Life and Fate
 | This article possibly contains original research. (December 2013) |
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| Author | Vasily Grossman |
|---|---|
| Original title | Жизнь и судьба |
| Translator | Robert Chandler |
| Language | Russian |
| Genre | Historical novel, war, philosophical, political fiction |
| Publisher | NYRB Classics (2006) |
Publication date | 1980 |
| Publication place | Soviet Union |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 896 |
| ISBN | 1590172019 |
| Preceded by | Stalingrad (1952) |
| Followed by | Everything Flows (1980) |
Life and Fate (Russian: Жизнь и судьба, romanized: Zhizn' i sud'ba) is a novel by Vasily Grossman. Written in the Soviet Union in 1959, it narrates the story of the family of a Soviet physicist, Viktor Shtrum, during the Great Patriotic War, which is depicted as the struggle between two comparable totalitarian states.[1]
A multi-faceted novel, one of its main themes is the tragedy of the common people, who have to fight both the invaders and the totalitarianism of their own state.
In 2021, the critic and editor Robert Gottlieb, writing in The New York Times, referred to Life and Fate as "the most impressive novel written since World War II."[2]
Vasily Grossman, a Ukrainian Jew, was rejected for military service in 1941 and became a correspondent for the Soviet military paper Krasnaya Zvezda. He spent approximately 1,000 days on the front lines, roughly three of the four years of the conflict between the Germans and Soviets.[3] He was one of the first journalists to write about the genocide of the Jewish people in Eastern Europe and was present at many famous battles. Life and Fate was his defining achievement,[4] its writing in part motivated by guilt over the death of his mother in the Berdychiv massacre at Berdychiv (UkSSR) in September 1941.[5]
Life and Fate is technically the second half of the author's conceived two-part book under the same title, with the first half published in 1952 under the title For A Just Cause. Although the first half, written by Grossman during the rule of Joseph Stalin, expresses loyalty to the regime, Life and Fate shows the political disillusion of the protagonist and sharply criticises Stalinism.[4] For that reason, the manuscript was censored in the Soviet Union at the time and was only published in the 1980s, nearly two decades after Grossman's death, first in the West and then on Russian soil under glasnost.
Life and Fate is a sprawling account of life on the Eastern Front, with countless plotlines taking place simultaneously all across Russia and Eastern Europe. Although each story has a linear progression, the events are not necessarily presented in chronological order. Grossman will, for example, introduce a character, then ignore that character for hundreds of pages, and then return to recount events that took place the very next day. It is difficult to summarize the novel, but the plot can be boiled down to three basic plotlines: the Shtrum/Shaposhnikov family, the siege of Stalingrad, and life in the camps of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. Although Life and Fate is divided into three parts, each of these plotlines is featured in each section.
Viktor Shtrum is a brilliant physicist who, with his wife, Lyudmila, and daughter, Nadya, has been evacuated from Moscow to Kazan. He is experiencing great difficulty with his work, as well as with his family. He receives a letter from his mother from inside a Jewish ghetto informing him that she is soon to be killed by the Germans. Lyudmila, meanwhile, goes to visit her son from her first marriage, Tolya, in an army hospital, but he dies before her arrival. When she returns to Kazan, she is extremely detached and seems still to be expecting Tolya's return. Viktor finds himself engaging in anti-Soviet conversations at the home of his colleague, Sokolov, partly to impress Sokolov's wife, Marya (Lyudmila's only friend). He consistently compares political situations to physics, and remarks that fascism and Stalinism are not so different. He later regrets these discussions out of fear that he will be denounced, an indecision that plagues his decision-making throughout the novel.
Suddenly, Viktor makes a huge mathematical breakthrough, solving the issues that had hindered his experiments. Viktor's colleagues are slow to respond, but eventually come to accept the genius of his discovery. After moving back to Moscow, however, the higher-ups begin to criticize his discoveries as being anti-Leninist and attacking his Jewish identity. Viktor, however, refuses to publicly repent and is forced to resign. He fears that he will be arrested, but then receives a call from Stalin himself (presumably because Stalin had sensed the military importance of nuclear research) that completely, and immediately reverses his fortune. Later, he signs a letter denouncing two innocent men and is subsequently racked by guilt. The last details about Viktor regard his unconsummated affair with Marya.
The events recounted at Stalingrad center on Yevghenia Shaposhnikova (Lyudmila's sister), Krymov (her former husband), and Novikov (her lover). After reconnecting with Novikov, Yevghenia evacuates to Kuibyshev. Novikov, the commander of a Soviet tank corps, meets General Nyeudobnov and Political Commissar Getmanov, both of whom are Party hacks. Together they begin planning the counter-assault on Stalingrad. Novikov delays the start of the assault for fear of unnecessarily sacrificing his men. Getmanov later denounces Novikov and he is summoned for trial, even though the tank attack was a complete success.
Meanwhile, Krymov, a Political Commissar, is sent to investigate House 6/1, where a tiny group of soldiers have held back the Germans for weeks, even though they are completely surrounded and cut off from all supplies. Grekov, the commanding officer, refuses to send reports to HQ, and is disdainful of Krymov's rhetoric. He later wounds Krymov in his sleep, causing him to be evacuated from the house. Soon after, House 6/1 is completely leveled by German bombs. Krymov, a staunch Communist, is then accused of being a traitor (this was standard for Russian soldiers who had been trapped behind enemy lines [citation needed]) and is sent to Lubyanka Prison in Moscow, where he is beaten and forced to confess. Yevghenia decides not to marry Novikov and goes to Moscow to try and visit Krymov. He receives a package from her and realizes that he still loves her but may never be released from prison.
The sections that take place in the camps have few recurring characters, with the exception of Mostovskoy, an old Bolshevik who takes part in a plot to rebel against the Germans, but is dismayed by the prevailing lack of faith in communism. His interrogator, Liss, asserts that fascism and communism are two sides of the same coin, which upsets Mostovskoy greatly. He is later killed by the Germans for his part in the uprising. In one scene, Sturmbannführer Liss tells Mostovskoy that both Stalin and Hitler are the leaders of qualitatively new formation: "When we look at each other's faces, we see not only a hated face; we see the mirror reflection. ... Don't you recognize yourself, your [strong] will in us?" Grossman also focuses on Sofya Levinton, a Jewish woman on her way to a Nazi concentration camp.
The final chapter introduces a set of characters who remain anonymous: an elderly widow observing her tenants, a wounded army officer recently discharged from hospital, his wife and their young daughter.[6] It is implied, however, that the officer returning to his family is Major Byerozkin, a recurring character from Stalingrad who is shown to be a kind man struggling to retain his humanity.
Grossman describes the type of Communist Party functionaries, who blindly follow the Party line and constitute the base for the oppressive regime. One such political worker (политработник), Sagaidak, maintained that entire families and villages intentionally starved themselves to death during the collectivisation in the USSR.
