Life and Fate (New York Review Books Classics)

Although initially touted as one of the most important novels of the twentieth century, the book is nevertheless a difficult read. This is Soviet Realism at its best, and it far exceeds in novelistic terms such efforts as Cement, by Gladkov and similar works. A modernized Dr. Zhivago it ain't, though. It's often compared to War and Peace, but except for the confusing array of characters and the wartime setting, I found little grounds for that. There really is no personalized love story, and it's hard, truly, to find and hang onto a single character and story. The contains little in the way of overt Soviet propaganda, but it quite clearly toes the party line in many respects. American readers have a very poor understanding of what Soviet culture was like or what Soviet society was like, and without that as a background, understanding the mindset of these characters can be challenging, to say the least. Set during the siege of Stalingrad, this novel also presupposes an intimate understanding of the military situation surrounding that city at the time; Grossman's revelation of the attitudes regarding Nazi barbarism, not only against Jews but against Slavs in general, was ground-breaking at the time of publication; this is counter-pointed by the anti-Semitic attitudes of the Soviets themselves, although theirs never reached murderous extremes, at least not in this era. Casual references to people such as Zukhov and Kruschiev are startling when they occur, and expressions of the characters about Joseph Stalin are also revealing of the attitudes and opinions of the typical Russian in the time. The stress and strain of the war, the uncertainty and enormity of the cost of defending the motherland against the invading German armies underscores the dramatic structure. Unfortunately, characterization is thin, and the action, while fluid and florid, is often confusing, as there is an assumption of knowledge of strategies, tactics, and even weaponry that goes beyond most contemporary readers. As an historical literary artifact, this is an exceptionally valuable reading experience; as an entertainment, it will probably not satisfy the average reader of World War II-set fiction.

Compelling, stunning, engrossing, moving and I could not put it down but I had to sleep. I underlined lines, paragraphs, and pages. Tears were followed by joy and adrenalin rushes as this huge story of the two great progressive socialist power went after each other to the death.

Life and Fate is overwhelming. Grossman brings out the horror of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, the awful treatment of Soviet citizens by their own government, the presence of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, and much, much more. This is a must read!

Bill Whittle mentioned this book so I thought I'd check it out.

I do agree that this book should be required reading for students.

And yes, it's about one of the most depressing things I've ever read. I needed to watch fluffy kitten videos on You Tube after reading this thing. It's a worthy read, just... ah. heavy. Very heavy.

My first Russian novel. Must read more. When I saw it's size I wasn't sure I wanted to get into it anytime soon but once I did I couldn't put it down. Excellent writing, very powerful. Amazing characters who you cared about. Really enjoyed it

Vasily Grossman's "Life and Fate" it pretends to be a sort of all encompassing novel about the Soviet Russia of WWII specially since the beginning of the war to the end of the battle of Stalingrad when the soviets took the upper hand and defeated Nazi Germany after, it suffers of being an unfinished draft poorly edited, that was confiscated by the NKVD from him and never publish in his lifetime, until smuggled out of the Soviet Empire many years latter. Grossman focus his attention in few of his over 150 characters, like Viktor Shtrum a physicist trap between scientific integrity research, and ideological party liners who prefer to stick to old scientific models, but politically party 's aligned, so safer. Political commissar Nikolay Krimov an old party liner who is so fanatic about his party ideology, that he is resolve to carry it even in a small pocket of heroic soviet soldiers isolated in the rubble of Stalingrad under constant enemy fire, and even after his arrest, expedited to the infamous Lubyanka prison, believing he must be guilty of something since the party is always right. His ex-wife Yevgenia Shaposhnikova torn between embracing a new life, and a new husband, a young General commanding a division of Tanks, and a new star on the rising, or throw her lot with the political outcast ex-husband. He is very descriptive of the horrors of Nazi concentration camps, the cruelty, and pettiness of the Soviet State micromanaged by Stalin. My problem with the novel, Grossman a war correspondent during the war treat the novel in the same fashion he got used to, as small journalistic dispatches for the press, like his book: "A writer at war" where no doubt he witness, and draw his material,and inspiration from, but leave many of the interesting stories inconclusive, maybe this was not his intention, but the book is what it is. Entertaining, absorbing at some points, mediocre at others, and not too good in some instances, a new Tolstoy he is not.

In the translators' introduction, Grossman, a Jewish-Soviet writer and journalist, is compared to Tolstoy. At times, his book reads as if he went to school studying how to be Tolstoy. The results are uneven. Grossman is at his best when he talks about a. The beauty of his native Russia. b. The intolerable hardships ordinary citizens experienced during World War II; c. The Battle of Stalingrad. Also when he describes and denounces the Stalinist system in the name of the individual and his freedom.

He is at his worst when he portrays his characters--which, unlike those of the greatest writers, hardly evolve as the story unfolds.Another weakness is that he consistently traces the horrors of the Soviet regime to Stalin, whereas in fact they were already created by Lenin. Yet another is that, though he does know some German, he is not very familiar with the history of the Third Reich. Possibly that was because, at the time he wrote the book around 1960, his access to material about that subject was limited. Consequently he makes mistakes--for example, by placing an extermination camp in Germany, where there were none.

It must be said that the book gets better towards the end. All in all, worth reading.

I was expecting a book about military history, not a soap opera that bounced around too much. Way too many characters. Not an easy read but I must say the concentration camp experiences were well written and if you didn't get nightmares then you are not alive.

Multiple story lines. Many many characters. For a person who is name challenged, it is difficult to follow all the characters with their various Russian names; sometimes one person may be referred to with three or four different names in the same paragraph. That said, fascinating book with some incredible moving parts including a woman writing a farewell letter to her son in anticipation of her death at the hands of the Nazies and another first person account by a woman doctor on her trip to the gas chamber including her death there. Stalingrad, the 1937 purges in Russia, life in Russia under the Stalin regime are vividly detailed. A dark book, not for the faint of heart or someone looking for an easy read.

The book is overly long with too many characters which makes it hard to follow. The interesting parts relate to the combat in the war zones. I could not read the whole book. It truly resembles a modern WAR & Peace

'Life and Fate' is one of the greatest Russian novels of the twentieth century, a semi-autobiographical account by Vasily Grossman of life under the twin horrors of Stalinism and Nazism. Grossman, a Russian Jew, was a war reporter and his book (banned in Russia under Khrushchev) focuses on an extended family scattered across the siege at Stalingrad, a Jewish ghetto and Nazi death camp, and a Stalinist concentration camp, mostly in the period 1941-43. Robert Chandler, its translator, has written an impressive introduction to the book, observing that Grossman came to reject all total ideologies:

"The tribute that a Grossman character pays to Chekhov is a statement of Grossman’s own hopes and beliefs: “Chekhov brought Russia into our consciousness in all its vastness… He said, let’s put God - and all these grand progressive ideas - to one side. Let’s begin with man; let’s be kind and attentive to the individual man - whether he’s a bishop, a peasant, an industrial magnate, a convict in the Sakhalin islands or a waiter in a restaurant. Let’s begin with respect, compassion and love for the individual - or we’ll get nowhere.”

Large Russian novels, books compared to Tolstoy's 'War and Peace' and acclaimed as classics, can appear intimidating. In fact 'Life and Fate' is beautifully written (and I should also add, translated) and many of the chapters are quite short, little more than a page. (The Kindle version facilitates a book search to refresh one's memories of the large cast of characters).

Those of us who have led sheltered lives shudder at the thought of what the Grossman generation had to endure. Yet his conclusion seems too austere: history is driven forwards by social movements, and those necessarily clothe themselves in banners and ideals. Few great social upheavals have been unmarked by sustained, collective violence against those invested in the status quo. The atrocious luck of Grossman (and millions of others) was that the twin forces of Stalinism and Fascism, which pressed so lethally upon them, were going nowhere in history.

Ow! Ah... oh... oh.... no... Heart wrenching. Insightful. Sad. Sweetness... where are you?
So you want a view of Stalingrad and its people during the World War II battle with Germany? Well here it is in all its raw suffering toughness. Will stay with you for many days to come as it gives voice to many who have gone before us who plead that you never forget.

Let me start by stating that no review can really do justice to this great book.
For starters it is important to know that it is written by a convinced soviet-citizen, a journalist with fame in the Soviet-Union, back in the fourties and fifties of the past century. But a journalist that came to understand how horrible the excesses of stalinism had been. And one that thought that after the reckoning of Stalin by Chroetsjev, the time was there to open up the "real existing socialism" to freedom and democracy.
This book totally respires that aspiration. So with hindsight you can imagine it was very brave and risky of Grossman that he put it down in writing. The theater he has situated his message in is that of the second world war, and especially the crucial episode of the battle of Stalingrad, end 1942-beginning 1943, the first defeat of Nazi-Germany and the beginning of the end for Hitler.
Grossman has been inspired by Tolstoi's War and Peace, of exactly 90 years before (and he doesn't conceal this): just as Tolstoi he offers a broad panorama of an important era, when Russia's fate was hung by a thread; Grossman gives attention to leaders (he even stands in the shoes of Hitler and Stalin) and to ordinary people (soldiers, civilians, a grandmothers, ..) and regularly he offers general considerations on history, friendship and other wisdoms of life.
But there are also lots of differences with Peace and War. The "inevitable force of history" of Tolstoi is replaced by the enormuous power of the state, that is the totalitarian state, that molds and crushes individuals without mercy. He illustrates this through some characters, with the very loyal partycommissioner Krymov as the most tragic victim. Grossman even equals the totalitarism of Stalin with that of Hitler, very surprising for a soviet-communist.
But the great force of Life and Fate lies in the drawing of the human characters. The evolution of the most important of them, the nuclear scientist Strum for example illustrates that most dramatically. Grossman's heroes are weak, but they are human; in this sense the author follows another great example of his, Tjechov.
Very special is the attention Grossman gives to the holocaust. Apparently he was one of the first to bring the real size of the persecution of the jews to the public attention (already in 1943). In this novel he makes this colossal drama very tangible through some characters. Horrifying. But he also frames it into the context of antisemitism in general, even in the Soviet-Union.
The binding thread in his novel is that of the unstoppable craving of life for freedom. It is this message that has made impossible to get the book published in the sixties. The KGB has destroyed (almost) all copies of the manuscript; and even a very courageous letter of Grossman to Chroetjov didn't alter anything. The author died a few years later, a broken man. Happily he had given a copy to a far-away friend, so that it eventually, in 1980, could be published.
Life and Fate certainly is one of the great novels of the 20th Century, especially for its themes. In a literary respect it contains episodes of a breathtaking, dramatic beauty, though it is a rather conventionally told story. Certainly it has soms weak episodes too, and some storylines are not quite elaborated enough. And for the unsuspecting reader the 243 characters (with the usual Russian first names, subnames, last names and nicknames) the readingcomfort will be severely tested. But nevertheless, there is only one word for this masterpiece: impressive!

