Customer Reviews

Life and Fate (New York Review Books Classics)

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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'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.

The preeminent Soviet war correspondent of World War II wrote this sweeping novel, modelled on "War and Peace", about the epic battle of Stalingrad and the Russian war experience. He finds Nazism and Communism to be essentially the same thing, which is why this book was banned by the Soviets and had to be smuggled out to the West. (They actually "arrested" the book itself, one of only two books ever accorded that honor in the USSR, and tried to destroy every manuscript.) Grossman describes every walk of Soviet life and how it was affected by both the war against the Germans and by the terror at home. He finds some bitter ironies, including Russians being motivated to fight the Germans not by internationalist Communism but by Russian nationalism. And while the turning of the war's tide was a positive outcome, the nationalism was bad for all the non-Russians - Jews and other minorities - who were turned on as a result. The war briefly unleashes a sense of liberty in soldiers at the front and civilians living in makeshift circumstances after being evacuated, but that liberty is squelched as the Russians turn the tide and Stalin regains control. Scenes among Soviet POWs in German concentration camps, Jews being taken to death camps and political prisoners in Russian gulags, are vivid and powerful. Grossman was the first journalist to cover Treblinka when the Russian advance overtook the site, his journalistic dispatches were the first things written about it and his death camp scenes here among the best things ever written about it. Also stunning is the surreal interrogation of an old Bolshevik, now a POW in a concentration camp, by an SS leader who argues adroitly that war between fascism and communism is a tragedy - each being, in his mind, the closest natural ally of the other.

Grossman writes about every aspect of Russian life; his characters - most of them linked somehow to the middle-class Shaposhnikov family - developed with subtlety. This may be the best book ever on what life under Stalin felt like. Solzhenitsyn's books are focused strongly on the experience of political prisoners, because prison and internal exile were all he knew, but Grossman, having avoided that fate, is able to write about the lives of peasants, soldiers, civilians, workers, commissars and scientists with a detail that is utterly convincing. He is strongest in unsparingly penetrating the compromises nearly every citizen, including himself, made to avoid arrest and death.

Rarely is a new classic born overnight, but that's what happened here. You may have never heard of this book; only now is the reading public becoming aware of it. Go read it now.

This is one of the mightiest books I've ever read -- mighty in the sense that it truly covers life and fate from a myriad of aspects and a depth of authenticity. The book focuses mainly on one family during a fateful time in the history of the Soviet Union -- World War II, with a heavy emphasis on the Battle of Stalingrad. This book reveals the Soviet Union in all its perfidy, and the sheer danger of being a Soviet citizen under Communism. The cruelty and madness of the Communist institution is laid bare; but so is the patriotism and bravery of the common Russian citizen. Also revealed in searing detail is the insanity and inhumanity of the Nazis. No book I've ever read so achingly illustrates the terror of Jews as they enter the ovens. Few books I've ever read have so vividly described the daily horror of war, to both the warrior and the civilian. The book is so profound on so many fronts over its 800-plus pages that one feels it should be required reading around the world. Vasily Grossman has written one of the best books of the Twentieth Century. You'll never forget it: you'll never view the Soviet Union, Communism, the war in Russia the same again. The title, Life and Fate, says it all.

Vasily Grossman was a scientist, a respected novelist during the Stalin era, a Jew, a widely admired war correspondent for the Soviet army newspaper, and, in the later years of his life, a dissident writer whose works were banned by the Soviet state. He brings all of his experiences to bear in this monumental novel of Russian society under siege during World War II. The book has a sweep and power and humanity that make most other novels seem trivial by comparison.

The book's episodic, multi-layered structure deliberately evokes Tolstoy's War and Peace. The plot revolves around the members, relatives and friends of the Shaposhnikov family. The main action centers on the battle for Stalingrad during the winter of 1942. Other locales include a Ukrainian village where thousands of Jews were slaughtered, a Russian labor camp housing the victims of Stalin's purges, a German prisoner of war camp, a Nazi concentration camp, and a Soviet institute for advanced physics.

Theoretical physicist Viktor Shtrum is the character Grossman uses to explore the ethical and emotional difficulties of living in a totalitarian state. Viktor is devoted to the ideal of scientific truth, and understands that intellectual freedom is a necessary prerequisite for scientific discovery. Viktor resists bureaucratic control over his thought processes with a heedless egoism that is heroic on one hand, but damaging to his family, colleagues and research on the other. For Viktor, the most enervating aspect of Stalin's Russia is the fog of moral ambiguity that blankets everything: independence equals disloyalty; integrity means selfishness; courage implies anti-social recklessness. Fear of state punishment leads to a mass form of voluntary censorship. What freedoms the secret police don't crush, citizens crush within themselves.

Grossman tried to publish this book in the early sixties during the political thaw of the Khrushchev regime. The manuscript was confiscated by the KGB, down to the carbons used to make copies. Its revelations that the USSR was complicit in the slaughter of Jews during World War II, and that Stalin's political commissars hindered the officers in charge of the Soviet armed forces subverted commonly held myths about the Great Patriotic War. The novel's ultimate heresy may have been its assertion that Stalinism and Nazism were mirror images of each other, totalitarian empires organized to suppress individual freedom in order to ensure their own perpetuation. Fortunately two copies of the novel survived, and one was smuggled to the west. Life and Fate was finally published in the 1980s, long after Grossman's death.