- Viktor Pavlovich Shtrum
- Viktor Shtrum is the primary figure in Grossman's novel, largely based on the author himself. Although there are a multitude of characters in Life and Fate, much of the novel's plot revolves around Shtrum and his family. Shtrum is married to Lyudmila. He works as a nuclear physicist and is a member of the Academy of Sciences.[7] A crucial aspect of Shtrum's character is his academic work. He is constantly thinking about his exploration of nuclear physics. This obsession with his work is obvious from the very start of the novel through the thoughts of Lyudmila, from whom he has drawn apart. Before the war, Shtrum's family had been living in Moscow, but the city's evacuation caused them to move into Kazan.[8] Throughout the novel, Shtrum hints at his ambivalent feelings toward the state, becoming increasingly disillusioned with Stalin's regime. He is at times an unsympathetic man – self-absorbed, irritable, difficult to live with – yet he is also deeply human, struggling to remain true to himself while navigating the innumerable moral quandaries of life in Soviet society. The war also forces Shtrum to come to terms with his Jewish heritage, largely through the traumatic loss of his mother, who was murdered by the Nazis in Ukraine. Viktor learns this through her last letter to him; Grossman has her suffer the same fate as his own mother,[9] who was killed in similar circumstances. This passage is both one of the most iconic and the most devastating in the novel. As the story goes on, Viktor also becomes increasingly aware of the latent anti-Semitism of the world in which he lives.[10]
- Lyudmila ('Lyuda') Nikolaevna Shaposhnikova
- Lyudmila is married to Viktor Shtrum and has a daughter with him named Nadya. This is her second marriage. She was originally married to Abarchuk, who has been sent to a Soviet labor camp. In the beginning of the novel, it is clear that Lyudmila and Viktor have drifted apart. Although their estrangement is not expressed openly by either character, it is evident through Lyudmila's discussion of her eldest son, Tolya, whom she had with Abarchuk. Lyudmila discusses how Viktor and his mother, Anna Semyonovna, always showed a preference to Nadya and ignored Tolya. Lyudmila describes this best when she says “Nadya, Nadya, Nadya ... Nadya's got Viktor's eyes ... Nadya's absent-minded, Nadya's quick-witted, Nadya's very thoughtful.”[11] Lyudmila's separation and apathy towards Viktor and Nadya grow greater after the death of Tolya. This plot thread is one of the first to occur in the novel, and Grossman plunges us into Lyuda's consciousness as she struggles to come to terms with the untimely loss of her son. For a long time afterward, she talks to Tolya constantly, sometimes out loud, a habit which Viktor finds hard to cope with.
- Yevgenia ('Zhenya') Nikolaevna Shaposhnikova
- Yevgenia is Lyudmila's younger sister. She was originally married to Nikolay Grigorevich Krymov, but when the reader is introduced to her in the novel, she is in a relationship with Colonel Pyotr Pavlovich Novikov. After moving to Kuibyshev, Yevgenia lives with an old German woman named Jenny Genrikovna, who had once worked as the Shaposhnikov family's governess. Yevgenia had a good relationship with Jenny, but after the old woman is deported, along with other Germans living in Kuibyshev, Yevgenia lives alone. Although she is a beautiful, charming, and highly intelligent woman, Yevgenia has much trouble acquiring a residence permit or a ration card. After many run-ins with Grishin, the head of the passport department, she is finally able to get these documents using societal connections. She receives aid in acquiring official documentation from Limonov, a man of letters, and Lieutenant Colonel Rizin, her boss at the design office – both of whom are romantically interested in her. As the novel goes on, Zhenya shows herself to be both a strong and profoundly sympathetic character.
- Alexandra Vladimirovna
- Alexandra is mother of Lyudmila and Yevgenia.
- Dementiy Trifonovich Getmanov
- Getmanov is the secretary of an obkom and is appointed commissar to Novikov's tank corps. He is described as having large and distinct features: “his shaggy, graying head, his broad forehead, and his fleshy nose.” Getmanov is married to Galina Terentyevna. He has two daughters and a young son. His family lives in Ufa, where his comrades take care of them when Getmanov is away. Getmanov comes off as a strong supporter of the Party. His prime objective in life is to move up in the Party's hierarchy, regardless of the cost to others. Thus, he is very cautious about what he says and what those who are associated with him say, because he does not want to offend the Party or Stalin in any way. This is obvious when he is discussing politics with his friends before leaving for the front. When one man discusses how his young son once abused a picture of Stalin, Getmanov is overly critical and says that this behavior, even from a youngster, should not be tolerated. Getmanov is also quite arrogant. He feels insulted at being appointed the commissar to only a tank corps. It may be possible to see Getmanov as a portrait of Khrushchev, who had been chief political officer during the battle for Stalingrad.[8]
- Abarchuk
- Abarchuk is Lyudmila's first husband. He was arrested in 1937 and sent to the gulag. Abarchuk is a strong supporter of the Party. He feels as though he has been wrongly imprisoned, yet does not fault the Party for its actions. He believes that such erroneous arrests are justifiable in the large scheme of party stability.[12] Abarchuk works with tools and materials in the camp. He works with a criminal named Barkhatov, who blackmails many people and even kills one of Abarchuk's friends, Abrasha Rubin. Abarchuk's actions are shaped by his need of approval by the Party. He refuses to even allow Tolya to take his surname, for Abarchuk believes that this might hurt his standing and party image. He insists on doing what he sees as his duty to the state by denouncing Barkhatov, even though this will likely cost him his life.
- Pyotr Lavrentyevich Sokolov
- Sokolov is a mathematician in Viktor's laboratory. In the beginning of the novel, Sokolov and Viktor are good friends. They love talking about their academic work and often get together at Sokolov's home to discuss life and politics. In general, however, Sokolov is more cautious than Viktor; it is only at the end of the novel that he finally dares to risk his social position for the sake of his convictions. It is implied, too, that he resents Victor's scientific breakthrough slightly. Furthermore, as the novel progresses, it is evident that Viktor and Marya Ivanovna, Sokolov's wife, have feelings for each other.[8] As Sokolov becomes aware of this, his relationship with Viktor cools somewhat.
- Mikhail Sidorovich Mostovskoy
- Mostovskoy is an Old Bolshevik in a German concentration camp. He is the first major character that the reader is introduced to and he appears in the very beginning of the novel. Mostovskoy was involved in the revolution of 1917 and had strong ties to the Communist Party, having worked side by side with Lenin. Although the living conditions in the camp are unspeakable, Mostovskoy is reasonable and optimistic. He says that the great mixture of prisoners in the camps, all from different ethnic, political and religious backgrounds, leads to an interesting environment. He can use his knowledge of foreign languages in the camp and he can attempt to understand new perspectives. Those inside the camp, including Mostovskoy, are extremely interested in what is going on in the war. Grossman uses Mostovskoy's character to reveal the philosophical tension that pervaded Europe during World War II. Mostovskoy is constantly involved in philosophical arguments with fellow prisoners such as Major Yershov and Ikonnikov, a former Tolstoyan. He is eventually singled out by the German officer Liss for a strange series of one-on-one conversations, during which Liss holds forth regarding what he sees as the essential similarities between Stalinism and Nazism. Mostovskoy is disturbed, but remains defiant, choosing to go to his death in a doomed prisoners' rebellion.
- Sofya Osipovna Levinton
- When the reader first meets Levinton, she is in a train on the way to a German death camp. We later find out that she is an army doctor and an old friend of Yevgenia's. On the train, Levinton meets a six-year-old boy named David. Sent to spend the summer with his grandmother, he was left cut off from his mother in Moscow after the rapid German advance through Ukraine. Levinton realizes that David's grandmother died soon after all the Jews were herded into the ghetto and that he has no relatives with him in the transport. Over the course of the novel, Levinton grows to love David as a son. When, at the camp, the Germans offer to spare certain prisoners of value (such as doctors), she does not save herself; but rather, she stays with David and heads with him to the gas chamber to be murdered together. This sequence of events in Life and Fate is especially powerful. It demonstrates how human compassion can rise above the atrocities that defined World War II.
- Captain Grekov
- Grekov is the 'house-manager' in House 6/1 – a Soviet stronghold surrounded by German troops. Grekov's superlative bravery, skill, and devotion to the fight are portrayed in an idealized manner. The men in House 6/1 look on Katya, the young radio operator posted to the building, in the disturbingly predatory way shown in the novel to be prevalent in both armies. Yet Grekov, assumed by all to have a kind of leader’s right to sexually possess the young woman, behaves honourably, sending her out of the building unharmed before the final German assault that will kill them all. A kind of gruff chivalry is added to his other virtues. As a courageous and resourceful soldier, he inspires total devotion in his men, to the alarm of Krymov, who sees this as subversive. Tension forms between Krymov and Grekov as the novel progresses, because Grekov desires to act independently, and is deeply suspicious of the repressive state bureaucracy that Krymov represents. Although Krymov admires Grekov up to a point, and is eager to come to an understanding with him – albeit on the state's terms – it is heavily implied that the house manager ends up wounding him in order to have him evacuated.