A fascinating and complicated portrayal of Soviet Russia during WWII, centered around the battle for Stalingrad, but touching on all aspects of Soviet life. Unlike some dissident authors, Grossman is nuanced in his approach; Soviet life is not a dichotomy of evil Party members and poor, innocent everyday Russians, but even as the novel acknowledges the many shades of gray, it does not shy away from the truths of Stalinist oppression, and is not afraid to illuminate the parallels between Fascism and Stalinism, in spite of the two sides being on opposite sides of the war.

The characters are all loosely tied together by their varied relationships to the Shaposhnikov family, but this connection is often tenuous, and results in the novel reading as a series of vignettes, rather than as a unified story. This scattered, far-ranging style is necessary, however, to present to full picture of WWII-era Russia. Characters range from front-line soldiers to commanding officers to military commissars to scientists to prisoners-of-war to gulag camp prisoners to NKVD interrogators, and all their relations as well--mothers, wives, daughters, sisters, brothers, uncles. German soldiers are presented as well, and in as nuanced a manner as the Russian characters, and Grossman even ventures so far as to attempt to place the reader in the heads of Stalin and Hitler in a couple brief chapters.

An ambitious, sprawling, impressive work, "Life and Fate" is to mid-twentieth century Soviet Russia what "War and Peace" is to early nineteenth century tsarist Russia.

Grossman’s book is a stunning effort. He might lack Tolstoy’s gift for character, but his magnum opus, smuggled to the west by Andrei Sakharov and other dissidents, is a brilliant novelised record of the Stalingrad conflict which shaped, and continues to shape, the modern world. He really needed an editor but as he had to write this in secret, he can be forgiven for his occasional repetitions and diversions. When Grossman asked for his novel to be published in Russia in the late 1950’s the censor replied that he should be prepared to wait “for 200 to 300 years”. It is an accessible and devastating attack on Stalinism and the way in which all authoritarian regimes, of both left and right, erode humanity and moral courage.

‘Life and Fate’ has sometimes been described as the ‘War and Peace’ of the 20th century. It invokes the experience of a vast cast of 162 characters, Russians, Germans and Ukrainians in the main, who come together in the Second World War, between late 1941 and the spring of 1943, when the Russians first resisted, then drove back, the might of Germany’s sixth army. This key battle was the fulcrum of the Second World War. The conflict is always present and is described graphically, often with visceral realism, as any authentic account of war demands.

Grossman focuses our interest on a few key ‘players’ who represent four broad groups:
1) The comfortable Russian middle-class scientific intelligentsia, (Vicktor Shtrum, his wife Lyudmila and their daughter Nadya. Viktor’s colleagues).
2) The favoured, yet precarious, Russian political class, here represented by the Commissars, their families and their lovers. (Krymov, Getmanov).
3) The Russian military (Novikov, tank corps; Viktorov, airforce)
4) Perhaps the most poignant group comprises the defeated and despairing Russians. Some are held in Nazi concentration camps (Sofya Levinton, Mikhail Mostovskoy, the “Old Bolshevik”, and Ikkonikov, the “Tolstoyan”). Others have been sent to the Lubyanka, as prisoners of Stalin, repeatedly enduring brutal three-day interrogations which eventually end in false confessions.

Grossman’s characters are made to face the awful moral quandaries he confronted in his own life as a writer and journalist. So the dilemma faced by his central character, Viktor Shtrum, who is urged to make false denunciations of innocent colleagues, is probably autobiographical. (Both Grossman’s and Shtrum’s mothers were murdered early in the war. Both Shtrum and Grossman felt guilty that they could have done more to save them).
The author, who had been a mining engineer and a chemist, volunteered for the Army but failed the medical. Having already published some articles and a novel, he was invited to work for Krasnya Zvezda (Red Star), the Army newspaper. He was attached to a branch of the journalist corps which stayed in Stalingrad throughout several months of constant battle, on a vast scale. Although he was not a communist, Grossman’s reporting was soon popular and trusted both by the ordinary soldiers and by Stalin and the elite. He was favoured and allowed long interviews with top Russian generals and front-line soldiers, alike. Many incidents described in the novel are near-verbatim accounts of real events committed to his war journals. (See Anthony Beevor ,2006, “A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941-1945”. Pimlico).

As a Jew, Grossman was acutely aware of Stalin’s growing paranoia about Jewish intellectual influence in the USSR. Our central character Viktor Pavlovich Shtrum, a theoretical physicist, declares that he had never even ‘felt Jewish’ until he realised that many of his colleagues, who were no longer being promoted or recognised, were also Jews.

Grossman shares Tolstoy’s faith in the natural decency of the Russian peasant. There are touching scenes when an old Russian widow shares her meagre food with an escaped Russian prisoner who immediately vomits it up, because of weeks of starvation. Hunger, and its psychological effects, especially on soldiers and prisoners of both sides, is dealt with powerfully and at length.

Grossman is not particularly convincing when writing about women. Too often his female characters are simple, slightly sentimentalised ‘saints’ (Sofya, Marya Ivanova), although Shtrum’s teenage daughter Nadya is a notable and delightfully ‘sassy’ exception. When Shtrum is trying to work out his place in the hierarchy of Soviet science, he discovers that his rival, Sokolov, is getting 25 eggs per week, when he is only getting 24 (the average Russian saw none, of course). It takes his daughter to explain why. School gossip ensures that Nadya’s classmates all know exactly who is ‘up’ and who ‘down’ in the Institute’s rankings.

Some of the most interesting and believable dialogue, full-blown political debate, occurs between the Old Bolshevik, Mikhail Mostovskoy, and his fellow prisoners in the German concentration camp. Later, when Mostovskoy is interrogated by the sinister, yet plausible, Obersturmbannfuhrer Liss, there is a sense that each knows his imminent fate, as Liss attempts to explain to the old Communist that Hitlerism and Stalinism share a similarly cynical view of man.

The best writing is left to last, in chapter 60 of part three. Here, a few months after the German retreat, Stepan Spiridonov, the Stalingrad power station manager, is seen leaving the vast works, the power plant he has managed throughout the city’s violent siege of daily aerial bombardment. He leaves demoted, because of a brief period of unofficial absence. When he takes leave of his old colleagues, who have suffered so much hardship and danger with him, there is great warmth. Before he is sent to the East, he presses his cheek against the huge flywheel of the electric turbine he had kept running throughout the worst of the war. We can all empathise with his outrage at the injustice of his exile.

Such a long book with so many characters requires concentration. The writer assumes that the reader knows something of post-revolution Russian history and the basic distinctions between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. It will help if you know the reasons for Trotsky’s murder in exile and why the Soviet ‘terror trials’ of 1937 took place. If these events are unfamiliar, the following books might help:
Simon Sebag Montefiore (2007) “The Young Stalin”. Orion (final chapters)
Martin Sixsmith (2011) “Russia, a 1000 year chronicle of the Wild East”. Pages 119-211. BBC Books

So, all in all, a major work demanding considerable attention. Was it worth it? You bet.

Vasily Grossman
Life and Fate

Vasily Grossman (1905-1964), a Ukrainian Jew, was a war correspondent for the Red Army newspaper Red Star, reporting on the defence of Stalingrad, the Fall of Berlin and the Holocaust. His earlier work, Glyukauf (1932) had been criticised by Maxim Gorky for its excessive `naturalism' or truth to nature, while in 1961 the manuscript of Life and Fate was confiscated for being `Menshevik in sympathy.' In 1941 his mother was one of 12,000 Jews to be exterminated in his native city of Berdichev, and Grossman never forgave himself for failing to help her or to protest against the `cleansing' policies of Soviet Russia. In part, Life and Fate is the author's attempt at redemption.

But this epic novel is much more than a protest against the Holocaust; its vast panorama of society in time of war covers military and civilian life, life in the trenches and life at home, starvation and death being commonplace in both. However, even the German prisoners are seen as real human beings, sometimes cruel and cynical, at others depressed, angry and even cheerful or charitable. Interrogations, being informed on as a possible dissident, being ignored by friends who fear official displeasure if they do not conform and condemn - all these possibilities hang over the heads of every character, whether of high or low degree. Nobody is beyond suspicion in wartime. Anybody could betray you to save his life or reputation, and landowners (kulacs) who protest against collectivisation are sent with their families to starve to death in Siberian camps.

It would be futile to outline the many strands of plot that meander through this sprawling novel of 864 pages and a cast of over 160, but the central character Victor Shtrum is obviously based on Grossman himself. Life and Fate is an engrossing, but by no means an easy read. For a start the reader needs to keep a marker in the 8 page List of Chief Characters at the end of the book. These figures inhabit some 16 different venues, from Moscow to Kuibishev, from Stalingrad to the Kalmyk Steppe, from the Lubyanka prison to the Gas Chamber. Time shifts and characters movement supply an additional hazard, as does character identification among multiple forenames, nicknames and patronymics. The fact that several of them have almost identical surnames adds to the task; thus we have a Krymov, a Karimov, a Klimov and a Kirilov.

