The Road
By Vasily Grossman
Translated by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler with Olga Mukovnikova
(New York Review of Books Classics, 372 pp., $15.95)
What should we call the literary age of Vasily Grossman, who wrote Life and Fate, the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century? There was the “Golden Age,” from Turgenev and Goncharov to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov. The “Silver Age,” interrupted by the Revolution of 1917, had Blok, Gumilev, the young Mandelstam, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, Khodasevich, Mayakovsky, Bely, and the future Nobelist Bunin. But for what followed we have no name.
Yet has there ever been, anywhere, a pleiad as richly talented, and as thoroughly decimated, and as cruelly tormented, as the generation of Russian writers born around the end of the nineteenth century or, like Grossman, in the first few years of the twentieth? On Trilling’s “bloody crossroads” of politics and literature, has bloodier politics ever met finer literature? They wrote in the shadows of Lubyanka and the watchtowers of the Gulag, the pre-dawn shots in the back of the heads of their marshals and prime ministers, colleagues and professors, neighbors and friends, ringing in their ears. Yuri Olesha and Boris Pil’nyak, Isaac Babel and Mikhail Bulgakov, Yevgeny Zamyatin and Yuri Dombrovsky, Varlam Shalamov and Andrei Platonov. Gumilev, Pil’nyak, and Babel were shot. Mandelstam died in his first months in the Gulag, most likely driven mad and starved to death. Tsvetaeva hanged herself. Mayakovsky shot himself in the heart. Dombrovsky and Shalamov each spent nearly two decades in the Gulag.
“The age of a wolfhound is jumping on my back,” Mandelstam wrote in one of his finest poems. Grossman saw the wolfhound in action: his mistress was arrested, and so was his second wife. His friends, the young writers Boris Guber, Ivan Kataev, and Nikolai Zarudin, who encouraged him to write and helped with the first publications, were shot in the Great Terror of 1937.
But the wolfhound never jumped on Grossman’s back. Was it the incredible luck of the draw, or was he spared by his elevation to the celestial category of “master” by Stalin? (“But he is a master, isn’t he, isn’t he?” Stalin relentlessly questioned Pasternak in the famous phone call about Mandelstam.) Tortured though they were by abject poverty, by the arrests, imprisonments, and deaths of sons, husbands, and lovers, none of the “masters”—Akhmatova, Pasternak, Platonov, Bulgakov—were arrested themselves. (Even after writing about the “Kremlin mountaineer” in “cockroach whiskers,” Mandelstam lasted for five years, until 1938, and then was sentenced only to five years of camps—a miracle that could have been brought about only by Stalin’s intervention.) “Stalin has a very particular attitude toward me,” Grossman’s daughter recalled her father saying. “He does not send me to the camps but he never awards me prizes.”
Grossman died of lung cancer, impoverished and ostracized, in 1964, three years after the KGB found and destroyed all but the two hidden manuscripts of Life and Fate. (They would be edited, combined, and published in 1988.) Even as he was dying, he continued to polish his other masterpiece, Vsyo techyot, which has been translated as Forever Flowing, a sparsely plotted meditation on the sources and the mechanisms of Soviet totalitarianism, and one of the most powerful artistic disquisitions on modern tyranny ever penned. For twenty years, between 1968 and 1988, Grossman’s name was forbidden to be mentioned in print.
In the wolfhound poem, Mandelstam pleads with his age to leave him alone. It is all a mistake, he writes, “I am not a wolf in my blood.” He dreams of hiding from it all, of being stuffed, like a winter hat, into “the sleeve of the hot fur coat of the Siberian steppes,” where he would no longer see “the coward, the thin mud, the bloody bones in the executioner’s wheel.” But Grossman sought out his age, in all its perverse and insatiable cruelty, all its revolting lies. Although sick at heart and at times on the verge of collapse, he would not avert his eyes from the wolfhound’s jaws. He wanted to look his age in the eye—and, by understanding the wellsprings of its horrors, to make it blink. He was a “political writer” of genius, like Orwell.