- Nikolay Grigorevich Krymov
- Krymov is Yevgenia's former husband. He is the commissar posted to House 6/1. Krymov seems to be a "good communist", with a history of near-fanatical ideological commitment to the Party. Indeed, his perceived callousness in this regard caused Yevgenia to leave him. However, he grows progressively more disillusioned as the novel goes on. Furthermore, he worked alongside Mostovskoy in the earliest days of the Bolshevik Party, placing him in a compromising position due to his association with various now-discredited figures. Thus, he must watch everything that he does and says. Eventually, a careless comment on the part of Novikov provides the impetus for Krymov's arrest and incarceration, whereupon every politically sensitive detail of his past is turned against him. Despite extensive torture, Krymov consistently refuses to confess to a fabricated series of treasonous acts. Although Yevgenia believes herself to be over Krymov, she constantly thinks about him, and ends up going back to him despite his arrest.
- Colonel Pyotr Pavlovich Novikov
- Novikov, Yevgenia's lover, is the commanding officer of a tank corps. As such, he participates in the vital pincer movement which ultimately secures the Red Army's victory at Stalingrad. At the front, Novikov works with Getmanov, to whom he rashly lets slip a compromising detail about Krymov's past which Yevgenia had confided in him. Getmanov seizes upon this and reports Krymov, with devastating consequences. Until this point, the young man had hoped to marry Yevgenia, with whom he is infatuated, although the two don't appear to have very much in common. While he believes that he is getting closer to her, the reader realizes that Yevgenia is slowly drifting away from him in favour of Krymov.
Most of the events of Life and Fate take place in the Soviet Union during the late autumn and winter of 1942-43. It was the time of Operation Blue and Operation Fischreiher, the continuation into a second year of Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union that had started with Operation Barbarossa; it was the time of the Battle of Stalingrad.[7] But, just as much as it takes place as a part of the Second World War, it takes place as part of the history of Stalinist Russia.
Hitler and Stalin had previously signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, which, on the face of it, seemed to be advantageous to both.[13] However, on 22 June 1941, Hitler unilaterally terminated the pact by invading the Soviet Union. There has been much speculation on the Soviet response. But, whatever the reason for this response, they were not ready for what took place; the army had been seriously weakened by Stalin's purges of the army of the late 1930s, and the intelligence that was getting through to Stalin was filtered by their fear of having to tell Stalin things that he did not want to hear. So, though they had increased military spending, they did not yet have an army that could benefit from this. This was compounded by the change in command structure that Stalin initiated in the wake of the 1937 purges and maintained for large periods up to 1942. Political commissars operated alongside military commanders.[14][15][16]
The book begins when Axis forces lay siege to the city, trying to conquer it. Throughout the book there are references to the decaying city and the damage from aerial bombardments and artillery based around the city. There are also occasions in the Russian novel in which the Axis blockade is quite noticeable. The characters suffer from starvation and thirst. The book ends with the surrender of German field-marshal Friedrich Paulus' 6th Army remnants and the return of civilians to the city.
The novel's characters are a combination of fictional and historical figures. The historical figures include Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. Many of the characters are more loosely based on a historical figure, or a representative Soviet citizen. The main character, Viktor Shtrum, is a “self portrait” of Grossman himself,[17] though Shtrum also had a real-life prototype - the Soviet nuclear physicist Lev Yakovlevich Shtrum (1890-1936), who was a family friend of Grossmans in Kyiv. One of the most promising Soviet physicists of his time, Lev Shtrum was arrested and executed during Stalin's Great Purge. Vasily Grossman took an enormous risk and immortalized his friend, first in the novel "Stalingrad", which was first published under the title "For a Just Cause" in 1952, i.e. still in Stalin's lifetime, and then - in the novel "Life and Fate".[18]
In Life and Fate there are different times when the Nazi concentration camps are mentioned.[17] A long section of Life and Fate is about a German prison camp, where many characters are on their way to the gas chamber to be gassed; then follows a dialogue of ranked Nazi officers inside a new gas chamber who toast its opening.[17] The characters shipped off to Germany had been caught leaving one of the countries under Nazi rule. Grossman's inclusion is historically accurate, since there are records of many Russians in Nazi labor and death camps. Grossman also includes another German concentration camp where one of his main arguments takes place concerning communism and fascism. Grossman devotes large sections of the book to the prisoners held at Soviet and German labor and concentration camps, which is necessary for a holistic understanding of the time and events.
Begun by Grossman while Stalin was still alive,[19] Life and Fate was his sequel to For a Just Cause. It was written in the 1950s and submitted for possible publication to Znamya magazine around October 1960. Very quickly after it was submitted, the KGB raided his apartment;[20] the manuscripts, carbon copies and notebooks, as well as the typists' copies and even the typewriter ribbons were seized. The KGB did not know that he had left two copies of the manuscript with friends, one with the prominent poet Semyon Lipkin, a friend, and the other (Grossman's original manuscript) with Lyolya Klestova, often erroneously identified as Lyolya Dominikina, a friend from his university days.[21][22]
On 23 July 1962, the Politburo ideology chief Mikhail Suslov told the author that, if published, his book could inflict even greater harm to the Soviet Union than Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, speculating that it could begin a public discussion on the need for the Soviet Union.[8] Suslov has been said to have told Grossman that his novel could not be published for two hundred years;[5][19] however more recent research amongst the documents of both Grossman and Suslov, in writing about this meeting, provide no evidence for this; they doubt that Suslov actually said this.[23] Suslov's comment reveals both the presumption of the censor and recognition of the work's lasting significance.[24] Grossman tried to appeal against this verdict to Khrushchev personally, unaware of Khrushchev's personal antagonism towards Grossman, and misunderstanding the climate of the time.[25][8][26]
In 1974, Lipkin got one of the surviving copies to put onto microfilm and smuggled it out of the country with the help of satirical writer Vladimir Voinovich and nuclear scientist Andrei Sakharov.[8] Grossman died in 1964, never having seen his book published, which did not happen in the West until 1980 at the publishing house L'Age d'homme, thanks to the efforts of Shimon Markish, professor of the University of Geneva and Efim Etkind (then in Paris) who achieved the meticulous work of reading from the microfilm.[26]
As the policy of glasnost was initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev, the novel was finally published on Russian soil in 1988 in the Oktyabr magazine[27] and as a book.
Some critics have compared Grossman's war novels, and specifically Life and Fate, with Leo Tolstoy's monumental work War and Peace.[28] He had written to his daughter that War and Peace had been the only book he had been able to read during Stalingrad, but while there are similarities, it is recognized that, because Grossman actually witnessed the events of Stalingrad, there are many differences.[8] Robert Chandler, who translated Life and Fate into English, while noting the comparison with Tolstoy, says that there is something Chekhovian about his writing.[21]
In Linda Grant's introduction to the 2011 Random House edition of the book, Grant says that Grossman never had the chance to edit his book; what Robert Chandler had to work with was a work that was "a copy from an imperfect microfilm of an imperfect book".[29]
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Viktor Shtrum is in part a reflection of Grossman's own character. There are many overlaps between Shtrum's life and Grossman's life,[4] such as their mothers' deaths in the Holocaust; both seem to find a place in their Jewish identity that was not present before the war. Grossman was one of the first to write about the Holocaust in 1944, seeing first hand that Eastern Europe was empty of Jews; Jewish acquaintances he came to check up on were in mass graves, their houses empty. His article on the camp Treblinka was even used as evidence at the Nuremberg Trials. Raised as a secular Jew, it becomes clear that Shtrum discovers part of his identity through the suffering he encounters.
