"Europe Central"
by William T. Vollmann
Viking, 811 pp., $39.95

Who does William T. Vollmann think he is writing for? During the past two decades, this California-born writer has published eight novels, three collections of stories, a memoir, a book of photographs, a 3,298-page "essay" on violence, and a hefty selected reader from his work. Add to this list "Europe Central," his latest Dodge Durango-size novel, and the grand total of Vollmann's output tops 10,000 pages.

Vollmann's inability to turn this faucet off has made him something of a circus-freak among writers, but to focus on this facet alone — as it is tempting to do — would belittle the scope of his ambition. Indeed, Vollmann seems to write long because what he wants us to understand is broad and deeply complex, fiercely resistant to simplification. His "Seven Dreams" series attempts to explore and respin the tale of how whites conquered the North American continent. "Rising Up & Rising Down" sought to create a moral calculus that could tell us when violence was justifiable and when it was not.

"Europe Central," not surprisingly, arrives with a fistful of ambitious visas to foreign countries and a familiarly stark moral quandary. Set in Europe mostly in the 20th century, the novel asks whether good people could be caught up in the slaughter that came as a result of totalitarianism.

Like Danilo Kis' "A Tomb for Boris Davidovich" or, more recently, David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas," "Europe Central" is essentially an interconnected collection of short stories. Each tale gets a kind of sister story, so that the book reveals Nazis and Soviets facing off across the gulf of Vollmann's imagination. Happily, Vollmann never tries to artificially bridge this gap; he lets the distance speak for itself.

The space between becomes the nubbly texture of history. Shuffling from one story to the next, we get to know many dozens of figures involved in the rise of, production of and propaganda of totalitarianism. Some of them are invented; many, however, are not. Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin make appearances, as do the opposing military leaders of their armies and opposing martyrs for partisan causes.

Vollmann has been criticized for being an insensitive inventor of female characters — many are prostitutes. That charge will not stick with "Europe Central," which brings forward a group of strong, brilliant and three-dimensionally wicked women, from Stalin's wife to Shostakovich's mistress.

As he did in "Rising Up and Rising Down," Vollmann storms into this highly charged bit of history. He asks us to put aside our preconceptions, to allow that there could have been SS with whom we might feel sympathy, Stalinists who were heroic if only on their own terms.

Take, for example, the case of Kurt Gerstein, the SS officer who puts his own life on the line to try to save the lives of those he is ordered to murder. In the end, though he clearly sympathizes with Gerstein, Vollmann is no idealist: He understands that the man knew his method of slowing concentration- camp deaths by using diesel fumes would not stop the killing.

Vollmann works his prose into a froth of surreal imagery, trying to capture the noxious reality of humans bending before the will of the state. Narrating sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third person, he looks down on his fascists and Nazis with pity and irony. One of the book's central characters is a morally cloudy figure, Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who becomes a celebrated public artist during Lenin's time and enjoys the benefits of such acclaim, not to mention Communist Party membership, even as he "kept silent, feeling worms crawling in his heart."

The worm of history is insidious, this book instructs. And more American writers are beginning to understand how deeply it has burrowed its way into our lives, how much it has feasted on our sense of right and wrong. Jonathan Safran Foer does in his new novel, "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," (reviewed on this page) as does Tom Bissell in his story collection "God Lives in St. Petersburg."

With this profound and fully realized new work of fiction, Vollmann asks us to put aside what we think we know of history and immerse ourselves in it once again. He posits that even if it is the devil that lives in St. Petersburg, not God, it is our duty to know him, too.

John Freeman is a writer in New York.