The most difficult thing, Viktor Shklovsky wrote in his unsurpassed biography of Tolstoy, is to understand how a writer of genius is “constructed.” The Road will help to do this for Grossman. Among its many treasures, this carefully, even lovingly produced and meticulously edited book, complete with excellent biographical and textual notes, is an indispensable record of Grossman’s road to Life and Fate. The translations by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler with Elena Mukovnikova are competent and at times inspired. I have only a few cavils about the smoothing over of some of Grossman’s occasionally long and shaggy sentences—the syntactic imprints of his anguish, his unfinished and unfinishable moral and intellectual questings—and about the reliance upon more conventional English words to translate the rougher but fresher Russian originals. I have fiddled a bit with the translations of some of the passages I cite here.
It all began with the novella “In the Town of Berdichev,” Grossman’s first publication, which instantly established him, in 1934, at the age of twenty-nine, as a rising star of Soviet letters. It is a story of a pregnant Red Army commissar who during the Soviet-Polish war of 1919-1921 leaves her regiment to give birth in the house of the worker Haim-Abram Magazanik, his wife, Beila, and his seven children in the Ukrainian town (which was also Grossman’s birthplace and before the Holocaust the home of a large Jewish community).
There are unmistakable stylistic borrowings from Isaac Babel, who mined the same Soviet-Polish war for his Red Cavalry tales, where he rendered devastation and brutality in the solemn cadences of the Pentateuch. Ten years younger than Babel and his great admirer, Grossman sounds positively Babelesque in passages such as this one: “The twilight thickened; lights appeared in the window. Jews were coming back from the synagogue, their prayer garments rolled up under their arms. In the moonlight, the empty marketplace and the little street and houses seemed beautiful and mysterious.” (Compare this to Red Cavalry’s two-page gem, “Gedali,” in my translation: “On Saturday eves I am oppressed by the dense sadness of remembrance....I am circling through Zhitomir in search of a timid Saturday star. Next to the ancient synagogue, next to its yellow and aloof walls old Jews are selling chalk, laundry blue, wicks—the Jews with the beards of prophets, with passionate rags over sunken chests.... Saturday is coming. Gedali is going to the synagogue to pray.”)
The novella overflows with the self-mocking Jewish humor of Babel’s Odessa Tales and their unmistakably southern Jewish Russian. “If you think that I would have wished it on myself to give birth for the first time at thirty-six, then you are mistaken, Beila,” a maternity nurse, Rozaliya Samoylovna, tells Magazanik’s wife. Like Magazanik, who “bathed in the sunlit pillars of dust, in smells, the mewing of the cat, the muttering of the samovar,” Grossman casts much of the story in a soft light, his prose savoring the household suffused with love (and making the commissar’s final, heart-wrenching choice all the more shocking). When the commissar’s baby is born,
half-opening the door, [Beila] cried out triumphantly, “Haim, children, it’s a boy!” And the entire family clustered in the doorway, excitedly talking to Beila. Even the blind grandmother had managed to find her way over to her son and was smiling at the great miracle. She was moving her lips; her head was shaking and trembling as she ran her numb hands over her black kerchief. She was smiling and whispering something no one could hear. The children were pushing her back from the door, but she was pressing forward, craning her neck. She wanted to hear the voice of ever-victorious life.
Yet already adumbrated here is Grossman’s hard and unflinching stare, and his ability to write without mercy: in her birthing torment the commissar “thought of nothing. She wanted to howl in a wild, wolfish voice, to bite the pillow. It seemed that her bones were crackling and breaking, and sticky, nauseous sweat covered her forehead.”
In 1967, one of the most talented young Soviet film directors, Aleksandr Askol’dov, made a very fine movie called Komissar, based on the story. In the final scene, added by Askol’dov, the commissar’s son, adopted by the Magazaniks, walks with them and the rest of Berdichev’s Jews to be shot in 1941. It was instantly forbidden for distribution and all prints of the film were ordered destroyed. Askol’dov lost his job, was expelled from the Communist Party, exiled from Moscow as a “social parasite,” and banned for life from making movies. One miraculously saved print enabled the film’s release in 1988.
It is almost always awkward, and occasionally painful, to read the greats backward, from their late works to their early ones. Great writers take time to ripen. More often than not, juvenilia are marginalia. Mercifully, there are, in addition to “Berdichev,” only two early stories in The Road, and none nearly as interesting. Yet there, too, talent is unmistakable and enjoyable, the prose is beginning to turn direct and unadorned, and the world is observed in the same intensely precise way that would make it impossible, decades later, to read more than a few pages of Life and Fate without putting the book down to catch one’s breath.