Grossman's novel has been rightly compared to Tolstoy's War and Peace, and its title alone invites the comparison. Under the stress and horror of war a human being is tested to his limits and the extremes of his character are highlighted. How brave, how loyal, how physically and morally strong is a man under fire or interrogation? How often is he or she obliged to jettison deeply cherished friendships or convictions? Grossman's Stalingrad, like Tolstoy's Borodino, becomes the crucible that tests a man's mettle.

Unlike other war epics, such as, say, All Quiet on the Western Front, Grossman's novel avoids protest; he also shuns taking sides. He gives us a scrupulously neutral narrator, one whose main business is to record rather than stir the reader to anger. German and Russian are shown as similarly human, both victims of totalitarian regimes whose survival depends on subservience to the iron will of the state and its necessity to crush dissent. The supremacy of state control over the individual will is matter for astonishment to the narrator: `There were cases of huge queues being formed by people awaiting execution - and it was the victims themselves who regulated the movement of these queues....Millions of innocent people, knowing that they would soon be arrested, said goodbye to their nearest and dearest in advance and prepared little bundles containing spare underwear and a towel. Millions of people lived in vast camps that had not only been built by prisoners but were even guarded by them,' And nobody dared say a word. Such total state control not only of behaviour but thought recalls the notions of Machiavelli, Hume and Nietsche, but was only put in practice in the Twentieth Century by the Messianic zeal of the world's notorious dictators. Yet but both Stalin and Hitler appear in the novel, not as monsters but as perfectly understandable and honest human beings.

Although for the most part the narrator is an objective reporter, occasionally, as he gives the viewpoint to the nuclear scientist Victor Shtrum, he shows that even a morally good and rational man can learn to hate, bear grudges and even be obliged to betray a friend. Just occasionally we find Grossman intruding as a wise commentator, as in this passage, where novelist becomes preacher or philosopher: `Human groupings have one main purpose: to assert everyone's right to be different, to be special, to think, feel and live in his or her own way. People join together in order to win or defend this right.' This optimistic and highly debatable intrusion in manner and matter is thankfully rare - although not without precedent in most of the Russian novels ( in translation) that I've encountered.

Such authorial philosophising is not what one especially relishes in today's fiction, but it is a minor glitch in what the Daily Telegraph rightly sees as `One of the finest Russian novels of the twentieth century.' Linda Grant in her 2011 Preface tells us that `In the seven years since I first read Life and Fate I have urged all my friends to read it. In part this is from a sense of obligation to a great writer, to rescue his masterpiece from state-sponsored obscurity. But it is also because I want others to feel as I have done - that they are entering the heart of the twentieth century, touching its pulse.' And so say all of us, possibly according with the views of the panellists on a recent BBC Radio 4 `Start the Week' consortium that this novel should be made compulsory reading in schools. Except that this dictate sounds far too authoritarian for Grossman, the staunch defender of personal freedoms and quirky individualism.

Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, the classic epic novel of WWII Russia, centers on the Shaposhnikova family and their life in totalitarian Stalinist Soviet Russia, and in particular on the Battle of Stalingrad, but there are literally dozens of characters in a multitude of settings.

The tale is unrelentingly grim. Nearly every character dies, is betrayed to the Soviet authorities, or simply suffers - and no ordinary suffering, but genuine Slavic deprivation. With a few temporary exceptions, universal hunger and material deprivation prevail. Hunger ranges from ever-present to starvation. Political betrayal runs rampant across every class of Stalinist Soviet society with mind-boggling inefficiency. Grossman also describes the very beginnings of the Nazi Holocaust at Treblinka and other extermination camps, including a blood-chilling scene with Eichmann having dinner at the camp to celebrate its opening.

Grossman's characters engage in extensive internal dialogue about their suffering and especially about their political punishments. Grossman recreates the frustration of not knowing why one has been accused of infidelity to the Revolution. Often the victim doesn't know by whom or of what they have been accused.

Grossman was a decorated Soviet military journalist who moved gradually toward the dissidence that flowers in his epic novel. What is remarkable, and a matter of some debate today, is how Grossman ever imagined that his book would be published in the Soviet Union - as he proposed during the thaw under Nikita Khrushchev. Instead, while Grossman was not molested, his book was taken "under arrest" by the KGB in 1961. Fortunately, Grossman kept two undeclared copies that were smuggled out to the West in 1980 and published in 1985.

Life and Fate is not an easy book to read on several levels. It is long - some 871 pages. It is ceaselessly grim and gritty. Keeping track of the characters and various plot lines is a challenge (The book contains a handy listing of the main characters in an 8-page appendix. For the Western reader, the Russian surnames are hard to keep straight. I recommend keeping an extra bookmark in place at the Appendix). Grossman's characters engage in lengthy intellectual dialogue.

For some of these same reasons, the book is also vastly rewarding. As the excellent introduction to the New York Review of Books edition puts it, Life and Fate is "almost an encyclopedia of the complexities of life under totalitarianism" and the pressures brought to bear on the individual. Absolutely the highest recommendation. Five stars don't do it justice.

Vasily Grossman
Life and Fate

Vasily Grossman (1905-1964), a Ukrainian Jew, was a war correspondent for the Red Army newspaper Red Star, reporting on the defence of Stalingrad, the Fall of Berlin and the Holocaust. His earlier work, Glyukauf (1932) had been criticised by Maxim Gorky for its excessive `naturalism' or truth to nature, while in 1961 the manuscript of Life and Fate was confiscated for being `Menshevik in sympathy.' In 1941 his mother was one of 12,000 Jews to be exterminated in his native city of Berdichev, and Grossman never forgave himself for failing to help her or to protest against the `cleansing' policies of Soviet Russia. In part, Life and Fate is the author's attempt at redemption.

But this epic novel is much more than a protest against the Holocaust; its vast panorama of society in time of war covers military and civilian life, life in the trenches and life at home, starvation and death being commonplace in both. However, even the German prisoners are seen as real human beings, sometimes cruel and cynical, at others depressed, angry and even cheerful or charitable. Interrogations, being informed on as a possible dissident, being ignored by friends who fear official displeasure if they do not conform and condemn - all these possibilities hang over the heads of every character, whether of high or low degree. Nobody is beyond suspicion in wartime. Anybody could betray you to save his life or reputation, and landowners (kulacs) who protest against collectivisation are sent with their families to starve to death in Siberian camps.

It would be futile to outline the many strands of plot that meander through this sprawling novel of 864 pages and a cast of over 160, but the central character Victor Shtrum is obviously based on Grossman himself. Life and Fate is an engrossing, but by no means an easy read. For a start the reader needs to keep a marker in the 8 page List of Chief Characters at the end of the book. These figures inhabit some 16 different venues, from Moscow to Kuibishev, from Stalingrad to the Kalmyk Steppe, from the Lubyanka prison to the Gas Chamber. Time shifts and characters movement supply an additional hazard, as does character identification among multiple forenames, nicknames and patronymics. The fact that several of them have almost identical surnames adds to the task; thus we have a Krymov, a Karimov, a Klimov and a Kirilov.

Grossman's novel has been rightly compared to Tolstoy's War and Peace, and its title alone invites the comparison. Under the stress and horror of war a human being is tested to his limits and the extremes of his character are highlighted. How brave, how loyal, how physically and morally strong is a man under fire or interrogation? How often is he or she obliged to jettison deeply cherished friendships or convictions? Grossman's Stalingrad, like Tolstoy's Borodino, becomes the crucible that tests a man's mettle.

Unlike other war epics, such as, say, All Quiet on the Western Front, Grossman's novel avoids protest; he also shuns taking sides. He gives us a scrupulously neutral narrator, one whose main business is to record rather than stir the reader to anger. German and Russian are shown as similarly human, both victims of totalitarian regimes whose survival depends on subservience to the iron will of the state and its necessity to crush dissent. The supremacy of state control over the individual will is matter for astonishment to the narrator: `There were cases of huge queues being formed by people awaiting execution - and it was the victims themselves who regulated the movement of these queues....Millions of innocent people, knowing that they would soon be arrested, said goodbye to their nearest and dearest in advance and prepared little bundles containing spare underwear and a towel. Millions of people lived in vast camps that had not only been built by prisoners but were even guarded by them,' And nobody dared say a word. Such total state control not only of behaviour but thought recalls the notions of Machiavelli, Hume and Nietsche, but was only put in practice in the Twentieth Century by the Messianic zeal of the world's notorious dictators. Yet but both Stalin and Hitler appear in the novel, not as monsters but as perfectly understandable and honest human beings.

Although for the most part the narrator is an objective reporter, occasionally, as he gives the viewpoint to the nuclear scientist Victor Shtrum, he shows that even a morally good and rational man can learn to hate, bear grudges and even be obliged to betray a friend. Just occasionally we find Grossman intruding as a wise commentator, as in this passage, where novelist becomes preacher or philosopher: `Human groupings have one main purpose: to assert everyone's right to be different, to be special, to think, feel and live in his or her own way. People join together in order to win or defend this right.' This optimistic and highly debatable intrusion in manner and matter is thankfully rare - although not without precedent in most of the Russian novels ( in translation) that I've encountered.

Such authorial philosophising is not what one especially relishes in today's fiction, but it is a minor glitch in what the Daily Telegraph rightly sees as `One of the finest Russian novels of the twentieth century.' Linda Grant in her 2011 Preface tells us that `In the seven years since I first read Life and Fate I have urged all my friends to read it. In part this is from a sense of obligation to a great writer, to rescue his masterpiece from state-sponsored obscurity. But it is also because I want others to feel as I have done - that they are entering the heart of the twentieth century, touching its pulse.' And so say all of us, possibly according with the views of the panellists on a recent BBC Radio 4 `Start the Week' consortium that this novel should be made compulsory reading in schools. Except that this dictate sounds far too authoritarian for Grossman, the staunch defender of personal freedoms and quirky individualism.

Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, the classic epic novel of WWII Russia, centers on the Shaposhnikova family and their life in totalitarian Stalinist Soviet Russia, and in particular on the Battle of Stalingrad, but there are literally dozens of characters in a multitude of settings.

The tale is unrelentingly grim. Nearly every character dies, is betrayed to the Soviet authorities, or simply suffers - and no ordinary suffering, but genuine Slavic deprivation. With a few temporary exceptions, universal hunger and material deprivation prevail. Hunger ranges from ever-present to starvation. Political betrayal runs rampant across every class of Stalinist Soviet society with mind-boggling inefficiency. Grossman also describes the very beginnings of the Nazi Holocaust at Treblinka and other extermination camps, including a blood-chilling scene with Eichmann having dinner at the camp to celebrate its opening.

Grossman's characters engage in extensive internal dialogue about their suffering and especially about their political punishments. Grossman recreates the frustration of not knowing why one has been accused of infidelity to the Revolution. Often the victim doesn't know by whom or of what they have been accused.

Grossman was a decorated Soviet military journalist who moved gradually toward the dissidence that flowers in his epic novel. What is remarkable, and a matter of some debate today, is how Grossman ever imagined that his book would be published in the Soviet Union - as he proposed during the thaw under Nikita Khrushchev. Instead, while Grossman was not molested, his book was taken "under arrest" by the KGB in 1961. Fortunately, Grossman kept two undeclared copies that were smuggled out to the West in 1980 and published in 1985.

Life and Fate is not an easy book to read on several levels. It is long - some 871 pages. It is ceaselessly grim and gritty. Keeping track of the characters and various plot lines is a challenge (The book contains a handy listing of the main characters in an 8-page appendix. For the Western reader, the Russian surnames are hard to keep straight. I recommend keeping an extra bookmark in place at the Appendix). Grossman's characters engage in lengthy intellectual dialogue.

For some of these same reasons, the book is also vastly rewarding. As the excellent introduction to the New York Review of Books edition puts it, Life and Fate is "almost an encyclopedia of the complexities of life under totalitarianism" and the pressures brought to bear on the individual. Absolutely the highest recommendation. Five stars don't do it justice.

If Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky (of 'Karamzov') and the Nabokov of 'Speak Memory' collaborated after spending months in a concentration camp this would be the result. Held captive by the book for 3 weeks, to see the kernel of humanity amidst the ruins of war and witness the almost unbearable moral struggles people encountered, found it truly a life-changing work. Maybe Lear comes close./..

Following the lives of the Shaposhnikov's and those linked to them, 'Life and Fate' paints a huge canvas of the war years from the seige of Stalingrad and its liberation to the world of the prison camps both German and Soviet,Himmler's gas chambers and the paranoia of Stalin and the totalitarian state.
'Life and Fate' is an epic of War and Peace proportions (it even draws on the similarity between the war at Stalingrad which effectively broke the back of Hitler's army, and that of Borodino that broke Napoleon)but here the focus is on the evil of state and political power that destroys all that is human and crushes the individual spirit. Strong paralels are drawn between the totalitarianism of Hitlers fascist state and Stalins communist state; even during the height of the Stalingrad seige,ludicrous political dogmas and denounciations carry on via half witted party bureaucrats who know nothiong of combat yet order senoir officers to send their troops into hopeless attacks that lead thousands to needless deaths.And on the German side, the same is true of Paulus's troops being ordered by Hitler to maintain a futile stand in a battle already lost.
'Life and Fate' is Orwellian in its warnings against political power and state control-only the extremely naive and foolish think there is a difference between 'right' and 'left' wing oppression- and the hypocricy of Stalin's denounciations and purges; the one person who was most guilty of collaboration and collusion with nazi Germany was Stalin himself,1939 to 41 with his pact and piece of Poland...
This is a work of genius, and staggers one to think that this is an unedited draft by Grossman (the MS being seized by the KGB)The only drawback for the Western reader is perhaps the abundance of characters and their various patrynomics that the book contains, but there is a glossary of characters and the story lines are so strong and vivid you are engrossed and never lost.

Grossman's "Life and Fate" is a classic. His depiction of the internal thoughts, attitudes and contradictions inside every human mind during a time of incredible historical turmoil is absolute genius. The pure truth that pours forth from every page is a testament to the triumph of the human spirit under incredible odds and its absolute destruction under totalitarianism, bureaucracy and sycophancy of whatever stripe.

Particularly moving are the letter from Viktor Shtrum's mother and another section where he describes in great detail the process through which tortured souls arriving on a train get taken through the stages of the gas chamber. Despite the emptiness one feels upon reading the thoughts of these minds so readily extinguished in this great conflict, there is a sense of great lessons for humanity's future tied up within their stories.

Quite simply this is an exquisite masterpiece of Russian literature and World War Two historical fiction. Not having been printed in English until 1980 and written in 1959, this work, like the beautiful human spirit that so eagerly presents itself in the pages of this tome, has an irrepressible nature that will continue to inspire those who take the time to listen to its historical lessons.

Vasily Grossman's "Life and Fate" - the Awful Truth of History
02/12/09 | by Ian Malcomson | Categories: book reviews
This is one of the best fictional accounts of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-5 that I have ever read. Grossman weaves a complex story of characters based on a set of very real events that take place in the context of the Battle of Stalingrad. The reader gets to see how both sides of the Eastern Front deal with the terrible adversities, challenges, and complexities of modern warfare as they are acted out through the personal decisions and convictions of individual men and women engaged in the life-and-death struggle of war. While on the surface the struggle for control of Stalingrad becomes the political objective for both the German and the Soviet armies in late 1942, Grossman introduces a whole other drama that takes the reader inside the consciences of the common foot soldier, inmates at a POW camp, local peasants, field general involved in the seige, bureaucrats secretly planning the death of millions and the very leaders themselves. By connecting all these disparate parties together in various situations surrounding the epic battle, Grossman comes to the timely conclusion that there is no morally right position in war that reflects the general values of society. Everybody either fights to destroy or survive, and that both fascism and communism, as the governing ideologies, are both interchangeably evil. Both Stalin and Hitler are portrayed as monsters whose only purpose is to inflict pain and destruction of others in the interest of wielding power. There is no glory in an armed conflict that attempts to strip the individual of his or her right to freedom. In all this, the author does a capable job in preserving the individual against the scourge of the tyrant. That for Grossman is the real monument to human endeavour. Acts of bravery, courage, and determination are the true forces that define the fate of man's freedom, and not the mailed fist of a crackpot dictator seeking to destroy. Lots of thought-provoking dialogue in this story, which rivals anything coming out Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago" trilogy. His description of the Battle of Stalingrad is both detailed in technical terms and poignant to human emotions. This is a one-of-a-kind narrative that allows the reader to feel like he or she is a big part of the action. I found this to be a very rewarding read because it put right inside the indiviudal minds and souls of those who both witnessed and participated in this tragic event.

This outstanding novel is simply the best work of fiction to come from WWII. Remarkably ambitious in scope, Life and Fate aims at presenting a panoramic view of Soviet society at the time of the battle of Stalingrad. Grossman shows combat in Stalingrad itself, life in the army behind the front lines, the character of civilian life, German death camps containing Soviet citizens, work camps in the Gulag, and the Lubyanka prison. Grossman was a journalist during the war, spent much of his time at the front, and this book draws directly from his experiences. Beyond conveying the experience of the war in the Soviet Union, Life and Fate is also a devastating indictment of Stalin's Russia. Grossman shows directly the pervasive character of totalitarianism in the Soviet Union and its structural similarities to Nazi Germany. In many respects, Life and Fate is a celebration of human impulses under the pressure of totalitarianism and the ordeal of total war. Grossman, however, is never sentimental and unflinchly shows the horrors of total war and the basic corruption of Stalin's Soviet Union.

A number of comments have been made about Grossman's relatively plain, almost journalistic style. These kind of comments considerably underestimate Grossman's achievement. Certainly, he drew on his experiences as a journalist and intended to produce a relatively easy to read book. His handling of the multiple plot lines, however, is excellent. His ability to quickly sketch believeable characters is outstanding and he has a eye for telling personal and social details. Some critics have commented correctly that Life and Fate is the greatest achievement of the Soviet Social Realist style. In its relatively unadorned prose, avoidance of modernist fictional techniques, and attention to the lives of ordinary people, Life and Fate is an exemplar of Social Realism. All this is employed, however, in a brilliantly successful effort to expose the brutality and fraudulence of the Soviet State. Soviet censors attempted to impose the Social Realist style to support the Stalinist state. Grossman used their methods to subvert their aims and to reaffirm the importance of simple human decency.

Grossman has spoken to us beyond the grave. It is with a heavy, Slavic accent in the "Russian" style - huge tomes, sweeping arcs of drama, a large cast of characters, death, repression, a cry for freedom and an attempt to make sense of both the internal and external world.
Some reviewers both here and elsewhere have taken Grossman to task for suggesting that the Soviet regime was a mirror image of the Nazi state. Both were collectivist societeis, both exalted group rights over the individual, both were run by a party apparatus, Both employed terror on their own citizens and remained in power through sheer force. Germany has had to atone for her crimes many times over but the Soviet state has yet to acknowledge the murder of up to 50 million people according to the mathematician dissident Vladimir Bukovsky.
The titantic struggle between these two forces forms the basis of the book. But it is not just the battles; Grossman allows us to see the human behind the machine, the wants and needs and hopes of common people. It is impossible for anyone who has not been in battle - particularly a siege - to grasp the futility and absolute unreality of the situation. That is why the small deeds and everyday actions seem to stand out; they are subtle reminders of a time without war, normality and reason.
And in this theater of the absurd, Grossman documents the almost insane actions of the Soviet regime: The political commander's rabid focus on Marxist theory when people are starving, the wasting of human beings as mere objects, the violence and above all else, arguing Socialist theory amidst rubble, the dreary, gray, hapless lives in a totalitarain state.
There are some who can never bring themselves to criticize the Soviet regime and Marxism's utter failure in almost every field of achievement - economic, political, artistic, financial, scientific. Grossman says yes, this is all true, but what counts are the pathetic lives of the unlucky but steadfast citizens caught in the grip of madmen; this is where the real crime takes place. It ends in a silent desolation that is almost stifling.

