Curzio Malaparte - The Volga Rises in Europe
A sublimely lyrical study of the intersection of culture, technology and warfare on the Eastern front
Author: Curzio Malaparte
Title: The Volga Rises in Europe
Publisher: Birlinn Limited
Publication Date: 1951
Pages: 210
Born Kurt Erich Suckert, in Prato, Tuscany, to a German father and an Italian mother, and taking Malaparte as his pen name to make a tongue-in-cheek play on Bonaparte, Malaparte is the epitome of the interbellum man of culture with shifting allegiances. In his thoughtful review of the novel The Skin Andrew Stuttaford offers the most elegant succinct description of Malaparte’s political wandering I found so far:
Malaparte was a fascist, and then he was not. He flirted with Communism, and then he did not. A protestant by baptism, an atheist by choice, he converted to Catholicism on his deathbed, but in his will left the house he had built on Capri, the most beautiful in the world some said—his “Casa Come Me”—to the Chinese Communist Party.
Malaparte’s political slipperiness can make him an untrustworthy narrator to some critics. To me, the impossibility of placing Malaparte in a specific tradition - literary or political - is what makes him more trustworthy, not less. We should not make the mistake of equating ideological consistency with strength of character and trustworthiness. Maintaining ideological consistency through the turbulence of modernity, through WWI, the great upheavals of the Italian interbellum and WWII, shows rigidity, not the openness and intelligence one may expect of a politically engaged writer.
There is however something very peculiar about Malaparte’s style of writing. In his preface to The Volga Rises in Europe - his collection of dispatches about the Eastern Front and the Leningrad Siege by the Finnish troops - Malaparte prides himself that he is hailed by notable contemporaries of his as the most ‘objective’ reporter of the war. If his writing is ‘objective’, it is not because its prose is sparse, succinct and factual as we may expect of journalistic writing. It is ‘objective’ rather, because it is ‘hypersubjective’, because it manages to captures the intensity of the war experience by means of the hyperbole, by describing the border-experience that could have only taken place then and there in excruciating detail. It is his great talent for finding the representative and symbolic example and describing it in lyrical detail that makes Malaparte one of the greatest political authors I’ve read. The writing of Malaparte is politically colored, and prone to exaggeration, straddling the line between fact and fiction, but it is so openly and by design. The reader is made part of Malaparte’s political musing and meandering, and is invited to see him test his political assumptions through his writing. It’s gonzo journalism meets political science.
Malaparte’s hypothesis for The Volga Rises in Europe is laid out in the preface, when he describes the theme that he meant to capture in the work’s originally intended title War and the Strike Weapon, that was censored by the fascist authorities:
I chose it because I felt that the title War and the Strike Weapon brought out in full relief the social character of this war and the fundamental importance of the ‘proletarian ethic’ as a factor in the Soviet military power, to which all those social elements of the social character of this war and the fundamental importance of the ‘proletarian ethic’ as a factor in the Soviet military power, to which all those social elements of the class struggle and of the technique of the proletarian revolution embraced by the word ‘strike’ made, and would continue to make, as significant a contribution as the weapons of war and the various aspects of the military art, such as discipline, technical training, tactical organization, etc.
There is something deductive about Malaparte’s approach here: there is a ‘proletarian ethic’ writ large that has taken form during the modern period on the European continent and it’s spreading, it has a significant impact on the nature of modern warfare, and he means to find it. He is looking for the real and lived examples of what he thinks of as the great cultural achievement of the U.S.S.R., of what he calls ‘the other Parthenon of Europe’:
Behind the Doric columns of the Pyatlyetki, the Five Year Plans, behind the rows of figures of the Gosplan, there stretches not Asia, but another Europe: the other Europe (in the sense in which America too is another Europe). The steel cupola of Marxism + Leninism + Stalinism (the gigantic dynamo of the U.S.S.R according to Lenin’s formula: Soviet + electrification = Bolshevism) is not the mausoleum of Genghis Khan but - in the very sense that bourgeois folk find so distasteful - The other Parthenon of Europe. ‘The Volga,' says Pilnyak, 'flows into the Caspian Sea.' Yes, but it does not rise in Asia: it rises in Europe. It is a European river. The Thames, the Seine, the Potomac are its tributaries.
The Volga is the ‘proletarian ethic’, and its rising. One can imagine a stream of communist ideology flowing like a river over the map of Europe. The title is just subtle enough to dodge the fascists censors.
The first part of the book takes place in the summer of 1941. During this time Malaparte was a front-line correspondent and followed the Germans as they made their way to the Soviet Union through the Ukraine front. There is no real narrative to speak of here, other than fragmentary meetings with German soldiers, an almost description of the German advance, and more theoretical musings about the ‘proletarian’ and ‘industrial ethic’ that prevails in modern warfare.