In Grossman’s case, writerly maturity arrived not so much with physical age but with a war. The Crimean War and Sevastopol led to War and Peace. Life and Fate, which has been justly compared to Tolstoy’s epic, was forged by Stalingrad. Grossman was terribly nearsighted, with thick lenses in his wire-rimmed glasses, but still he volunteered to serve in the trenches, and was sent instead to be a war correspondent for the main army newspaper, Red Star. From the autumn of 1942 until Field Marshal Paulus’s Sixth Army capitulated on February 2, 1943, he reported from the “right bank”—a narrow strip of land by the Volga held by the Red Army against the relentless German bombings and tank and infantry attacks. There Grossman would find the themes of Life and Fate: the wellsprings of tyranny, mass murder, and heroism; freedom as the essence of our humanity; the dignity of moral choice as the essence of freedom. (So ringing an affirmation of the moral imperative of freedom had not been heard in Russia for almost a century, since Alexander Herzen, who, alone among Russia’s progressives, was more passionate about liberty than equality.)
Grossman’s war articles were enormously popular with the troops, but most of what was published in Red Star in 1941-1945 was marred by primitive war propaganda. In a story reproduced in the book, German officers urinate and defecate in bed. The editors of The Road are wise, with Grossman’s uncensored and brilliant war diaries already translated and published in the West, to limit all but one of their wartime selections to what would torment and inspire Grossman until the day he died: the Shoah.
If there is any substitute for love, Joseph Brodsky once observed about Nadezhda Mandelstam, it is memory: “to memorize is to restore intimacy.” In this matter Grossman had no choice. His beloved mother, Ekaterina Savel’evna Grossman, was shot on September 15, 1941, with the other Jews of Berdichev. Along with her last moments, he strained to imagine those of the millions of others, to endow them with what their souls were made of—habits, foibles, words, loves, memories—and thus wrench them from the murderous oblivion. For four years he worked with Ilya Ehrenburg on The Black Book, a meticulously documented testimony of eyewitness to the extermination of Jews in the Soviet Union and Poland, and in 1945 he replaced Ehrenburg as head of the editorial board. The book was ready for publication in 1946, but it was banned the next year, and the printer’s plates were destroyed in 1947.
Grossman succeeded beautifully in the restoration of intimacy by memory in his portrait of Boris Isaakovich Rozental, the hero of “The Old Teacher,” a novella written in 1943. We meet Rozental in the story’s opening paragraph on a warm summer evening, a day before the Nazis enter his town somewhere in Ukraine and a few days before he is killed along with several hundreds of the town’s Jews. As usual, the eighty-two-year-old retired high school teacher of algebra and geometry sat in the yard,
on the bench near the well with a small volume of Chekhov. Resting the open book on his knees, he would keep looking at one and the same page, half closing his eyes and smiling a dreamy smile like that of a blind man listening to the noise of life. He was not reading, but the habit of having a book with him was so strong that it seemed necessary to him to stroke the rough binding and to check with his trembling fingers the thickness of the pages. The women sitting nearby would say “Look—the old teacher is asleep,” and go on talking about women’s matters as if he were not there. But he was not asleep. He enjoyed the warmth of the sun-warmed stone, breathing in the smell of onions and sunflower-seed oil, he listened to the old women’s talk about their sons- and daughters-in-law, caught the ruthless, frenzied vehemence of the boys’ games. Every now and then, the heavy wet sheets on the clothesline would flap like sails in the wind, and his face was sprayed with fine mist. And he imagined: he was young again and a university student sailing on a sea in a boat.