In Ch. 15 of Part II, Grossman uses Ikonnikov's letter to provide his own perspective on humanity. He first asks whether a good common to all man exists, and then proceeds to describe how the ideal of good has changed for different races and religions. Grossman criticizes Christianity especially, deeming its attempt to create universal good through peace and love responsible for many of the world's most horrific events. “This doctrine caused more suffering than all of the crimes of people who did evil for its own sake,” he writes (406). Grossman then inquires as to the very nature of life—is it that life itself is evil? And although he provides multiple examples of such evil, Grossman does believe that life itself has some good in it: “Yes, as well as this terrible Good ... there is everyday human kindness” (407). But it's not so simple, for “after despairing of finding Good either in God or in Nature, I began to despair even of kindness ... Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.” (410). Here, Grossman offers an alternative to despair: the idea that, despite such great evil, humanity and good will be the ultimate victors. Simple, often unnoticed, human kindness forms the basis for Grossman's theory, which is to say that despite great evil, small acts of charity reflect the idea that good is both alive and unconquerable no matter what. No matter how great the evil may be, this basic “kernel” of good is a key part of human nature and can never be crushed.
Despite his acknowledgement of the world's great evil, Grossman believes humanity to be fundamentally good. If mankind is stripped down to its very core, all that will remain is this invincible kernel; therefore, it is this kernel (and perhaps this kernel alone) that is responsible for the basic goodness of humanity.
This worldview is reflected in Ch. 40 of Part I, when Grossman describes Abarchuk and his love for Stalinism. “He [Abarchuk] had repeated, 'You don't get arrested for nothing,' believing that only a tiny minority, himself among them, had been arrested by mistake. As for everyone else—they had deserved their sentences. The sword of justice was chastising the enemies of the Revolution. He had seen servility, treachery, submissiveness, cruelty ... And he had referred to all this as 'the birthmarks of capitalism,' believing that these marks were borne by people of the past ... His faith was unshakeable, his devotion to the Party infinite” (179). Abarchuk is incapable of understanding the reality of his situation: that he has been wrongly imprisoned and will suffer in spite of his innocence, as has happened to so many others. Abarchuk is so completely immersed in the aura of the Party and so dedicated to the Stalinist religion that he cannot see the ethical violations occurring all around him. He is a reflection of the “religious frenzy” of Stalinism; the prisoner simply refuses to comprehend his situation and instead chooses to focus on his faith and devotion to the Party (Buruma).
Therefore, Abarchuk and his mentality are, at this point in the book, Grossman's representations of the archetypical Party member and the dream-world in which he lives. Despite being presented with an excellent cause to abandon the Party, Abarchuk maintains his faith.
At the end of Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman presents the reader with the broadest concept of his novel: the idea that despite war, genocide, suffering beyond the realm of imagination, and utter destruction, life goes on. This idea is depicted in the last few lines of the book, as Grossman writes, “Somehow you could sense spring more vividly in this cool forest than on the sunlit plain. And there was a deeper sadness in this silence than in the silence of autumn. In it you could hear both a lament for the dead and the furious joy of life itself. It was still cold and dark, but soon the doors and shutters would be flung open. Soon the house would be filled with the tears and laughter of children, with the hurried steps of a loved woman and the measured gait of the master of the house. They stood there, holding their bags, in silence.” (871). All through Life and Fate, Grossman has painted gritty pictures of war, death, and suffering. He has shown us the loss of hope, destruction, and total fatigue. Indeed, the author references these scenes as he describes the sadness in the silence of the forest—the “lament for the dead”—and the “still cold and dark” house (871). Grossman, however, does not conclude the book with these thoughts. He turns instead to the future, and future hope. The author describes a family scene, with a husband, wife, and children, in addition to the flinging open of doors and shutters—an act symbolic of moving on and reclaiming one's life. Therefore, Grossman wants the reader to come away from reading Life and Fate with an appreciation for the darkness of World War II, but also an understanding of the cyclical nature of life. We may suffer, but, in the end, life always goes on; happiness and peace return eventually.
As a Soviet physicist, the main character of the novel, Viktor Shtrum, offers an irregular view of the Soviet system. Science, in the novel, plays the role of a calming constant, the last remnant of rationality in a world of chaos. Despite Stalin's alterations and manipulations of societal and human truths, he cannot deny the plausibility of physics. For this reason, Viktor is affected by both the disrupted world of his personal life and the soothing world of mathematics. He finds that his two lives begin to split as he becomes more and more pressured from both sides. As his anxiety over his dysfunctional formula eats away at him, he realizes that he can no longer discuss such things openly with his wife. And vice versa: as his friendship with his partner, Sokolov, is threatened by Viktor's anti-Party feelings and temper, his work also suffers.
In Chapter 17 of Part One, Viktor discourses on the new strides made in physics during the forties and fifties. He remarks that the stability of science previously falsely represented the universe. Instead, he wonders at the newfound bending, stretching, and flattening of space. “The world was no longer Euclidean, its geometrical nature no longer composed of masses and their speeds.” (Grossman 79) While this discovered chaos may at first seem to contradict the sanctity of reason, it actually strengthens it. With this realization, Viktor learns that the political and social chaos the Soviet Union is undergoing in fact fits right in with the fundamental laws of the universe. This is why science was such a key field under the Soviet regimes.
Under Stalin, free thought was oppressed and discouraged. Therefore, Viktor's work as a physicist was increasingly difficult under the watchful eye of Stalin. During much of the novel, Viktor finds himself at a loss for the solution to a problem concerning an atomic phenomenon. The point at which he finally figures it out, however, is a point when he has just thoroughly slandered Stalinism and Soviet society. This goes to show that Grossman believed that true freedom of thought was entirely impossible in anyone who accepted Stalin as their leader.
Grossman, in many chapters involving Seryozha Shaposhnikov and Novikov, portrays the stark difference between life on the battlefield and in the cities. In chapter 60 of part one, Seryozha is introduced among the war-hardened soldiers of the surrounded House 6/1. Here, Grossman offers an interpretation of war that compares it to an all-engrossing haze. “When a man is plunged up to his neck into the cauldron of war, he is quite unable to look at his life and understand anything.” (Grossman 255) This statement sets up the book to be looked at from two different perspectives: those whose lives are entirely immersed in war, and those who either straddle or are more distanced from it.
In his writing, Grossman gives a very distinct feeling to war scenes that is absent from chapters devoted to city life and totalitarian rule. Battles are imbued with an intense feeling of isolation, from government, politics, and bureaucracy. Instead, they focus on the thoughts of the human, the individual who is participating. Thoughts of family, lovers, friends, and home become the centerpiece of these violent sections. In House 6/1, even in their vulnerable position, everyone becomes infatuated with the one woman present and 'gossip' reigns. By setting this up, the author seeks to separate the true meaning of the war from the ideologies that supposedly govern it. In addition, their feelings and emotions that are directed towards their relations become a flurry of unrelated thoughts, brought on by the chaos of war.
In domestic settings, however, the focus becomes entirely on meaning behind the war, political ideologies, and largely abstractions. Aside from the direct personal relationships and casualties experienced, conversation in cities often concerns the war as an abstraction, not as an experience. In this way, there is a stark difference in perception inside and outside of Stalingrad. As Grossman paints it, war completely devours those involved, becoming in many ways an alternative reality irreconcilable with their former reality. There is an increased amount of freedom, lacking the constraints of Soviet bureaucracy, but also an increased risk of death. It poses different daily questions to the individuals involved, asking them how they should spend and survive their day instead of asking if it's worth it to do so.
An English-language radio adaptation of the novel was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 from 18 to 25 September 2011. Translated by Robert Chandler and dramatised by Jonathan Myerson and Mike Walker, the eight-hour dramatisation stars Kenneth Branagh, David Tennant, Janet Suzman, Greta Scacchi and Harriet Walter.[30]
A television series, with twelve episodes, based on the book was broadcast on Russian television in 2012.[31][32] It is also available on Amazon Prime in certain countries.[33]
- ^ Todorov, Tzvetan; Bellos, David (Trans.) (2003). Hope and Memory: Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. p. 65.
- ^ Gottlieb, Robert (23 January 2021). "Harold Bloom is Dead. But His 'Rage for Reading' is Undiminished". The New York Times.
- ^ Grossman, Vasily (June 2010). "Introduction". In Beevor, Antony; Vinogradova, Luba (eds.). A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army (ebook). London: Random House. ISBN 9781407092010.
