles and so on and translated. He’s a very good translator of poetry. So, I admire him greatly.

Michael Glennie also translated rather a lot, possibly a bit too much. Sometimes perhaps he was working a bit too fast and made sort of minor factual errors. He can write. So, I still prefer his Master and Margarita to other versions. I probably shouldn’t say anymore because I say too many names.

Robert Chandler: [inaudible 01:09:08] I don’t mention.

Robert Chandler: No, I mean, I agree with every word you’ve just said. And, remembering people–a lot of Grossman’s work is itself a work of remembrance, endlessly wanting to include names of people whom he respected, both important, both well-known historical figures and kind of cooks and nurses and minor figures in Stalingrad who would tend to get forgotten about. He was always keen to include their names. He loves lists of names, remembering names, a bit like one remembers names in a prayer. So, yes, I agree.

Robert Chandler: Thank you.

Robert Chandler: Thank you very much for reading that passage; and I will remember that phrase, ‘desperate optimism.’ I, for a long time was rather puzzled that I’d always loved that Ikonnikov chapter and found it both moving and profound. And was a bit puzzled that I felt that most people were either not paying much attention to it or seeing it as perhaps rather naive or something–then[?] it is really in the last few decades with a revival of moral philosophy, which was very much out of fashion for a lot of the 20th century. And in particular, the philosopher, the Jewish Lithuanian philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, who worships Grossman. It’s only relatively recently that moral statements like the one you’ve just read are sort of finally getting the attention they deserve.

Robert Chandler: Thank you very much.