But even a talent such as Grossman’s was powerless to reclaim souls from an abyss such as Treblinka, about which he wrote in 1944: so thick was the murderous blackness, so thoroughly were individual fates and sufferings subsumed, weighed down, crushed by the exterminated multitudes. Treblinka—or “Ober-Majdan,” in the official German parlance—was a tiny patch of sand and pines sixty kilometers from Warsaw, where in thirteen months, from June 1942 to August 1943, close to a million Jews, and likely more, were killed. According to the “dozens” of witnesses Grossman interviewed, at least one “transport” of cattle cars came to “Ober-Majdan” every day. Those who stepped off the trains were suffocated by carbon monoxide from tank motors, by pumps that sucked the air out of the chambers or pumped in steam to force out the air, or simply by cramming between four hundred and six hundred people in each of the ten tiny chambers and keeping them there until there was no air to breathe. “Cain, where are they, those whom thou hast brought here?” Grossman cries out in “The Hell of Treblinka.” There is no answer. This soul-killing anonymity, this inability to know and to mourn every one of the dead—their “powerful minds, honorable souls, glorious children’s eyes, sweet faces of old women, the proud heads of girls, all that nature had toiled through the multitude of centuries to create and that in a vast silent stream fell into the abyss of non-being”—was for Grossman the most painful aspect of his artistic engagement with the Shoah.
Grossman casts about for literary models, he even invites the reader to “walk the circles of the Treblinka hell”—but he dismisses Dante’s Inferno, later one of the tropes of Holocaust writing, as “Satan’s innocuous and empty joke” compared with Treblinka. He finally settles on a lament disguised as a sparse and meticulously factual report. First published in the November 1944 issue of the literary monthly Znamya, “The Hell of Treblinka,” which is included in The Road, is an account of no more than two or three hours, from the moment the victims alighted from their “transport” at “Ober-Majdan” to when their bodies were packed on trolleys to be delivered along the narrow-gauge rails to the giant ravines, deepened and widened around the clock by giant excavators. Grossman’s piece was probably the first detailed account of the systematic mass murder of Jews published in any language.
After their bodies were killed, the Treblinka martyrs were killed again, when their last possessions, all that could have made their memorial, were destroyed. Grossman hopes to conjure these things by listing them: “letters, photos of newborns, of brothers and brides, yellowing wedding announcements, all these thousands of invaluable objects, so infinitely precious to their owners but [which] were refuse for the masters of Treblinka, were gathered in heaps and carried toward giant pits, on the bottom of which lay hundreds of thousands of similar letters, post-cards, business cards, photos, pieces of paper with children’s scribbles and their first awkward drawings in color pencils.” On his desk Grossman kept a child’s wooden block, a kubik, from Treblinka, the letters and pictures on its sides almost completely faded.
With the advancing Red Army, Grossman entered the precincts of what he would call a “conveyer-belt executioner block” in September 1944, thirteen months after the last transport arrived at “Ober-Majdan.” By then not a bone was left: on Himmler’s orders all the bodies had been exhumed and burned. It had taken months, and the countryside for miles had been covered with “fat black soot.” The red brick gas-chamber building with a Star of David and the Hebrew inscription “Through this gate only the righteous pass” on the front—the victims were told that they were going to a bathhouse—had been razed, as were the guards’ barracks and the buildings where men and women undressed on the way to the execution. The ravine-digging excavators had been dismantled and shipped back to Germany, and the grounds carefully reseeded with grass and trees. But the soil under his feet seems to Grossman to tremble—the swollen, fattened earth of Treblinka, “swaying and bottomless, like the deep of the ocean.”
Suddenly the author is stopped in his tracks. There is a mass of hair on the ground:
Yellow, gleaming like copper, wavy thick hair, delicate, lovely hair of a young woman and, next to it, blond locks, and further down heavy black braids on the light sand, and then more and more. This must be the contents of just one, forgotten sack of hair, somehow left behind. So it is all true! The wild, last hope that it is all a dream collapses.... And it seems that one’s heart is stopping, gripped by such sadness, such grief, such anguish that is more than man can bear.
As his horrific tale unfolds, Grossman is enveloped in a dread that also infects the reader. Humanity itself seems to have been murdered here, and Grossman is desperate to find anything that might redeem our species. In the interrogations of the captured Wachmänner (the guards and tormentors from the Soviet prisoners of war, mostly ethnic Ukrainians), and in his conversations with Polish peasants in the nearby villages and with a handful of survivors, he searches for instances of heroism, for an affirmation of human dignity, which to him already was inseparable from freedom, even it was only freedom to die honorably—something to which he would return again and again in Life and Fate.