- ^ a b c Gessen, Keith (March 6, 2006). "Under Siege". The New Yorker.
- ^ a b Chandler, Robert. Introduction to Life and Fate. page xi. 1985. New York, New York Review of Books Classics.
- ^ In his Introduction to his translation of Life and Fate (page xxi), Robert Chandler identifies the anonymous couple in the final chapter as the relatively minor character Major (now Lt. Col.) Byerozkin and his wife.
- ^ a b Grant, Linda (26 August 2014). "Grossman's Life and Fate took me three weeks to read – and three to recover". The Guardian. Retrieved 5 March 2018.
- ^ a b c d e f g "The Great Patriotic War, 1941-1945". Yale University. 25 October 2017. Retrieved 6 March 2018.
- ^ Todorov, Tzvetan; Bellos, David (Trans.) (2003). Hope and Memory: Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. p. 54.
- ^ Kirsh, Adam (30 November 2011). "No Exit". The Tablet. Retrieved 6 March 2018.
- ^ Grossman, Vasily (2011). Life and Fate. Translated by Chandler, Robert. Vintage Books. p. 57.
- ^ "The Guardian view on Russia's revolutionary centenary: it shook the world – then it failed". The Guardian. 6 November 2017. Retrieved 6 March 2018.
- ^ Sužiedėlis, Saulius (Spring 1989). "THE MOLOTOV-RIBBENTROP PACT: THE DOCUMENTS". Lituanus: Lithuanian Quarterly Journal of Arts and Sciences. 35 (1). ISSN 0024-5089.
- ^ Blitstein, Allen (April 2007). "What Stalin Knew: The Enigma of Barbarossa (review)". The Journal of Military History. 71 (2): 561–562. doi:10.1353/jmh.2007.0094. S2CID 162097482 – via Project Muse.
- ^ Harrison, Mark (1992). "Barbarossa: the Soviet Response, 1941" (PDF). University of Warwick, Department of Economics. Retrieved 28 March 2018.
- ^ Barber, John; Harrison, Mark (2006). Suny, Ronald Grigor (ed.). Patriotic War, 1941–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 235–238. ISBN 9780521811446.
- ^ a b c Lanchester, John (18 October 2007). "Good Day, Comrade Shtrum". London Review of Books. 29 (20): 10–12.
- ^ Alexandra Popoff, Tatiana Dettmer: Vasily Grossman and the Plight of Soviet Jewish Scientists. The Tragic Tale of the Physicist Lev Shtrum https://lithub.com/vasily-grossman-and-the-plight-of-soviet-jewish-scientists/
- ^ a b Aron, Leon (12 October 2010). "The Russian Masterpiece You've Never Heard of". Foreign Policy. Retrieved 15 March 2018.
- ^ Chandler, Robert. Introduction to Life and Fate, page xv. 1985. New York, New York Review of Books Classics.
- ^ a b Chandler, Robert (September 2006). "VASSILY GROSSMAN". The Berdichev Revival. Jorge Spunberg. Retrieved 6 March 2018.
- ^ Grossman, Vasily (25 August 2011). The Road: Short Fiction and Essays (ebook). Translated by Chandler, Elizabeth; Chandler, Robert. London: MacLehose Press. pp. Part III Introduction. ISBN 9781906694265.
- ^ Bit-Yunan, Yury; Chandler, Robert (13 November 2019). "Vasily Grossman: Myths and Counter-Myths". L A Review of Books. Retrieved 15 August 2021.
- ^ Grossman, Vasily (June 2010). "Afterward". In Beevor, Antony; Vinogradova, Luba (eds.). A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army (ebook). London: Random House. ISBN 9781407092010.
- ^ Finney Patrick (2013). "Vasily Grossman and the myths of the Great Patriotic War" (PDF). Journal of European Studies. 43 (4): 312–328. doi:10.1177/0047244113501747. S2CID 146286598.
- ^ a b Sacks, Sam. "Life is Freedom: The art of Vasily Grossman". The Quarterly Conversation. Scott Esposito. Retrieved 7 March 2018.
- ^ Bill Keller (28 January 1988). "Notes on the Soviet Union". The New York Times. Retrieved 4 October 2013.
- ^ Ellis, Frank (1989). "Concepts of War in L. N. Tolstoy and V. S. Grossman" (PDF). Tolstoy Studies Journal. 2: 101–108. ISSN 1044-1573.
- ^ Grossman, Vasily (30 April 2011). Chandler, Robert (ed.). Life And Fate (Vintage Classic Russians Series). Random House. p. xiii. ISBN 9781446467046.
- ^ "Life and Fate". BBC Radio Four. 2011. Retrieved 16 September 2011.
- ^ Guzeva, Alexandra (2 August 2013). "Grossman's 'Life and Fate' manuscript has left the secret archives". Russia Beyond. Rossiyskaya Gazeta. Retrieved 6 March 2018.
- ^ Life and Fate (TV Series 2012– ) at IMDb
- ^ Life and Fate, Amazon.co.uk
- Life and Fate (ISBN 0-00-261454-5 – first English translation edition, other editions ISBN 0-09-950616-5; ISBN 1-59017-201-9; ISBN 1-86046-019-4)
- Noise, Fire, and Hunger By Josef Skvorecky Review at The New York Review of Books Volume 33, Number 12. July 17, 1986.
- Review in the London Review of Books
- Life and Fate By Vasily Grossman Translated by Robert Chandler review at The Jewish Reader. March, 2004.
- Life and Fate (12 episode film series 2012)
==
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Audible Audiobook – Original recordingVasily Grossman (Author), & 3 more
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 2,270 ratings
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Kenneth Branagh stars in BBC Radio 4's ambitious eight-hour dramatisation of Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman's epic masterpiece set during the Battle of Stalingrad. This powerful work, completed in 1960, charts the fate of both a nation and a family in the turmoil of war. Its comparison of Stalinism with Nazism was considered by Soviet authorities to be so dangerous that the KGB placed the manuscript under arrest and Grossman was informed his book would not be published for at least 200 years.
Having been a household name as one of Russia's most distinguished war correspondents, Grossman died aged 58 - the banning of his book hastening the end of his life - and he would never know the fate of his masterpiece: smuggled out of the Soviet Union on microfilm, to freedom and eventual publication in the West. Today it is increasingly hailed as the most important Russian novel of the 20th century.
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7 hours and 35 minutes
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Product details
Listening Length 7 hours and 35 minutes
Author Vasily Grossman
Narrator Kenneth Branagh, David Tennant
Audible.com.au Release Date 13 October 2011
Publisher BBC Audio
Program Type Audiobook
Version Original recording
Language English
ASIN B00NPB7SHY
Best Sellers Rank 25,379 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals)
50 in Radio (Books)
179 in Entertainment & Performing Arts
454 in War & Military Fiction
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4.6 out of 5 stars
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Howard Hilton
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant and un missableReviewed in Australia on 11 December 2019
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Brilliant book overall wonderful. He encompasses a huge amount in his head and then on to the page. Better than Stalingrad and if you are up for 800 pages and are interested in The Russian German war read it.
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Jon B
5.0 out of 5 stars Great Book should be read by allReviewed in Australia on 8 June 2021
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This is a wonderful, book
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Martin Parker
5.0 out of 5 stars OutstandingReviewed in Australia on 23 August 2020
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Everyone should own this book
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John Giles
2.0 out of 5 stars Read it 40 years too lateReviewed in Australia on 31 October 2020
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There are 157 Chief Characters listed in this book and that is not counting the lesser unlisted characters. I found understanding the characters and the relationships between them (which to me what the book is largely about) extremely difficult and in the end I just did not care. And so reading became a chore.