As an ardent reader of history, I was familar with the horrors perpetrated by Hitler and Stalin. But it took Grossman's "Life and Fate" to bring them to life. I almost hate to say it for fear of scaring readers off, but Grossman puts you there under the crushing weight of a society crafted by Stalinism, he puts you there in a Nazi death camp. As terriable as that sounds (and it is indeed), this book is simply too good not to be read. Its sweep and scope and rush of characters is pure Tolstoy. But Grossman combines this with an eye for detail that comes from his years as a reporter (he was a popular war correspondent in WWII) to make a thoroughly modern novel. Grossman shows how humans are capable of unspeakable cruelty and (almost as bad) indifference to each other, but also contain the ability to be caring and kind even to strangers they might have every reason to hate. If I had to recommend a handful of books as my top pics, this would definitely make the list.

I confess Life and Fate devoured me. Tuesday, I had to stop work, stop my normal schedule, stop answering the telephone, and read it. And this was not my first, but my second time through its pages.

Life and Fate's main action takes place from the fall of 1942 until the spring of 1943. It reaches forward in history to the 1950s and reaches back to the Bolshevik revolution itself. it covers every aspect of the Soviet-German war from Stalin and Hitler's offices, to devastated huts inhabited by soldiers and refugees, from the halls of the scientific academies to the dark quarters of the Gulag and the gas chambers of the Nazi death camps.

While there is a lot of action in this book in the smoke and fire of Stalingrad, in the dungeons of Stalin's prisons, and in the death camps of Hitler , the strength of this book is how it covers an important part of history, but also shows the life, loves, yearnings, hearts and minds of real people struggling through the Second World War in the Soviet Union.

Grossman's political target is what he calls the "totalitarian" State. He sees symmetry between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Mostly he frames Nazi Germany as being identical to the Stalinist Soviet Union, a depiction that harms the accuracy of his depiction of Germany. Like many around the world of his generation, Grossman asserts the strength of the human spirit and the struggle for freedom and socialism against these twin horrors. Yet, Grossman appears too much in awe of Stalin and Hitler, and does not realize that their brutality flowed from their weaknesses, not strength.

Even people I know who should know better, see the heroic defense of the Russian Revolution's conquests against Hitler only through the fantasies produced by Stalinist propaganda. Grossman shows you how this fight was muzzled by Stalin's regime whose abominations did not cease, but grew during the Second World War. Grossman points to the growth of Russian Chauvinism, anti-Semitism, oppression and prejudice against non-Russian nationalities throughout the war.

While he depicts the bravery of the Red Army, Grossman is honest about its real character. We see its brutality--generals slapping and beating up subordinate officers and soldiers, NKVD officers persecuting generals for military decisions, a commissar plans to have heroic frontline soldiers completely surrounded by the Germans disciplined for living in a spirit of equality between officers and men, behind it all Stalin threatening to and sometimes imprisoning or executing generals. We see the corruption of the most celebrated of Red Army commanders: with their special privileges in food and drink, their pastime of preying sexually on women attached to their armies, and their concern for their own fame, and their reveling in Stalin's readoption of the regalia and customs of Tsarist militarism. We see the way science is subordinated to the bureaucracy's whims and how integrity and survival are in conflict in Stalinist Russia.

For many in the USSR the idea of Soviet victory brought forth dreams of a better day for the peoples of the Soviet Union, but the Stalinist bureaucracy had to break those dreams had to be broken and the dreamers throttled. Grossman gives you the feeling of the dreams for socialist democracy, the end of forced collectivization, and scientific freedom held by his characters and their friends are crushed by the Stalin regimes growing persecution, by its growing identification with the rotten legacy of Tsarist racism, discrimination, and prejudice.

Vasily Grossman was in a position to know. A former engineer who became a writer in the 1930s, he was one of the greatest war correspondents of the Soviet Army. His realistic depictions of the war made him widely popular with the front line troops and allowed his articles and dispatches to carry grimy accurate truth that the censors removed from the work of other correspondents.

Vasily Grossman was one of the first correspondents to document that Nazi extermination of the Jews. His article "The Hell of Treblinka" in _A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941-1945_, a collection of his war correspondence and diaries, is one of the great works of modern literature. The passages in Life and Fate on the death camps rise to this level of brilliance, truth, and beauty.

Likewise, Life and Fate has a marvelous chapter modeled after the murder of the tens of thousand of Jews in the town where Grossman was born, the town where his mother lived and died during the war, the chapter centered on a character modeled on the Grossman's mother. Like so much in this book, this chapter could stand on its own as a masterpiece.

But a great novelist like Grossman must do more than teach history. He must give us characters we care about well enough to struggle its many pages with.

Grossman's characters are full humans, with flaws, with weaknesses, with needs, with enjoyment of little personal desires, with fears, and even crimes they perform to stay themselves. Somehow he can explain not only the hideousness of Stalinism and the terror of war, but the strength of our need for love from family, from colleagues, for romance.

What is missing is any full depiction of the USSR's everyday working class, its peasants, and its rank and file soldiers. All Grossman's major characters are military officers, industrial leaders, party functionaries, scientists, and intellectuals. To be sure, we see the suffering and struggle of ordinary soldiers, workers, and peasants as they cross the lives of his characters, but not through their own lives

Grossman was not allowed to finish this book from him. The NKVD took the book from him. He believed until he died that all the copies of the book had been destroyed. Fortunately, copies survived. One was smuggled out of the USSR and published after his death.

This book suffers from some of the normal problems of a final draft of a great novel has before being edited. In places it is too wordy, we do not know what happens to characters for long sections of the narrative, and Grossman's great digressions distract us from the narrative. For this we can blame the NKVD, not Grossman

Life and Fate is one the great works of Literature. It becomes part of your life beyond the moments its pages are in front of you. We develop such a strong feeling for the lives, hopes, and dreams of his characters that when we finish this book we cannot say "Farewell" to them. We think about their lives and struggles like we do our own. We need to revisit them by reading this book again.

Vasily Grossman submitted his manuscript for Life and Fate in 1960 at the height of Khrushchev's post-Stalinist cultural thaw. Subsequent to a review of the manuscript Grossman was advised that the book (but not Grossman) was being arrested. Grossman was told the book would not be published for at least 200 years. All copies of the manuscript were rounded up and sent to party headquarters for safekeeping. The manuscript was arrested because, inter alia, it dared to imply that Hitlerism and Stalinism bore more similarities than differences. Grossman made this point obliquely by putting these words into the mouth of a despicable SS death camp commandant. Nevertheless this was too much for both Khrushchev and the apparatchiks at the National Union of Writers and the book was banned.

Life and Fate was eventually published because a manuscript remained at large. The author Vladimir Voinovich helped smuggle a copy to Switzerland where it was published in 1980, 15 years after Grossman's death in 1965. The book was published in the USSR in 1989 to sensational results. Nevertheless, Grossman remains relatively obscure outside Russia and that is a great pity.

Grossman was born in 1905. Although Jewish by birth, Grossman was never particularly religious and his family supported the 1917 revolution. After receiving a degree in chemistry Grossman found work in the Donbass coal mines. Encouraged by Maxim Gorky, Grossman began writing short stories and plays. Grossman adopted Stalin's maxim that writers were engineers of human souls and his work was firmly rooted in the rather tedious school of socialist realism. Grossman's play "If You Believe the Pythagoreans" attacked the philosophical rants of intellectuals and argued that they were garbage not "worth a good worker's boot." For all intents and purposes, Grossman was a true believer. How and why did this change? Life and Fate begins to answer that question.

Grossman volunteered for the front after the German invasion in 1941 and worked as a reporter for Red Star, an army newspaper known for its forthright reports from the front lines. (The historian Anthony Bbeevor was written a wonderful account of Grossoman's World War II reporting.) Grossman received national fame due to his reporting from the front lines. Grossman was the first reporter to write first hand accounts of German concentration camps and his experience there had a devastating impact on his world view. Grossman learned after the war that his mother, who he failed to move from Berdichev to Moscow after the invasion perished in Hitler's genocide. It was the death of his mother and the post war anti-Semitic campaigns of Stalin that may have led Grossman to challenge his own acceptance of Soviet orthodoxy and set him to work on Life and Fate and his other major work, Forever Flowing.

Life and Fate is a remarkable novel despite its occasional unremarkable prose that contains a trace of Grossman's earlier socialist realism style. The book's emotional core involves humanity's struggle for freedom in an unfree world. Josef Skvorecky put the central question of Life and Fate thusly: "Does man lose his innate yearning for freedom? The fate of both man and the totalitarian State depends on the answer to this question. If human nature does change, then the eternal and world wide triumph of the dictatorial state is assured; if his yearning for freedom remains constant, then the totalitarian state is doomed."

The scope of the story and the cast of characters are vast and in the tradition of both Tolstoy and Pasternak. This edition contains a list of characters and their geographic location during the story. The central characters include Viktor Shtrum, a scientist, and his extended family. Other central figures include Captain Grekov, the leader of a group of soldiers doing battle with the Nazi's in a bombed out apartment building in Stalingrad. Grekov is an iconoclast doing battle not only with the Nazis but the political commissars that spent more time concerned with political orthodoxy than fighting. Key scenes in the book also take place in a German concentration camp and a Russian labor camp.

Life and Fate is a wonderful book. Grossman's assertion towards the end of his work that we can be slaves by fate but not slaves by nature is an important concept to keep a hold of today.