The scenes of Ukraine are of a ‘countryside in agony, a torpid, impermanent, decaying countryside’. An insecure landscape, that is sitting in waiting for the storm that is the German army. It is this contrast: between the silence of Europe’s granary and the noise, violence and ruthless efficiency of the German Pantzerwagens and motorized divisions thundering over its roads, that makes up the central guiding image/metaphor of this part of the book. Malaparte’s exploration of the impact of modern technology, coupled with a artisinal ‘proletarian ethic’ is here at its most explicit:
I watch them working; I note the way they use their hands, the way they hold things, the way they bend their heads over their implements. They are the same soldiers as I have seen 'working' in the streets of the Banato, outside Belgrade. They have the same impersonal, alert expressions, the same calm, deliberate, precise gestures, the same air of unsmiling equanimity. They reveal the same indifference to everything that is unconnected with their work. It occurs to me that perhaps the peculiarly technical character of this war is leaving its mark on the combatants. Rather than soldiers intent on fighting they look like artisans at work, like mechanics busying themselves about a complex, delicate machine. […] Their very gait, their very manner of speech, their very gestures are those of workmen, not of soldiers. The wounded have that tight-lipped, slightly angry air of workmen injured in an industrial accident. Their discipline has about it the same flexibility and informality as the discipline maintained by a gang of workmen. Their esprit de corps is an esprit d'équipe, a team spirit, and at the same time it as an esprit de métier. They are bound to their unit by the same bonds of loyalty and affection as unite a team of factory-hands to their machine, a team of electricians to their dynamo, a team of artisans to their lathe, to their boiler, to their rolling-mill. In the mechanized armies of today the officers are the technicians, the N.C.O.s are the foremen, the gangers.
His desciptions of the German war machine leave no doubt - what we’re dealing with is the upending and mobilization of the whole of the German industrial complex in service of the war effort:
Below me, on both sides of the hill, down in the valley and again on the opposite slope, I could see, slowly advancing, not an army, but an immense traveling workshop, an enormous mobile foundry that stretched as far as the eye could reach in either direction. It was as if the thousands of chimneys, cranes, iron bridges and steel towers, the millions of cog-wheels, the hundreds and hundreds of blast-furnaces and rolling-mills of the whole of Westphalia, of the entire Ruhr, were advancing in a body over the vast expanse of corn-fields that is Bessarabia. It was as if an enormous Krupps Steelworks, a gigantic Essen, were preparing to launch an attack on the hills of Zaicani, of Shofroncani, of Bratosheni. Yes, that was it: I was looking not at an army but at a colossal steel-works, in which a multitude of workmen were setting about their various tasks with a streamlined efficiency which at first sight concealed the immensity of their effort. And what amazed me most of all was to see this gigantic mobile steelworks leaving behind it no trail of smoking ruins, no heaps of rubble, no blackened fields, but only peaceful villages and unscathed expanses of corn.
By September 1941 Malapare was expelled by the facsist government at the Germans’ request and spent four months under house arrest in Italy. In March 1942 he was allowed to be dispatched again and tagged along with Finnish troops during the siege of Leningrad, where he stayed for almost a year. His experiences in the snow and silence on the Finnish front, with the great industrial city of Leningrad looming on the horizon make up the second part of the book.
Whereas in the first part I found myself skimming over some of the more expository passages, in the second part Malaparte’s writing finds the tone and brilliance I have come to expect from his work and takes on the style I became familiar with in my reading of The Skin, and Kaputt. Some of the more imaginative experiences described by Malaparte here almost seem as if they are finger excercises for his later works. One of the most striking images from Kaputt involves a large group of horses frozen in the Ladoga Lake near Leningrad. In The Volga, it's not horses, but Russian soldiers who are frozen in the ice:
Imprinted in the ice, stamped on the transparent crystal beneath the soles of my shoes, I saw a row of exquisitely beautiful human faces: a row of diaphanous masks, like Byzantine icons. They were looking at me, gazing at me. Their lips were thin and shrivelled, their hair was long, they had sharp noses and large, very brilliant eyes. (They were not human bodies, they were not corpses. If they had been I should have refrained from mentioning the incident.) That which was revealed to me in the sheet of ice was a row of marvellous images, full of a tender, moving pathos: as it were the delicate, living shadows of men who had been swallowed up in the mysterious waters of the lake.
In the passages that follow the image of the Russian soldiers frozen in ice, Malaparte gives what may be his best decription of the esthetic element he has sought to master throughout his work:
War and death sometimes partake of these exquisite mysteries, which are imbued with a sublimely lyrical quality. At certain times Mars is at pains to transform his most realistic images into things of beauty, as if there came a moment when even he was overwhelmed by the compassion which man owes to his like, which nature owes to man.
In his descriptions of the frostbound army on Finnish front the discipline of journalism strike a balance with an intense and lyrical aestheticiation of the excesses of war. The fragmentary descriptions of the silent, brooding Karelinian forests, and the proud and equally brooding and silent Finnish soldiers in their isolated outposts are captivating. In the Finnish forests and hilltops the rules of nature still reign supreme over the machine. The forest is portrayed as a living and breathing predator, in which only the young and most hardened Finnish soldiers, who were born in this organism, can move about with confidence. The scenes of them skiing through the forests, applying tactics of guerilla warfare, unconcerned about the hardships they face, adds to the idea that anything can happen when the Sovjets cross the line into Finnish held territory. One cannot but feel sorry for the groups of the godless, young Sovjet troops, who die all too greedily and almost indifferently, to protect their homeland.