116 of 119 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant Thoughtful Work, July 18, 2004
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 The book could not be published for at least 200 years.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
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19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best Novel Ever - No Kidding!, April 13, 2005
This review is from: Life and Fate: A Novel (Paperback)
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.
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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
More on Life and Fate, September 13, 2000
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.
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