The lessons of a police state are timeless and universal, but it does not take 855 pages ( in this edition) to make this case, particularly when the characters and relationships meant so little,
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paul m
5.0 out of 5 stars A masterpieceReviewed in Spain on 14 July 2024
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A masterpiece made better by a seamless and readable translation by Robert Chandler. His rendering most likely makes this book even better in English than the original - not the usual direct translation from Russian making classics hard going
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Akash Srivastava
5.0 out of 5 stars Everyman's Library books are simply amazing.Reviewed in India on 20 March 2024
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This book was on my wish list for quite some time. The moment I saw it here on Amazon for Rs.776 I decided to buy it. The book is in good condition. I love books by everyman. Happy with the book. Can't wait to read it. ✌✌
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Pat
5.0 out of 5 stars The Best Book I've Read, EverReviewed in Canada on 12 August 2020
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My only complaint is that it isn't long enough.
Life and Fate has been praised as the War and Peace of the 20th century, and its message today is more timely than ever. I would say it's the best book I have ever read, even better than Tolstoy's last novel, Resurrection.
It's a book about freedom and kindness and our right to be different at a time when liberties are under attack, cruelty is often condoned and diversity is vilified.
Grossman saw where this can lead. In Stalin's Soviet Union almost everyone lived with the icy dread of having their number drawn in the great terror lottery. No one was immune.
At the start of Part 3 of the novel, Krymov, the fanatically loyal battalion commissar, is ordered, out of the blue: "Hand over your weapon and your personal documents." Thus begins his irreversible descent into the Gulag.
One reason the KGB seized Life and Fate is it equates Stalinism with fascism. (He didn't say one was worse or better, just that all totalitarianism is bad.)
I would say the biggest difference between Stalin and Hitler is Stalin got away with it. Stalin lived happily ever after. This book details Stalin's crimes against humanity without downplaying Hitler's monstrous legacy.
GETMANOV: Stalin?
In my opinion Stalin appears in the novel twice -- as himself (the historical character) and as the fictional character Getmanov. Without a doubt, Getmanov is Stalin.
Despite Grossman's courage and political naivete, there was a limit to what he could say about Stalin in the Soviet Union of the late 1950s.
Stalin had been dead since 1953. In a closed session of the Communist Party Congress in 1956 Khrushchev had denounced Stalin and his legacy of mass murder, torture and slave labour.
But the fact that the ruling dictator was only willing to criticize Stalin in a secret speech -- even though Stalin was dead -- speaks volumes about freedom of expression in the Soviet Union as Grossman was writing Life and Fate.
Getmanov is by far the most hateful of the novel's fictional characters. He is a self-promoter with a fake persona. He always appears to be smiling, but inspires fear. He never misses a chance to denigrate ethnic minorities. Grossman’s Getmanov would be quite at home in Snakes in Suits, a book about psychopaths.
The former obkom secretary, who was appointed as a military commissar to spy on senior officers, had always been considered a man of the masses. "He only had to open his mouth for people to laugh; his vivid, direct way of talking, his sometimes vulgar language quickly bridged the distance between the secretary of an obkom and a worker in overalls.”
On the factory floor, he would present himself as "a true servant of the people, the way he was ready to attack managers." But in his office at the obkom, "his only preoccupations were the preoccupations of Moscow."
...
"What was most extraordinary of all was that Getmanov always seemed to be absolutely sincere."
...
"Despite the fact that he never served at the front, people said of him: 'Yes, our commissar's a true soldier.' He enjoyed holding meetings and his speeches went down well with the troops: he made lots of jokes and spoke very simply, often quite coarsely."
...
"He was quick-tempered and resented it if someone answered him back.”
STALINGRAD
While Getmanov is the embodiment of evil, the defenders of Stalingrad embodied hope.
Stalingrad represented a turning point in the war – dawn’s early light in a long dark night of barbarism.
Up to that point, the Nazi tsunami seemed unstoppable. One European nation after another capitulated. Hitler penetrated Soviet defences like a hot knife through butter. Entire armies were taken prisoner. The fuhrer, the only one Stalin ever trusted, could be forgiven for believing the campaign would be over before winter (assuming he hadn't heard of Napoleon).
To be fair, Stalingrad wasn’t the first place where the blitzkrieg didn’t go as planned. The British inspired the world by holding out amid the most destructive air raids the world had seen up to that point. And though the Nazis reached the gates of Moscow, they never really tried to take it.
But Hitler threw massive resources into the assault on Stalingrad.
In one of the bloodiest battles of human history, the Soviets held out for five agonizing months before finally encircling and capturing the German 6th Army. With this historic victory the Red Army began a relentless drive that pushed the Nazis out of the Soviet Union and continued to Berlin.
According to Grossman, Stalingrad was more than a turning point in the war; it was also a turning point in the defenders’ hopes for freedom and justice after the war.
"Nearly everyone believed that good would triumph, that honest men, who hadn't hesitated to sacrifice their lives, would be able to build a good and just life," he wrote. "This faith was all the more touching in that these men thought that they themselves would be unlikely to survive till the end of the war; indeed, they felt astonished each evening to have survived one more day."
Grossman declared: "The soul of wartime Stalingrad was freedom."
Instead, they got a few more years of Stalin's terror, and no break from totalitarianism after Stalin's death. A symbol of that outcome still stands today. A decade after the Nazis were beaten at Stalingrad (now called Volgograd), Grossman notes slave labour built a megaproject.
"Here, 10 years later, was constructed a vast dam, one of the largest hydro-electric power stations in the world -- the product of the forced labour of thousands of prisoners."
HOPE
When Grossman died in 1964, his country – and this novel – remained in chains, and there was no light on the horizon. Grossman was the first to report on the industrial-scale genocide of the Nazi death camps. His mother was murdered by the Nazis. He'd endured Stalin's terror.
So what hope does this witness to some of humanity’s darkest deeds offer his readers?
It certainly isn’t religion or ideologies, which he notes have been used to justify horrific evil. One of Grossman characters, Madyarov, gives us the author's philosophy in a nutshell:
"Chekhov 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 never get anywhere."
Grossman's character Ikonnikov, the "holy fool" who is executed for refusing to help build a Nazi gas chamber, discusses how religions and ideologies have endlessly divided and subdivided people -- all in the name of a supposedly universal good overcoming evil. But "whenever we see the dawn of an eternal good ... the blood of old people and children is always shed."
Before he is taken away to be interrogated, Ikonnikov secretly pens his philosophy.
Where good can be found, he wrote, is in the "private kindness of one individual towards another; a petty, thoughtless kindness; an unwitnessed kindness. Something we could call senseless kindness. A kindness outside any system of social or religious good."
... "This kindness is senseless and wordless. It is instinctive, blind."
In the concluding words of Ikonnikov's essay we find Grossman's message of hope: "Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer."
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Ashutosh S. Jogalekar
5.0 out of 5 stars The case for dumb kindnessReviewed in the United States on 29 March 2020
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On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union in a typhoon of steel and firepower without precedent in history. In spite of telltale signs and repeated warnings, Joseph Stalin who had indulged in wishful thinking was caught completely off guard. He was so stunned that he became almost catatonic, shutting himself in his dacha, not even coming out to make a formal announcement. It was days later that he regained his composure and spoke to the nation from the heart, awakening a decrepit albeit enormous war machine that would change the fate of tens of millions forever. By this time, the German juggernaut had advanced almost to the doors of Moscow, and the Soviet Union threw everything that it had to stop Hitler from breaking down the door and bringing the whole rotten structure on the Russian people’s heads, as the Führer had boasted of doing.
Among the multitudes of citizens and soldiers mobilized was a shortsighted, overweight Jewish journalist named Vasily Grossman. Grossman had been declared unfit for regular duty because of his physical shortcomings, but he somehow squeezed himself all the way to the front through connections. During the next four years, he became one of the most celebrated war correspondents of all time, witnessing human conflict whose sheer brutality beggared belief. To pass the time in this most unreal of landscapes, Grossman had a single novel to keep him company – War and Peace. It was to prove to be a prophetic choice.