End note: Robert Chandler's translation does an excellent job conveying the subtleties and nuances of Grossman's prose.

This is a very great novel, not merely because of what is depicted, but also because of the artistry of the depiction which, at different points, recalls Tolstoy and Chekhov.
There are things in this novel that most novelists, I imagine, would prefer not to depict so openly. A mother spends a night crying over the grave of her son; a Jewish lady, trapped in a ghetto, writes to her son about her certain and imminent death; a man is tortured in the Lubyanka; we even follow a group of Jews into the gas chamber itself. All this is, as it should be, harrowing, but Grossman is too honest to shirk any of it. The eventual impression, paradoxically, is of hope.
As with "War and Peace", this novel is on an epic scale, but the focus is always firmly on the individual characters, who are depicted with unfailing humanism and unsentimental compassion. There are only a small handful of novels that have moved me as intensely as this one has.

I picked up this book in a used bookstore because I love Russian novelists. I had never heard of Grossman before and I expected possibly a good book, certainly a clever book, because even inferior Russian novelists are clever. However, the little hairs on the back of my neck went up when I began to read the first few pages. I realized after the first couple of chapters that I was not reading an adequate or even a diverting book--but AN ABSOLUTE MASTERPIECE! The level of detail--of setting and character--is amazing, and the way in which Grossman takes situations which could be rendered with bathos or melodrama and makes them fresh takes the breath away. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It's an achievement of the first order. I put it shoulder-to-shoulder with my favorite Russian writers: Nabokov, Gogol, Bulgakov, etc.

This book was the selection of my local bookstore reading group. Like many of their selections, I had never heard of it before and was a bit daunted by its length of 871 pages. But once I started reading it, I was completely swept into the story and I found myself thinking about it as I went about my day and looking forward to getting back to reading it. Simply put, it is nothing less than a masterpiece.

The author, Vasily Grossman was an important journalist in the Soviet Union during WWII. He covered all the important battles of the war - a true witness to history. Later, he wrote this book and it so infuriated the Soviet Union that they even confiscated the typewriter ribbons he used. It wasn't until after his death that his book was finally published. And this, I feel was a gift to the world.

Like the great Russian writers of the 19th Century, this is a complex book. Told from the point of view of one family, there are dozens of characters and deep important themes. There is life and death and fear and horror and love and tenderness and cold cold winters. The Soviet Union and the way it shapes individuals is a driving force. There's the battle of Stalingrad and the deprivation of the people. I could almost feel the cold of the winters, the pangs of hunger and the disgust of only having a bit of rotted horse meat and a leaf of cabbage to eat. Everyone suffered in some way. There is the mother who learns of her soldier's son's death, the Jews bound for the gas chambers, the scientist who fears for his life, the inmates of the Russian prison camps, love affairs and love triangles and, most of all, the kind of oppression that makes one testify against his neighbor in order to save his own life. There are also the feelings of guilt that eventually force even the strongest to eventually confess to anything. There's a dark climate and issues of personal freedom. This is the Soviet Union where the effect of politics on the people makes everyone afraid all the time. And then there are bits of humanity that couldn't help but make me smile.

How the author wove all this together, even making Stalin and Hitler themselves characters in the book, is just pure genius. It was a little confusing at first because of all the characters with similar names, but I soon got used to it and felt I was right there, living the nightmare of the Soviet Union in the 20th century and having nothing but admiration for the people who had to live under such tyranny. This is one of the finest books I've ever read. I give it my highest recommendation.

I've worked in used bookstores for more than fifteen years and have read voraciously for all of that time, and I hope you will believe me when I say that this is simply the best novel I've ever read. When you also consider that it is a translation, that's really saying something. The book is an easy read, the language is very straightforward, yet I was blown away every time I sat down to read it. The book entertains while being profoundly moral, like a Kurosawa film. Along with Lowry's Under The Volcano, with its fantastically beautiful prose (and serious shortage of plot), this sits at the very top of my stack. So don't let its length bother you - instead, be grateful that such a such a killer read isn't over too soon.

This is one of the greatest books of literature I have ever read. I have read a lot. Tremendous historical fiction.
This was mesmerizing for me all the way through, one of those you hate to see end. And it is lengthy, which I like, too.
A magnificent panorama of history, culture, passion, society and characters.
Based around WWII which you can see more of in other reviews. Deeply personal, moving. You can feel all the emotions, strengths and weaknesses.
A must read.

and bear his hopes 'bove wisdom, grace, and fear." Wm. Shakespeare, Macbeth.

Vasily Grossman submitted his manuscript for Life and Fate in 1960 at the height of Khrushchev's post-Stalinist cultural thaw. Subsequent to a review of the manuscript Grossman was advised that the book was being arrested. The book could not be published for at least 200 years. All copies of the manuscript were rounded up and sent to party headquarters for safekeeping. The manuscript was arrested because it dared to imply that Hitlerism and Stalinism bore more similarities than differences. Grossman made this point obliquely by putting these words into the mouth of a despicable SS death camp commandant. Nevertheless this was too much for both Khrushchev and the apparatchiks at the National Union of Writers and the book was banned. Life and Fate was eventually published because a manuscript remained at large. The author Vladimir Voinovich helped smuggle a copy to Switzerland where it was published in 1980, 15 years after Grossman's death in 1965. The book was published in the USSR in 1989 to sensational results. Nevertheless, Grossman remains relatively obscure outside Russia and that is a great pity.

Grossman was born in 1905. Although Jewish by birth, Grossman was never particularly religious and his family supported the 1917 revolution. After receiving a degree in chemistry Grossman found work in the Donbass coal mines. Encouraged by Maxim Gorky, Grossman began writing short stories and plays. Grossman adopted Stalin's maxim that writers were engineers of human souls and his work was firmly rooted in the rather tedious school of socialist realism. Grossman's play "If You Believe the Pythagoreans" attacked the philosophical rants of intellectuals and argued that they were garbage not "worth a good worker's boot." For all intents and purposes, Grossman was a true believer. How and why did this change? Life and Fate begins to answer that question.

Grossman volunteered for the front after the German invasion in 1941 and worked as a reporter for Red Star, an army newspaper known for its forthright reports from the front lines. Grossman received national fame due to his reporting from the front lines. Grossman was the first reporter to write first hand accounts of German concentration camps and his experience there had a devastating impact on his world view. Grossman learned after the war that his mother, who he failed to move from Berdichev to Moscow after the invasion perished in Hitler's genocide. It was the death of his mother and the post war anti-Semitic campaigns of Stalin that may have led Grossman to challenge his own acceptance of Soviet orthodoxy and set him to work on Life and Fate and his other major work, Forever Flowing.

Life and Fate is a remarkable novel despite its occasional unremarkable prose that contains a trace of Grossman's earlier socialist realism style. The book's emotional core involves humanity's struggle for freedom in an unfree world. Josef Skvorecky put the central question of Life and Fate thusly: "Does man lose his innate yearning for freedom? The fate of both man and the totalitarian State depends on the answer to this question. If human nature does change, then the eternal and world wide triumph of the dictatorial state is assured; if his yearning for freedom remains constant, then the totalitarian state is doomed."

The scope of the story and the cast of characters are vast and in the tradition of both Tolstoy and Pasternak. This edition contains a list of characters and their geographic location during the story. The central characters include Viktor Shtrum, a scientist, and his extended family. Other central figures include Captain Grekov, the leader of a group of soldiers doing battle with the Nazi's in a bombed out apartment building in Stalingrad. Grekov is an iconoclast doing battle not only with the Nazis but the political commissars that spent more time concerned with political orthodoxy than fighting. Key scenes in the book also take place in a German concentration camp and a Russian labor camp.

Life and Fate is a wonderful book. Grossman's assertion towards the end of his work that we can be slaves by fate but not slaves by nature is an important concept to keep a hold of today.
L. Fleisig

It has been widely noted that "Life and Fate" has much in common with "War and Peace." Both are panoramic Russian epics, depicting the devastating impact of a great war on a wide range of characters, and, while focusing on the microcosm of an individual family and its members, portraying the entire era in which each book takes place.

"War and Peace" is my all time favorite novel and many consider it the greatest novel ever written, and so it is no small thing to write a book consciously inviting this comparison. Grossman more than justifies this.

One of the things that make "Life and Fate" so monumental an achievement, is that the comparison vividly reveals the differences between life lived under the nineteenth century Tsarist feudal regime as described in "War and Peace," and the twentieth century Stalinist totalitarian regime of Soviet Russia. While there's no argument that Tsarist Russia was ruthlessly repressive, with many of the features of a police state, what comes through in "Life and Fate" are the dramatic differences the one-party state made on the every-day lives of people living in Russia since the revolution, especially during the Stalinist era. This is particularly borne out in the story line of one of the major characters, Victor Strum, a nuclear scientist, who after making a break-through discovery in theoretical physics, is accused of political insubordination, is ostracized by his department and threatened with the loss of his career unless he repents and offers the apology which his colleagues beg him to proffer:

"Victor Pavlovich, I entreat you, we all of us entreat you: write a letter, say you repent! I can assure you that will help. Just think: you're throwing away everything - and at a time when an important - no, a truly great - work lies before you, a time when all that is genuine in our science looks to you with hope. Write a letter, admit your errors.' `What errors? What do you want me to repent of?' `Who cares? It's what everyone does - writers, scientists, political leaders, even your beloved Shostakovich. He admits his errors, writes letters of repentance - and then returns to work. It's like water off a duck's back.' `But what do you want me to repent of? And who to?' `The director, the Central Committee... It doesn't matter - as long as you repent!......' pg 671

Victor refuses, becomes persona non-grata among his colleagues, slips into a depression and seems to have lost everything, until, he suddenly gets a call from Stalin himself, and suddenly gets everything back: his position at the institute, the regard and support of his professional associates, the control of his department etc. only to be threatened once again with losing it all if he refuses to sign a letter defending the arrests of two doctors he believes are innocent of poisoning Aleksey Gorky. "Victor felt overwhelmed by disgust at his own submissiveness. The great State was breathing on him tenderly; he didn't have the strength to cast himself out into the freezing darkness... He was paralyzed, not by fear, but by something quite different - a strange agonizing sense of his own passivity." Pg 835