This book puts Grossman in the pantheon of Russia's greatest novelists. The scenes of women and children confronting their deaths in the concentration camps rival Dostoievsky at the peak of his powers. Although Grossman was not as polished a writer as Chekhov, he writes with a humanity and fine-grained particularity Chekhov would have admired. The texture of the battle scenes is astonishing, down to the feel and smell of hunkering down in bunkers during an aerial bombardment. Life and Fate can stand up to a comparison with War and Peace. Grossman may not have Tolstoy's magical ability to make words stand in for real life, but he's a deeper social thinker. The novel's only structural flaw is in the chapters where Viktor is working out the moral implications of his work and his love life. They go on too long, probably because the author was struggling to work out his own attitudes towards these issues. To be fair, Grossman never got to do a final edit on the galleys.

Grossman had a ringside seat during the climatic struggle between the twentieth century's most malign political monsters. He had the courage and the skill to see the story clearly, to bring back reports from the living, and to bear witness for the dead. In its explorations of suffering, understanding of history, and affirmation of the human spirit, Love and Fate has to be ranked as one of the twentieth century's greatest novels. Seldom in world literature have words been used to such powerful effect.

This is a great work of literature, which I would put alonside the novels of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. It has the advantage over these other Russian Classics of being closer historically to our times and hence the characters are somewhat more vivid to the modern reader. Grossman was a War Correspondent in WWII which brings great power and accuracy to his narrative. This new edition is well translated and packages the large 800 page text well. This view of WWII from the Soviet side will be an eye-opener for the American reader.

I've long felt that "Life and Fate" may be the greatest book of the twentieth century that few people have ever heard of. It uses interlinked plots and characters to tell the story of World War II from the Soviet perspective. A fascinating undercurrent is the interplay between the Soviet war against the Nazis and the Stalinist war against the Soviet people. Fate could well "resurrect" a victim of the latter war who was needed to fight the former one. Comparisons with "War and Peace" are inevitable, and to put it succinctly Tolstoy was a greater writer than Grossman, but the history is better in "Life and Fate". A comparison could also be made to Wouk's "War and Remembrance", which uses similar devices to tell the story of the war from the American side; Grossman, however, is a more literary writer than Wouk. If anything mentioned above sounds interesting, read this book. You won't be sorry.

Note: I originally posted this review for a now unavailable edition of this book.

How should you read this novel? In a time frame that's as condensed possible. It is not a book that can be picked up at intervals, as you will lose track of the characters and their complex, interwoven stories. Why should you read this novel?

Here are a few reasons. First, for its depiction of the German concentration camps, where Grossman's own mother perished. Second, for the equation it establishes between the crushing power of the Nazi state and the equally destructive power of the Soviet state. Particularly poignant is the fate of the commissar Krymov, an old Bolshevik whose dedication to the state lands him in prison, in the Lubyanka. He comes to understand Stalin's method, to realize that "the hide was being flayed off the still living body of the Revolution so that a new age could slip into it; as for the red, bloody meat, the steaming innards--they were thrown onto the scrapheap. The new age needed only the hide of the Revolution--and this was being flayed off people who were still alive. Those who then slipped into it spoke the language of the Revolution and mimicked its gestures, but their brains, lungs, livers, and eyes were utterly different" (841). Finally, read the novel for the story of Shtrum, the scientist, and its examination of what happens when science must serve the state.

Reading "Life and Fate" is rewarding the way reading Tolstoy is rewarding. It's a big, complicated, interesting novel. It's also the world Orwell tried to warn us about in "1984."

Life and Fate is a literary classic. Picture War and Peace set in the 20th century. Replace Napolean with Hitler and substitute the Shaposhnikov family for the Rostofs. I've read scores of works with a World War II backdrop, but never from this perspective.

Never have I seen the war from the viewpoint of the average Russian, at Stalingrad, in the Ukraine, in Moscow and in the death camps. Most jarring is the repressive shadow of Communism and the fear constantly felt by even the most patriotic and loyal party member. Most heart breaking is the astonishing story of Sofya Levinton, her journey to the gas chamber and her "adoption" of the frail, young orphan.

It has been said that a death is a shame, a thousand deaths is a tragedy, but twenty million deaths is a statistic (or something to that effect) and it is true. Until we see an event from the perspective of an individual, we cannot grasp the horror and the emotions involved in an historical event with the scale of a Stalingrad or Treblinka. We cannot grasp the fear and trepidation created by a party apparatus such as the 20th century Communist Party.

This classic work brings all those emotions and human reactions to bear through the eyes of a typical Russian extended family. Though it is a translation, it flows smoothly and seamlessly. While the plethora of Russian names and nicknames is sometimes confusing, an index of characters in the back of the book assists immeasurably. I cannot recommend this novel highly enough.

Anyone who likes long,langorous Russian novels will find Life and Fate deeply involving. Like Pushkin, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Pasternak, Grossman evokes the tragic soulfulness of the Russian people in a way that can only make the reader sad to have been born someplace else. Set around the battle of Stalingrad, which Grossman viewed first-hand as a correspondent for the Russian army newspaper Red Star, the novel takes one from Moscow to the steppe, from battle to homefront, and from forest to the wastelands of Siberia, along the way revealing the conflicts of a Jewish physicist as he tries to reconcile the great promise of the Revolution and the terryifying realities of the Stalinst state.