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Life and Fate

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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 The book could not be published for at least 200 years.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

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.

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.

There's a decent proportion of readers whose reaction to a Russian epic over 600 pages called "Life and Fate" is to snicker. If that's you, probably best to pass on. That would be a shame however, because this is a book about people in a situation which is everything ours is not. Where we are safe, prosperous and secure, the characters in this book are all constantly at risk.

Grossman's magnificent acheivement is to allow us to empathise with these characters and explore a war of the bad with the worse. The pages do not "fly by" - but they do stay with you long after the book is finished. Grossman was a Soviet war journalist, and his coverage of everything from the battle of Stalingrad to the gulag is utterly gripping. It is not a feelgood book, or a "testament to the triumph of the human spirit". It is a beautiful, memorable tribute to how ordinary people cope with impossible situations. If you have any interest in life in an utterly different situation, this book is a purchase you should really, really not pass up. I cannot praise it highly enough.

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.

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.

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.

I know that this novel, of which I am the translator, is still in print. For some reason, Amazon keep getting this wrong.

Grossman is one of the very finest C20 Russian novelists, along with Bulgakov, Platonov and Sholokhov.

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.

The paperback edition of LIFE AND FATE has been in print, without interruption, for the last seven or eight years. The ISBN is 1860460194. Do not believe anyone who tells you otherwise. I am the translator of Grossman (the finest writer I have translated other than Andrey Platonov) and I am certain of this!