After signing the letter: "Victor had been so proud of his courage and uprightness; he had laughed at anyone who had shown signs of weakness or fear. And now he too had betrayed people. He was ashamed of himself; he despised himself. ......His friendship with Chepyzhin, his affection for his daughter, his devotion to his wife,....his work, his beloved science......- everything had vanished." p. 840

One of the more glaring ironies in Life and Fate is portrayed in the two major interrogation scenes, the first in (part II, chapter 14, page 401) between the Gestapo officer Liss, and the old Bolshevik Russian prisoner, Mostovskoy, in which Liss attempts to prove that there is virtually no difference between the Germans of National Socialism and the Russians of Stalinism, yet they are pitted against each other in the battle for Stalingrad, a major turning point in the war:

"What is the reason for our enmity? ... That there is no private property in your country? That your banks and factories belong to the people? That you're internationalists and we're preachers of racial hatred? ... That the world hates us - and that its hopes are centered on Stalingrad?... Nonsense! There is no divide. ... In essence we are the same - both one-party States. Our capitalists are not the masters. The State gives them their plan. The State takes their profit...Your State also outlines a plan and takes what is produced for itself." "You knew Lenin personally. He created a new type of party. He was the first to understand that only the Party and its Leader can express the spirit of the nation. He did away with the Constituent Assembly. ...And we learned many things from Stalin. To build Socialism in One Country, one must destroy the peasants' freedom to sow what they like and sell what they like. Stalin didn't shilly-shally - he liquidated millions of peasants. Our Hitler saw that the Jews were the enemy hindering the German National Socialist movement. And he liquidated millions of Jews. But Hitler's no mere student. ...It was the Roehm purge that gave Stalin the idea for the purge of the party in 1937..."

Later in the book, Grossman depicts the interrogations and beatings of Krylov, the ex-husband of Victor's sister-in-law, a former ardent communist party founding member and Bolshevik revolutionary, who now, at the conclusion of the battle of Stalingrad is himself the victim of a purge of the "old guard" of revolutionaries by the "new guard."

Significantly, his "investigator" is never named: "You must help the Party in this new stage of its struggle. To do that, you must first renounce your past opinions. Only a Bolshevik is capable of such a task...." "`Very well,' Krylov said slowly and sleepily. `I can allow that, in spite of myself, I may have given expression to views hostile to the Party. My own internationalism may have contradicted the policies of a Socialist State. I may have been out of touch with the new people. Yes, I can admit all this. But espionage, sabotage...' ... `No, I deny that I'm a spy.' `So you don't want to help the Party? Just when we get to the point, you try and hide. It's like that, is it?'" Page 785

It is a further irony that in these scenes, Krylov's treatment by his own countrymen is depicted as more brutal and less reasonable than that visited upon Mostovskoy by the Gestapo.

In his brilliant portrayal of this brutal era in Russian history, through a myriad of characters and story lines Grossman writes in a style designed to mitigate the reader's despair for the tragedy and oppressiveness which the characters are continually forced to endure. The book is constructed in short chapters (usually one or two pages), which have the effect of being read as if they are vignettes or short stories, and written in a Chekhovian aesthetic, which Grossman overtly articulates for the reader through a literary conversation among Victor's institute colleagues in Kazan, to where they have been evacuated from their Moscow institute before the commencement of the story. In this conversation, Madyarov could as easily have been describing Grossman's literary intensions for this superb novel:

"Chekhov took Russian democracy on his shoulders, the still unrealized Russian democracy. Chekhov's path is the path of Russia's freedom. We took a different path - as Lenin said. Just try and remember all Chekhov's heroes! Probably only Balzac has brought such a mass of different people into the consciousness of society. No - not even Balzac. Just think! Doctors, engineers, lawyers, teachers, lecturers,...(he lists 32 other professions)..." "Chekhov brought Russia into our consciousness in all its vastness - with people of every estate, every class, every age...More than that! It was as a democrat that he presented all these people - as a Russian democrat. He said - and no one had said it before, not even Tolstoy - that first and foremost we are all of us human beings. Do you understand? Human beings! He said something no one in Russia had ever said. He said that first of all we are human beings - and only secondly are we bishops, Russians, shopkeepers, Tartars, workers. Do you understand? Instead of saying that people are good or bad because they are bishops or workers...he said that people are equal because they are human beings." ... "Chekhov is the bearer of the greatest banner that has been raised in the thousand years of Russian history - the banner of a true, humane Russian democracy, of Russian freedom, of the dignity of the Russian man." Page 282

My three children are adoped from Russia and Ukraine, and my visits to those countries led me to immerse myself in the history and literature of that fascinating part of the world, which has witnessed a disproportionate amount of pain and suffering.

I hope my son and two daughters, both of whom are of Jewish descent, will one day want to know more about their native land, and I hope they will have the profound experience of reading this shocking, yet beautifully written book. It is historical fiction at its finest, and easily the most emotionallly powerful book I've ever read. But brace yourself. I believe it takes courage on behalf of the reader to absorb these pages. I actually had a physical reaction to some of the sentences in Life and Fate and am haunted by them months after finishing.

It is simply beyond my ability to describe the experience of reading this book. Grossman has left the world an extraordinary gift that will undoubtedly stand the test of time.

While longer and thus a little more patchy than his other masterpiece, Forever Flowing, Life and Fate is perhaps the greatest novel of, and from, the Soviet Union. That it was locked away in a draw by the author and then confiscated by the KGB, and that the author died thinking it was lost forever gives this momentous work a measure of tragedy as well.

Like Tolstoy's War and Peace the novel tells the story of family living through dark times. In this case Stalinism and WWII. Especially vivid portrayals of the battle for Stalingrad (the beginning of the end for the Nazi regime) combine with human tales of the everyday domestic life of the characters. Over this are, again Tolstoy like, commentaries and asides about history, philosophy and meaning.

The more you know about the Soviet Union during the period, and about the Soviet's role in the war (basically the war in Europe was primarily one between Germany and the USSR, the stuff in the West was almost peripheral) the more you will pick up on and appreciate. However, even without that knowledge I suspect this book will sweep you away if you let it.

This is also a novel far more in the grand 19th century tradition, narrative, description and commentary all flow together. Its very long but you'll probably be sad to finish it, and it will stay with you a long time.

You might also want to compare it with some of the great American novels that came out in the 1950s dealing with the experience of the war. For example, Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and James Jones' The Thin Red Line or From Here to Eternity. Another Soviet book that readers who enjoyed this might also like is Anatoli Rybakov's Children of the Arbat.

I finished reading Life and Fate about three months ago, yet it kept following me around. I couldn't stop thinking about it. I was haunted by it. Unsure what to make of it, yet bound to it by some sort of mystique.

Three weeks after finishing the book I picked it up and started reading it again. In so doing, the book has gone from this `soupy' mysterious compelling novel to something utterly, utterly brilliant. I'm completely in love with it. Completely overcome by it. Without question, it is the greatest novel I have ever read. My heart wants to burst when I think about. I get goose bumps talking about it with my friends. I feel sorry for me friends having to put up with me talking about it all the time!

As corny as it sounds, I feel honoured to have had the opportunity to get to know this book. What an incredible gift to humanity Grossman has given. Read it! Read it! Read it!

This is a magnificent book that is the Twentieth Century's version of Tolstoy's masterpiece "War and Peace" To understand what the Soviet Union went through between the German invasion on June 22, 1941 up to and including the Battle of Stalingrad, this is mandatory reading. Grossman was the leading military correspondent of the Red Army, was a member of the Communist Party and was Stalin's favorite reporter. Yet he saw through Stalin and the CPSU and wrote this book which was suppressed for many years and miraculously was published in Paris in the mid 1980s after the manuscript, held by the KGB, was somehow smuggled out of the USSR. This is a must read for people interested in World War II, the USSR, the Holocaust, Communism and great literature.

This was a wonderful book if you enjoy historical fiction. It starts a little slow and is very broad in depth and characters (which makes it a little confusing at times), but if you stick with it you won't be disappointed. It's an amazing account of the Russian side of World War II, and what's even more amazing is how Grossman manages to use this as a vehicle for an even larger theme of the rise of the Soviet State. It's a topic that few people know about, outside of the old cliches of communism being bad/capitalism being good, and it's worth reading just for the value of getting an impression of what life was really like for Russians and this crucial point in their history. As horrible as World War II was for the Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and others systematically liquidated by the Nazis, few people know about the similar situations going on during collectivization and the purges in Russia prior to the war. Grossman approaches this subject from the many different views of his huge cast of characters, and the reader gets a sense for not only how awful the situation was, but also how the situation was accepted and how each person was forced to deal with it in their own way. The book is amazing for it's breadth and amount of detail (which explains the 800+ pages), and the writing is philosophical and thought-provoking without being pretentious. I've read reviews that compare it to Herman Wouk's books, which I've read and greatly enjoyed, and a rough comparison might be made in terms of detail, but Life and Fate tends to bounce around a bit while a novel such as Winds of War had a more conventional structure and was slightly easier to follow. The only criticisms I could think of off-hand would be those mentioned before, the slow start and the vastness of the plot, and the ending was a little anti-climatic, but the majority of the book was definitely worth the time. It's rare to find writing of this caliber in today's novels, but if you want to read something that is difficult to put down, that is good to read and is also good for you, get this book.