Not only was Grossman present during the siege and eventual victory at Stalingrad – a single battle in which more Soviet soldiers and citizens died than American soldiers during all of World War 2 – but he was also part of the Soviet advance into the occupied territories in which the Nazis had waged a racial war of extermination that would almost annihilate an entire race of people. While forward-deployed units of Nazi Einsatzgruppen killed more than a million Jews in Ukraine, Lithuania and other countries, this “holocaust by bullets” was only a precursor to the horror of Auschwitz and Treblinka. Grossman became the first journalist to enter Treblinka and describe what words could scarcely bring themselves to describe. Most of all, the Holocaust hit home for him in a devastatingly personal way – Grossman’s own mother was murdered by the Nazis in the village of Berdychiv; the prewar Jewish population of this small town numbering more than 40,000 was completely annihilated. This singular episode shaped Grossman’s worldview for the rest of his life.
Over the next ten years Grossman who had seen Stalin’s 1937 purges and the postwar takeover of Europe became witness to his own country’s descent into oppression, conquest and genocidal aspirations. The words that proclaimed liberty and brotherhood during the fight against the Nazis started sounding hollow. In 1960 he put the finishing touches to what was the culmination of his career and thinking – Life and Fate, a 900-page magnum opus that was on par with some of the greatest fiction of all time. Today Life and Fate stands shoulder to shoulder with the great novels. And similar to the great novels, it takes in the entire world and nothing seems to be missing from its pages. Love, hatred, war, peace, childhood, motherhood, jealousy, bravery, cowardice, introspection, economics, politics, science, philosophy…everything is contained in its universe. More importantly, like the great works of literature, like Shakespeare and Dante, Dickens and Hemingway, like Grossman’s compatriots Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the themes in Life and Fate are timeless, transcending nationality, race, gender and even its wartime setting. It will be relevant two hundred years from now when men and women will still be fighting and killing and discussing and loving. The novel speaks to human beings struggling with common problems across the gulf of time. And it speaks doggedly against the identity politics that riddles our discourse so widely.
Like War and Peace, Life and Fate straddles almost a hundred and fifty characters spread over a variety of times and locations, from the quiet warmth of a matriarch’s dwelling to the absolute nihilism of an extermination camp to several battle locations on the front spread around Stalingrad. Here we encounter characters whose views of life have been forced to be stripped down to their bare bones because of the sheer bleak brutality around them and forced minimalism of their existence. While there are hundreds of major and minor characters, a few key ones stand out. Broadly speaking, the characters fan out from the person of Alexandra Vladimirovna, a factory worker and steely matriarch who had lived in Stalingrad before moving out because of the war, and her two daughters Lyudmila and Yevgenia. The action also centers on Yevgenia’s old husband Krymov who has been an important party official and her new lover Novikov who is a tank commander. Meanwhile, Lyudmila lives with her husband Victor Shtrum, who in many ways speaks for the conscience of the various other characters in the novel. At least in one sense the most interesting person is Mikhail Mostovskoy, a friend of the family who has ended up in a German concentration camp.
It’s hard to keep track of all the characters, but one of the most remarkable things is how even some of the minor, intermittent players leave an indelible memory because of their pronunciations and ideas. There are some extraordinarily poignant moments, such as when Lyudmila’s son Tolya is wounded on the front and she hurries to visit him in the hospital, only to find that he has died shortly before. She asks to be escorted to his grave and spends a moment of hauntingly beautiful, ethereal and yet earthly tragedy mourning at his side, covering him with his shawl so that he won’t be cold. It takes her several minutes to realize the bare truth of Tolya’s non-existence:
“The water of life, the water that had gushed over the ice and brought Tolya back from the darkness, had disappeared; the world created by the mother’s despair, the world that for a moment had broken its fetters and become reality, was no more.”
Perhaps there is no story more emotionally devastating in the book than the story of Sofya Levinton, a Jewish friend of Lyudmila’s who has the misfortune of being snared by the Nazis and put on a cattle train to Auschwitz. On the train Sofya runs into David, a six or seven year-old boy who also shared the misfortune of being cut off from his mother and put in a ghetto with his grandmother. When his grandmother died of disease, the woman she had entrusted David to was too busy trying to save herself. Like two atomic particles randomly bumping into each other by accident, David and Sofya bump into each other on the train. They have no one else, so they have each other. They accompany each other into the camp, into the dressing room, and finally into the gas chamber where there is no light, no life, no meaning. As the Zyklon B starts hissing from the openings above, David clings to the unmarried, childless Sofya:
“Sofya Levinton felt the boy’s body subside in her hands. Once again she had fallen behind him. In mineshafts where the air becomes poisoned, it is always the little creatures, the birds and mice, that die first. This boy, with his slight, bird-like body, had left before her.
‘I’ve become a mother,’ she thought.
That was her last thought.”
In another German concentration camp, Mikhail Mostovskoy has philosophical disputes with a few prisoners who are trying to shake his confidence in communism and are also trying to organize an escape. Mostovskoy is a true believer and is keeping the flame burning bright. But reality is not so easy. The denouement comes when he is called to the office of the camp commandant. His name is Liss. Liss is interested in certain documents which a dissident named Ikkonikov has thrust into Mostovskoy’s hands, right before refusing to help build a gas chamber and being executed as a result. But that is not Liss’s main concern, and he is not here to punish Mostovskoy. Instead he does something worse than provide an easy death: he brings the hammer down on Mostovskoy’s entire worldview when he tells him how similar Nazism and Stalinism are, how they are built on the backs of oppressed and murdered people, how true believers in both ideologies should ideally stand shoulder to shoulder with each other, how this whole war is therefore an unnecessary farce. Mostovskoy is shaken, and his loss of faith very much mirrors Grossman’s own by the time he wrote the book: with its murder and suppression of all dissent, complete control of people’s lives and total disregard for individual freedom, were fascism and communism that different?
But if Mostovskoy had any lingering doubts about whether his faith in collective action has been built on a house of cards, it collapses completely when he reads Ikkonikov’s pamphlets and hears him speaking from the grave. It’s strange: Ikkonikov is a minor character who appears perhaps in four or five pages of the volume, and the transcript of his documents occupies not more than ten pages in a book numbering almost a thousand pages, and yet in many ways his pamphlet is the single-most important part of the book, communicating as it does the overwhelming significance of individual kindness and action in the face of utter, unending conflict. Individual kindness is the only thing that remains when all humanity has been stripped away from both oppressor and oppressed; when every trace of nationality, race, gender and political views has been obliterated by sheer terror and murder, this kindness is the only elemental thing connecting all human beings simply because they are human beings and nothing else, it is this kindness, this dumb, senseless kindness, that will keep propelling humanity onwards when all else is lost. It is this kindness that goes by the name of ‘good’. As Ikkonikov says,
“Good is to be found neither in the sermons of religious teachers and prophets, nor in the teachings of sociologists and popular leaders, nor in the ethical systems of philosophers… And yet ordinary people bear love in their hearts, are naturally full of love and pity for any living thing. At the end of the day’s work they prefer the warmth of the hearth to a bonfire in the public square.
Yes, as well as this terrible Good with a capital ‘G’, there is everyday human kindness. The kindness of an old woman carrying a piece of bread to a prisoner, the kindness of a soldier allowing a wounded enemy to drink from his water-flask, the kindness of youth towards age, the kindness of a peasant hiding an old Jew in his loft. The kindness of a prison guard who risks his own liberty to pass on letters written by a prisoner not to his ideological comrades, but to his wife and mother.
The private kindness of one individual towards another; a petty, thoughtless kindness; an unwitnessed kindness. Something we could call senseless kindness. A kindness outside any system of social or religious good.
But if we think about it, we realize that this private, senseless, incidental kindness is in fact eternal. It is extended to everything living, even to a mouse, even to a bent branch that a man straightens as he walks by.
Even at the most terrible times, through all the mad acts carried out in the name of Universal Good and the glory of States, times when people were tossed about like branches in the wind, filling ditches and gullies like stones in an avalanche – even then this senseless, pathetic kindness remained scattered throughout life like atom…
This kindness, this stupid kindness, is what is most truly human in a human being. It is what sets man apart, the highest achievement of his soul. No, it says, life is not evil!”
