A dark gray tapestry of human frailty

Leaving Joyce Carol Oates in the dust, William T. Vollmann has become the most prolific serious writer of our time. Since the turn of the century, he’s published two bloated but brilliant 800-page doorstops, the novels “The Royal Family” and “Argall” (which the reviewer in this publication called “hubristic,” “wearisome” and, most cruelly, “sentimental”), as well as “Rising Up and Rising Down,” a seven-volume meditation on violent bad news through the ages that makes his previous opuses look like haiku. Self-indulgent? Insanely. Significant? Vastly.

Now, in “Europe Central,” Vollmann’s term for the place “where true knowledge lived,” he may have written the book he was built for. Like its predecessors, “Europe Central” is long and tightly packed. Indeed, it’s the only book of fiction I know that includes 50-plus pages of endnotes -- yet it justifies such notes as it justifies every single fiery page that precedes them.

Those pages consist more of a series of interlocking stories than a single narrative. The stories -- told by several narrators, including a high-ranking Russian secret service operative and a telephone operator -- weave a remarkable tapestry of mid-20th century continental history. Among its characters are dozens of emblematic figures such as Friedrich Paulus, the German field marshal who surrendered at the Battle of Stalingrad, and his counterpart in failure, Soviet Gen. Andrei Vlasov, who surrendered at Leningrad and then tried to establish a Nationalist Russian army to fight on behalf of Germany. There’s Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, whose favorite reading material was Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women,” along with Hilde Benjamin, the placid, death-dealing vice president of the East German Supreme Court who was known as the “Red Guillotine” and who was -- you couldn’t make this up -- philosopher Walter Benjamin’s sister-in-law.

Besides political and military figures, “Europe Central” contains artists such as poet Anna Akhmatova, painter Kathe Kollwitz, documentary filmmaker Roman Karmen and, especially, composer Dmitri Shostakovich. For years musical historians have debated whether Shostakovich was a genius or a hack, an opportunistic apparatchik or a suffering romantic, or, of course, all of the above. Born before the revolution, he went from early success to opprobrium to hero of the Stalinist state. He is, ultimately, the most ambiguous figure in this book full of such characters.

Vollmann explores Shostakovich’s marriage and affairs, primarily with the translator Elena Evseyena Konstantinovskaya, for whom he pines decades after their short interlude in the 1930s. For Shostakovich, who “communicated only through music,” Elena’s “sighs were the score; his kisses were the performance.” With her he felt “solace, gratitude, fulfillment, absolute peace ... no, no, that’s [an] exaggeration; life isn’t as fancy as that; we have to, you know, eat whatever food gets set before us, even if it’s only oilcake.”

In the narrator’s jump from solace to whatever repugnant substance “oilcake” is, we may find the key to the stages in Shostakovich’s life. After Hitler (whom Vollmann refers to as “the sleepwalker”) invaded the Soviet Union, the composer channeled the mentality of besieged Leningrad: “Chords and motifs trolled between his ears like tank silhouettes probing the dark teeth of antitank concrete.”

Later, during the Cold War, Shostakovich’s “strings dripp[ed] with bitterness and hate” as he nonetheless joined the Communist Party and reaped its rewards. During those years, he “kept silent, feeling worms crawling in his heart” as he wondered, “Can music attack evil? If I were to try, really sincerely, and perhaps to suffer, and to seek out the sufferings of others,” would things be different?

The question of ethical behavior in despicable times is asked in different contexts throughout “Europe Central.” Scoffing at “intellectuals who’d never been compelled to pitch their tents in necessity’s winds,” one of Vollmann’s narrators -- himself no angel, a former philosophy student who “never shot a civilian except when under orders” -- breaks to address us, “Reader, which would you choose?” Of course, this is impossible to answer in cozy high moral retrospect.

These questions are especially pointed when Vollmann visits the most problematic character in his historical menagerie. Nazi Kurt Gerstein, a “delousing expert” from the SS and a self-described “spy for God,” strove to undermine the system of extermination that he also built. While Shostakovich pours his pain into music, Gerstein confesses his sins to everyone, including the Vatican. Unheeded, he laments, “What action against Nazism can anyone demand of an ordinary citizen when the representative of Jesus on earth refuses to hear me?”

Honorably presenting the opposition to his own evident sympathy for Gerstein, Vollmann quotes historian-ethicist Michael Balfour, who says, “One is tempted to dismiss Gerstein as a romancer. He must have realized that his actions were having no result.” Balfour is right. So Gerstein pretended that his prussic acid -- a solution of hydrogen and cyanide -- had spoiled and suggested to his cohorts that their victims be killed with diesel fumes, which were less effective (and would, at least notionally, slow down the march to genocide). May he rot in hell.

Like Shostakovich and Gerstein, all of these people are as human as they are repugnant. Paulus writes letters to his wife; Hilde Benjamin had a husband who died in Mauthausen; others worry about their children. Yet they are never more human than in their inadequate response to the world they inhabit. Sure, they are “inmates of that epoch,” a phrase implying both a temporal prison and the prisoners’ lack of agency, but when the “poison tide was at [their] feet” they went wading.

Only the fictional narrators’ side comments reveal a caustic impatience with the multiple historical protagonists’ self-justifications. These comments often cut to the quick with lines such as: “In the Hitler years we still believed in books enough to burn them.”

Vollmann uses many devices besides laser-sharp epigrams. He vividly anthropomorphizes everything from machines to minerals -- “Steel ... illuminates itself as it comes murdering” -- and displays vast erudition on subjects such as Jewish mysticism and Wagnerian mythology. But what’s literary rather than scholarly is the way he intertwines voices and images. Here he is, using Shostakovich’s musical vocabulary to describe war: “Did you know that under ideal conditions bombs can express all eight degrees of the diatonic scale as they whistle down?”

The 20th century was an age of art rather than media, of military strategy rather than business synergy, and its prime evil was totalitarianism not fundamentalism. All of these quaintly antiquated realms of endeavor from artistry to dictatorship imply the capacity of individual actors, whereas Vollmann imposes upon them a worldview loosely similar to that of the usually unread epilogue to Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” “Europe Central” resembles “War and Peace” not merely in its scope, but in its perception of history as a determining force that individual lives merely illustrate.

But whereas Tolstoy failed (fortunately!) to fully convey his theories because of the abounding life-energy of his fictional characters, Vollmann comes uncomfortably close to success. He paints a gray world in which innumerable people “murdered innocently, because they’d been told to murder and because they were stupid” and where Shostakovich, ever faithful to the heavenly idea of Elena and ever accommodating to his own mortal comfort, sighs: “I failed; I was human.” There are times when that just isn’t good enough. Vollmann makes a reader yearn for more thoughts like Akhmatova’s “Whoever doesn’t make continual reference to the torture chambers all around us is a criminal.”

By attempting to understand these people and posing these questions through a sequence of riveting set pieces, Vollmann has created a book that aspires to the highest possible potential of literature. “Europe Central” is more than physically enormous; it is morally significant. *