He learns that, as they were headed for the gas chambers, those whom Grossman called “the still living corpses” lunged at their tormentors with fists and sticks. One night a brief “battle” was fought between naked men on their way to the chamber and the Wachmänner guards who had to use machine guns and automatic rifles to bring down the rebels, their bodies strewn on the ground next to their primitive weapons: sticks, razors, a knife. A Jewish doctor-prisoner on Treblinka’s “staff” swallowed poison to avoid betraying, under torture, his comrades in the underground as they prepared the uprising. And on August 2, 1943, there occurred the Treblinka uprising itself. Carefully planned, its first objective was to destroy the camp and only then to secure the escape. Grossman rejoiced at the sight of “freedom and honor ruling” even for a few hours amid slavery and slaughter.
Most precious to Grossman were the traces of the ultimate antidotes to savagery: kindness, decency, love. As it did for the late Tolstoy, love became Grossman’s last hope against hatred and barbarity, which he thought eternal and recurrent. (“We must remember,” he warns on the last page of “The Hell of Treblinka, “that fascism and racism will emerge from this war not only with the bitterness of defeat, but also with sweet memories of the ease with which it is possible to commit mass murder.” ) In Treblinka he continued the search for goodness that he had begun at the ravines in Berdichev and Babi Yar and recorded in “The Old Teacher.” In that novella, Rozental stands on the edge of the ravine with his neighbor’s little girl, Katya Veisman, in his arms. The girl had been separated from her mother in the preexecution panic. About to be shot, Rozental is desperate to find words to distract and to comfort her. The “infinite sorrow” that “grips” him is not so much the inevitability of death but the absence of the words of love in these final moments of his life. Then he hears Katya’s voice: “Teacher, don’t look that way, it will frighten you.” And, “like a mother,” she covered his eyes with her hands.
In Treblinka, Grossman was “shaken to the bottom of his soul” by the stories of the “great and hopeless feats” of mothers who tried to hide their babies in the stacks of clothes and blankets, who struggled to give them a few more inches of space and air in the gas chamber. Their bodies were killed but not their humanity, he concludes, because to the last moments the murdered had preserved “the warmth of love.” “Humanity,” he was hugely relieved to have satisfied himself, “will live as long as there are humans.”
A decade later, Grossman saw Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. Captured with other paintings of the Dresden Gallery, it had been kept in storage for a decade and shown for a few days before being returned in 1955 to the German Democratic Republic. Along with tens of thousands of Muscovites, Grossman went to the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts to see the Madonna. He was stunned. In a piece called “Sistine Madonna,” he declares the painting the deepest, most durable piece of art he had ever seen or heard, above “Tolstoy or Beethoven, Goethe or Dostoevsky”—and wants to understand the source of this divine power. He decides that the Madonna embodies, perfectly, the hope and the redemption he had been searching for in Stalingrad and in Treblinka: “the human in the humankind.”
But there was even more to it. Raphael’s Madonna does not hide the baby, she “holds him forward.” This was the moment he had so desperately tried to imagine, and thought forever lost in the gas chambers and ravines: “the human in man goes to meet its fate.” He now sees the Madonna
treading lightly on her small bare feet, over the swaying earth of Treblinka; it was she who had walked from the “station,” from where the transports were unloaded, to the gas chambers. I knew her by the expression on her face, by the look in her eyes. I saw her son and recognized him by the lovely, un-childlike look. This was what mothers and children looked like, when they saw, against the dark green of the pine trees, the white walls of the gas chambers, this is what their souls were. How many times have I peered through the darkness at those who got out of the transports’ cars, but their faces have never been clearly visible to me—either the human faces seemed distorted by horror and everything faded in the terrible scream, or physical and spiritual exhaustion and despair obscured their faces by dull and stubborn indifference, or the carefree smile of madness blurred the faces of the people who left the transport and were walking toward the chamber. And now I have finally seen the truth of their faces, they were painted by Raphael four centuries ago—this is how man walks to meet his fate.... Their human strength triumphed over violence—Madonna walked on her light bare feet to the chamber, she carried her son over the swaying earth of Treblinka.