And who promotes this kindness? Not religion with its conditional acceptance and demands to conform. Not the state which also imposes its own demands for conformity. Not even capitalism which makes kindness conditional on the invisible hand of selfish actions. In fact no system of organization can impose this kindness, no matter how much it speaks of it in glowing terms. It can only come about when all systems of organization have been obliterated, when humanity’s bare existence compels its members to recognize a quality in each other that is completely independent of every group identification, every kind of “ism”.
And who spoke of this kindness? Not the religious prophets who sought salvation in the one true God and heaven, not the commissars whose mind-numbing bureaucratic machinations threatened to grind every human particle of unique identity into the featureless dust of one level playing field, not even the scientific rationalists whose discoveries can only describe, not prescribe. No, to describe senseless, stupid, all-encompassing kindness one must look to the great poets and writers, not the philosophers. And through everyday characters and conversations, nobody demonstrates the timeless nature of individual kindness as well as Chekhov:
“Chekhov 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 never get anywhere.”
If you haven’t already, dear reader, I cannot exhort you enough to read Chekhov. Read his plays, read especially his short stories, read anything by him. Throughout Life and Fate the nature of indivisible, immutable bonds between human beings – whether it is a commander and his aide, an aging communist and her son-in-law, and of course the more common and enduring sets of relationships between sons and mothers, daughters and fathers – stand above and beyond the basic essentials of the narrative.
Another character, in a completely different set of circumstances on the Stalingrad front:
“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. But this is where a terrible, fateful error is born: the belief that these groupings in the name of a race, a God, a party or a State are the very purpose of life and not simply a means to an end. No! The only true and lasting meaning of the struggle for life lies in the individual, in his modest peculiarities and in his right to these peculiarities.”
If that is not a soaring counterpoint to and a damning indictment of the identity politics that has completely taken over our discourse today, I do not know what is.
When word of Grossman’s magnum opus got out the KGB stormed his apartment. They considered the novel so dangerous that they confiscated not only the manuscript but also the typewriter ribbons which were used to craft the novel. This level of paranoia could only exist in the Soviet Union. Why they did this is clear after reading it. Not only does Life and Fate show, through devastatingly understated examples of indelible characters who gradually become disillusioned, the hollow nature of the Soviet system’s promises and its similarity with the fascism that its patriotic adherents thought they were fighting, but it also demonstrated through the character of physicist Victor Shtrum, the anti-Semitism that while not as fatal as that in Nazi Germany, was slowly but surely brewing in the country’s corridors and the hearts and minds of its people. Even before the war ended it was clear that the Germans’ campaign of Jewish cleansing in Ukraine and parts of Russia could not have been carried out without the complicity of local populations who held grudges against Jews for decades. Grossman’s personal motivation because of his mother’s murder brought to his depiction of the Soviet Union’s initially “benign” and then increasingly oppressive anti-Semitism particularly strident and urgent force. The party line in the country refused to have writers like Grossman single out Jewish victims of the Holocaust because they knew that doing so would shine a mirror into their own faces. The combination of Grossman’s expose of the Soviets as being little different from the Nazis and anti-Semites to boot sealed his novel’s fate.
When Grossman asked when his book might see the light of day, a high-ranking party official named Suslov said there was no question of the volume being published for another two hundred years; by announcing such a draconian sentence on Grossman’s work, he inadvertently announced the novel’s incendiary nature. Grossman died in 1964 without seeing his book smuggled out and translated by Robert Chandler, a sad and lonely man in a Moscow apartment battling stomach cancer.
But his act of defiance, expressed in this profound book as an assertion of the fundamental nature of the individual and a rejection of collectivism of all kinds, spoke to the ages, escaped the fetters of its two hundred-year oppressors and brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union. And it could well bring about the collapse of the systems we take so much pride in because we fail to see how they are turning us into inchoate groups. So let us now practice thoughtless, stupid, unwitnessed kindness. It’s the one constant in life and fate.
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Paul Parks
5.0 out of 5 stars Life and FateReviewed in Italy on 3 June 2019
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Amazingly good book, albeit demanding to read.
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There are novels I have re-read after 30 or 40 years that have shocked me with ideas which evidently made such a strong impression they ceased to be someone else’s thoughts and became my own. After a lifetime of reading you become formed by books; you are partly an accumulation of others’ ideas. Every time I re-read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway I see how this brief but enormously influential novel, first read in my teens, created in me the sense of lightness and excitement when walking down a London street, or how the phrase “among the cabbages” would resonate as a fragment of a sentence about memory and longing.
But only one book had such a decisive impact that I can date to it a profound alteration in my worldview and even behaviour. I read Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate in 2003. Like a handful of other people a decade ago, I felt that I held a samizdat; no one else I knew had ever heard of it. Grossman was referenced and footnoted in Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad and Berlin: The Downfall, both bestsellers of the 1990s. I am not an obvious audience for military history, but Antony and I had met on the management committee of the Society of Authors, and it seemed only polite to read each others’ books.
From Berlin, I moved on to Life and Fate. It took me three weeks to read it and three weeks to recover from the experience, during which time I could barely breathe. Grossman was a Soviet Jewish journalist who covered the battle of Stalingrad and the liberation of the Treblinka extermination camp. After the war he wrote this epic novel. Life and Fate is a Soviet War and Peace, in which every aspect of society radiates out from the central characters, Viktor Shtrum and his wife Lyudmila. Shtrum is a physicist and member of the academy of sciences; his wife’s first husband has been arrested during the purges; her son is a lieutenant in the army; Viktor’s mother, in the Nazi-occupied sector, is en route to the gas chamber. Dozens more interlinked people endure the war and its impact on ordinary and important lives, including those of Stalin and Hitler.
The novel is long, 871 pages in the Harvill edition, with a huge cast of characters that makes for a formidable challenge. Grossman was not a natural stylist – he wrote in journalistic prose; there is little lyricism. But because he writes of what he has seen firsthand, the images can be startling: “Blinking their scorched eyelashes, they forced their way back to the bunkers through the thickets of red dog rose.” He knows what people are thinking. In a scene of young soldiers at rest for a few minutes at the front, he takes us into their heads: one full of dire forebodings, another singing, one trying to identify a bird on a tree – soldiers dreaming of girls’ breasts, dogs, sausages and poetry.
When Grossman submitted his manuscript in 1960 he was told it could not be published for 200 years. Two years later he was dead of stomach cancer, his novel confiscated, “arrested” as he said, for he had assaulted Soviet totalitarianism. One must be careful not to confuse him with libertarians. Rather, Grossman saw the individual as a novelist does. “Human groupings have one main purpose,” he wrote, “to assert everyone’s right to be different, to be special, to think, feel and live in his or her own way … The only true and lasting meaning of the struggle for life lies in the individual, in his modest peculiarities and his right to these peculiarities.” The tolerance of difference is his message, not an assault on society or the state.
By the end of the novel, what you are left with out of the debris of Soviet Communism is something so banal it could be written on a greetings card: the individual, often random act of kindness – an old woman who picks up a stone to hurl at a captured German soldier and, for reasons she will never understand, replaces it with a piece of bread. People are placed in invidious situations, like Shtrum, cornered by Stalin. Few are heroes. But these acts of kindness recur throughout the novel, not in any context other than the spur of the moment. Kindness alleviates some of the horrors of war. In one brief moment a soldier thoughtfully removes a louse from his girl’s army jacket before kissing her.
Like many of my generation, I’d been shaped by ideas; by a number of -isms, socialism and feminism above all. I saw the world in terms of various us and them groupings. After reading Life and Fate they seemed to matter less. Grossman wasn’t advocating Christian saintliness, and was far from perfect in his own life. But if, even in the horror of war, you can alleviate suffering through some extraordinary action (volunteering to go to the gas chamber to hold the hand of a child so he won’t have to die alone), how easy might it be to behave with less anger, cynicism, irritation or sneery dismissiveness? And that’s what I have tried to do. Life and Fate is a daunting undertaking, but for those who finish it the experience is profound. Few novels that set out to change the world succeed; this one merely changed me.
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