A splendid novel and a fine translation. Those who would like to learn more about the novel and its author, Vasily Grossman, might wish to check the biography we published: The Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman (Free Press, 1996). And for more about the Eastern Front, see a book we edited: World War 2 and the Soviet People (St. Martin's Press, 1993). Sadly, the first is out of print, and the second may be too. We are pleased so many readers share our high opinion of Grossman's novel and of the Russian achievement in defeating Nazi Germany, which Grossman chonicled as the leading Soviet frontline correspondent in the Second World War. His dispatches from Stalingrad, translated into English during the war (before he fell out of favor with the Soviet authorities), have been widely used in the West, usually without any acknowledgment of his authorship. And words he wrote are also inscribed inside the dome of the massive Soviet war memorial at Stalingrad, also without his name. It's good see that Vasily Grossman is at last getting some long overview credit and the attention of readers.

The publication of the massive novel LIFE AND FATE by the Soviet war correspondent and novelist Vasily Grossman was a major event in the West when it was finally published in 1985, twenty five years after it was written. LE MONDE called it "the great Russian novel of the 20th century"--which it is most certainly not. Why would somebody read a Social Realist novel almost as long as the Old Testament (Grossman = 880 pages, God = 996 pages)?

In my case, it all started with an interest in the relationship between scientific creativity and literary creativity. One of the most interesting thinkers on that subject is the great Hungarian chemist Michael Polanyi, who shows that spontaneous order can be seen in political, social and economic behaviour. Underlying this order is an ethical foundation which Polanyi identifies with truth and human freedom. Everything else, as Polanyi sees it, is a consequence of the initial decision to choose truth or falsehood, and freedom or constraint.

Polanyi was therefore very interested in what was in his day the greatest enemy of freedom and truth, the totalitarian political systems of National Socialism and Leninist-Stalinist Socialism. And this is where LIFE AND FATE, and Grossman's own interests, intersect with Polanyi's thought.

Polanyi, himself a great research scientist of the first order (and his son was to win a Nobel Prize), recognised in Communism and Nazism a distorted, materialistic scientific world view that had flourished like a weed within the dramatic rise of science and technology over the last 400 years. Polanyi made the passing remark in MEANING that "There were people who actually transformed philosophic error into destructive human action . . . [they developed within] the intelligentsia of central and eastern Europe. They are the nihilists." Grossman must have been on a similar track in this novel about the rotten foundations of the Soviet system, because he makes a physicist one of his most important characters.

The key fact about Grossman was that he was an insider and, for most of his life, a supporter of the Stalinist Soviet system. Unlike Pasternak, Mandelstam, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn and the other great Russian poets and writers of the 20th century, who suffered persecution, imprisonment, torture, death and / or exile, Grossman was for most of his career a pet of the senior Soviet heirarchy. Trained as a chemist (like Polanyi and the chaos / complexity theorist Prigogine), Grossman was a feted war journalist like Ilya Ehrenberg--and like Isaac Babel a generation before, although Babel was executed in one of Stalin's early purges. Grossman is almost as good a writer as Babel, but he survived long enough to have a crisis of conscience and write about it, unlike Babel, who disappeared into the Lubyanka.

So the great interest of LIFE AND FATE is this conflict between lies and truth that Grossman is struggling with personally as a human being and writer throughout the novel. Fortunately for me, before beginning LIFE AND FATE I had started Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoir HOPE AGAINST HOPE, and was half way through, before I started LIFE AND FATE. Mandelstam's memoir provides a clear perspective on the corrupt ethical environment of the Soviet Union which, in LIFE AND FATE, remains murkier. The novel is deeply flawed as a literary work because of its author's unresolved struggle, but as a document of the human spirit trying to overcome its crippled and diseased state, it is fascinating.

LIFE AND FATE opens with a powerful evocation of a Nazi concentration camp, and almost the last chapter is a nightmarish vision of the future in which Stalinist gulags merge with global society into an indistinguishable system in which not just manual labour, but all intellectual effort and creativity, is enslaved to the State. In between Grossman makes increasingly explicit comparisons between Leninism-Stalinism and the Nazi system, which was no doubt a major reason the novel couldn't be published in the Soviet Union during his life time. The over-arching plot is a dual track account of the defense of Stalingrad in 1942 and the establishment and operation of the Nazi extermination camp system. Yes, a big downer of a book. On the surface, Grossman would appear to be contrasting the heroic Soviet defeat of the German 6th Army at Stalingrad with the industrial-scale moral obscenity of the Nazi's Final Solution, but in fact the entire novel demonstrates the numerous similarities between the two arenas and the systems that created them.

Grossman depicts a kind of anti-Polanyi universe. Polanyi famously described a Republic of Science in which tens of thousands of scientists around the world, each individually commmitted to the truth, continually share information and calibrate their own personal understanding of nature by freely sharing information and interpretations with one another, and then checking this against the data that new experiments report about empirical reality. Grossman shows a Soviet system in which millions of people lie and denounce one another in order to avoid personally coming to the attention of the vast secret police network as an "enemy of the people". Instead of a continous flow of truth and new information, Grossman shows how a vast ocean of lies swirls through the Soviet system, putting literally everyone at immediate risk of arrest, humiliation, torture, imprisonment and / or execution, a fate which millions of innocent people suffered.

LIFE AND FATE is a strange book, because in large sections Grossman still writes like a convinced Bolshevik, in others he appears to be trying to write in such a way that the book will slip through the censors, and in many passages he just takes the gloves off and writes about the truth--ie in a way which indicts the murderous nature of the Stalinist system. To untangle these different sections, it would be helpful to read Strauss's PERSECUTION AND THE ART OF WRITING before taking on LIFE AND FATE. For example, a scene in which the characters toast a portrait on the wall of Stalin and refer to what a wonderful leader and great human being Stalin is, almost imperceptibly turns into subtle, but strong, criticism of Stalin. At other times, Grossman puts some of the strongest criticisms of Stalin and Stalinism into the mouths of crazy, criminal, or doomed characters. But the overall comparison between Stalinism and Nazism is so obvious that it is hard to imagine how Grossman thought he would get away with it. In addition, however, there are numerous passages which justify terror as a legitimate tool against real "class enemies", if not necessarily all the "excesses" commmitted against imaginary class enemies.

Grossman is himself clearly deeply conflicted, as a prominent writer of the Soviet era, who benefited for most of his career from its system. He seems to have gone along with the nightmares of the late 20s and the Great Terror of 1937, only becoming disillusioned when the murderous, and potentially mass-scale, anti-Jewish persecution ("the so-called 'Doctor's Plot'") was about to be unleashed by Stalin just before Stalin's death. Because Grossman supports terror as a legitimate tool against class enemies, LIFE AND FATE stands as a tainted monument to its era, and to the moral corruption of its author. LIFE AND FATE ends rather abruptly without completing the many plot lines or resolving any of the tensions in its pro- and anti-Soviet depiction of reality. Grossman himself, by the time he died of cancer in 1964, was apparently deeply depressed, just like many of the characters he depicted in LIFE AND FATE who suddenly realise that the ruthless ideals to which they had devoted their lives, and sacrificed their family and friends, were nightmarish lies. Perhaps Grossman did finally recognise and accept the full truth, but if he did, he wasn't able to write about it in a document that survives. By comparison to LIFE AND FATE, the tragic clarity of Nadezhda Mandelstam's HOPE AGAINST HOPE is like a glass of pure water.

He might have written a book like _Life and Fate_. True, Grossman's epic lacks the didactic sections about history that have bemused college students for a century. But in scope of work, depth of characterization, and importance of history discussed, this book is both a conscious homage to, and true successor of, _War and Peace_.
Warning: the plot is so absorbing it can make you miss your subway stop. I ended up going from Manhattan to Brooklyn by mistake when I used this as a "train book."

I was left with somewhat of an empty feeling after completing this novel. Perhaps that was as it should be considering the tragic fate of many Soviet citizens that both preceeded and followed the country's grueling struggle against the Nazi war machine. This book does do a terrific job of conveying the internal evils of Stalinist Russia. Anyone still deluded enough to think that Communist totalitarianism was much better than Hitler's Germany would do well to read this book. I primarily read history but was drawn to this title having read and much appreciated Grossman's "A Writer at War". The latter book recounts his first-hand experiences as a Red Army journalist during the second world war.

Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate belongs the category of suppressed literature in the Soviet Russia. The author dared to submit the manuscript of this big book approval only after the death of Joseph Stalin. But the Party's cultural wing even then refused its publication for next 500 years! One night they took away all the manuscripts from author's apartment. Only in the 80's the manuscript was recovered and published in first time. This is a novel in a Tolstoyean mould. It has a lot characters. The story hangs in and around Victor, a nuclear physicist, and his family and friends. The events happened during the period of second world war, when Russia was attacked by the forces of Nazy Germany. The Russians called it great Patriotic War. Every problems of soviet system was swept aside in the defence of fatherland. The novel was conceived in the mind of Vasily Grossman during years of new purge against the jews in the USSR after the second world war. People were hunted down or isolated again by the soviet authorities in the name of race, religion and ationality. Vasily Grossman once a communist now understands he is a jew also. The Central character in the novel, Victor, is the alterego of the author himself. Victor works as a scientist.He has a wife and one daughter.Victor's character is always in clash with his wife.His tender relationship with his friend's wife is the only spiritual solace for him. When war broke out everybody starts speaking for the war against German forces is to protect freedom and honour of people. Vasily Grossman finds the irony of such a slogan. A People without a freedom and individual honour for many terrible years under Stalin now think they go to protect it. When Victor's political stand threatens his own existence he becomes fearful and starts to think of an apology before the authorities. Everybody treats him as an alien and people fear his arrest is near. In such a lonely and desperate night Victor got a telephone call from Joseph Stalin himself....
The narrative is simple. Victor's mother's last letter from the German concentration camp is one of the moving chapters in the novel.The scenes at the Russian labor camp are also interesting and informative. Life anf Fate gives a total, let me say, accurate picture of the Soviet Union. As some critics said, while other writers went out of the soviet system and wrote about it, Vasily Grossman lived in and through the troubles of soviet society and wrote about it. Like Dr. Zhivago this is also an important book for them who who love great fiction.