The Madonna and her child also stood for millions of Ukrainian and Russian peasant women and children starved to death by Stalin’s “collectivization” or killed by overwork and destitution as “kulak” exiles in the camps for the “specially re-settled.” Grossman thought that he had seen her at a train station in 1930—a peasant woman, “swarthy from suffering” as she approached a train car, “lifted her beautiful eyes and said without voice, with her lips only: ‘Bread.’ He also remembered her as a “kulak” wife, walking barefoot with a young son to a cattle car on her way from the south-central Russian provinces of Kursk or Voronezh “to the taiga, to the swamps beyond the Urals, to the sands of Kazakhstan.” In the baby Jesus, Grossman saw her son: “Vanechka, Vanya, why so sad is your face? The fate has nailed a wooden cross on the windows of your emptied hut. What long journey lies ahead of you? Will you reach its end alive? Or, exhausted, will you die along some road, on a railway station, in a forest, on the swampy bank of some little river behind the Urals?” And in this Madonna he intuited also the hundreds of thousands of wives of the “enemies of the people” swept up in the Great Purge of 1937:
It was she who stood in her room, for the last time holding her son in her arms, saying goodbye to him forever, scrutinizing his face, and then walking down the deserted staircase of a mute, multi-storied building. Her room is shut by a wax seal on the door, a car is waiting for her downstairs. What strange and watchful silence surrounds her in this ash-gray dawn, how silent are the tall buildings around.
And the Madonna, finally, is also a judge. We stand before her and we are “frightened, and ashamed, and pained.” Why was this century so awful? Why were we allowed to live when so many died? What can we, who lived through all this, say in our defense before the future tribunals? There is no acquittal for us, no excuses. Except this, Grossman resolves: “We will say that there has not been a time in history harder than ours, and yet we have not allowed the human in man to perish. And ... we continue to have faith that life and freedom are one, and there is nothing higher than the human in man. And thus this human in man will live forever and it will triumph.”
Almost audibly exhaling after the herculean effort of writing Life and Fate, in his last stories, written between 1960 and 1964, Grossman indulges the sheer mastery of his craft. In three of these wistfully graceful gems, he continued the classical Russian tradition of beautiful “animal stories” of love, devotion, and heartbreak: from Turgenev’s “Mumu” to Tolstoy’s “Kholstomer” and Chekhov’s “Kashtanka.” “The Road” is about a hard-working, abused, and lonely Sicilian mule who hauled ammunition for Mussolini’s troops first in the “hot and dry dust” of the Abyssinian deserts and then in the Russian steppes. Captured somewhere near Stalingrad in the “foggy, gloomy, snow-covered plain with no beginning or end,” he suddenly finds a kindred, loving soul in a small and sturdy Kalmyk horse. In “The Dog,” a smart Moscow street mutt, “with goodness in her heart that until then had not been needed by anyone,” is trained to follow her sisters Belka and Strelka into space, and returns from the harrowing trip with her mind addled but with her devotion to her master, the chief scientist, still unmistakable in her “foggy, impenetrable eyes of a humble being and an obedient, loving heart.”
In “Elk,” Grossman, who detested the killing of animals for sport, gives us a man dying after a long illness, suddenly bereft of his wife’s life-sustaining presence and seized, Ivan Ilych-like, by the mortal terror of a life misspent. The hero recalls shooting, almost point-blank, a she-elk who would not leave her maimed calf even as he had walked toward her and slowly lifted his rifle. In his last moments, his eyes meet the “maternal” eyes in the elk’s head mounted on the wall—“the glassy eyes covered by a misty film of blue moisture”—and “it seemed to him that there were tears in these eyes and that suddenly visible in the corners of these eyes were dark little paths of matted fur, the fur that a long time ago had been removed by the taxidermist’s tweezers.”
After Grossman’s death, two envelopes were found among his papers—letters to his mother written on the ninth and the twentieth anniversary of her execution, September 15, 1950, and September 15, 1961. Grossman wrote to her about entering her house in Berdichev in winter 1944, about questioning the neighbors, about trying to imagine how “you walked to your death” and “the man who killed you.” He wrote that so long as he lived, so would she. She would not die also because she was in his work of the “past ten years”—in Life and Fate, which is dedicated to Ekaterina Grossman—and because the “love and devotion that I feel for people is central to this work.” “And it seems to me,” Grossman ends one of the letters, “that my love and this terrible grief will never change until the end of my days.” And even beyond, we may add, because he transformed this love and this grief into great art.
Leon Aron is a resident scholar and director of Russian studies at the American Enterprise Institute. This article originally ran in the April 28, 2011, issue of the magazine.
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