Vasilii Grossman

Life and Fate

Vasily Grossman

Suppressed by the KGB, Life and Fate is a rich and vivid account of what the Second World War meant to the Soviet Union. On its completion in 1960, Life and Fate was suppressed by the KGB. Twenty years later, the novel was smuggled out of the Soviet Union on microfilm. At the centre of this epic novel looms the battle of Stalingrad. Within a world torn apart by ideological tyranny and war, Grossman’s characters must work out their destinies. Chief among these are the members of the Shaposhnikov family – Lyudmila, a mother destroyed by grief for her dead son; Viktor, her scientist-husband who falls victim to anti-semitism; and Yevgenia, forced to choose between her love for the courageous tank-commander Novikov and her duty to her former husband. Life and Fate is one of the great Russian novels of the 20th century, and the richest and most vivid account there is of what the Second World War meant to the Soviet Union.

Max Bodach

Incredible and beautiful work, though perhaps not as tight or as meaningful as Dostoevsky. Maybe that is the point. Grossman writes after WWII and his manuscript had to be smuggled out on microfilm. He's a gifted realist author and he evokes the moments of transcendence and human joy amid the misery of Stalingrad with a deft, understated touch. The highlights of the book are in his explorations of the psyches of those who are put under the microscope of state investigation. The examination of Party conscience that follows are profound, and Grossman articulates the desire for freedom beneath all obsequious party functionaries. There's very few true heroes in the book, but every character is human. A wonderfully liberal book taht is profoundly hopeful even as it tells the story of the Shaposhnikov family under Soviet totalitarianism.

THE ORIGINAL TRANSLATION BY ROBERT CHANDLER, UPDATED AND REVISED The twentieth century War and Peace, a broad portrait of an age and a searing vision of Stalinist Russia, Life and Fate is also the story of a family, the Shaposhnikovs, whose lives in the army, the gulag, a physics institute, a power station and a concentration camp are stunningly evoked, from their darkest to their most poetic moments. Judged so dangerous by the Soviet authorities that the manuscript was immediately confiscated when completed in 1960, Grossman’s masterpiece was finally smuggled into the West and published in 1980. The Vintage Classic Russians Series: Published for the 100th anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution, these are must-have, beautifully designed editions of six epic masterpieces that have survived controversy, censorship and suppression to influence decades of thought and artistic expression.

Life and Fate (Vintage Classic Russians Series)

Bryan Alexander

"nobody’s going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I’m crazy...”
-Ernest Hemingway

Life and Fate (Жизнь и судьба) is, to my reckoning, one of the handful of truly great novels about World War II, one of the classics of war literature, and possibly one of the 20th century's most important novels. It's a sign of that history that the novel disappeared for a generation, and only now is being read. 

You should read it, but I'll warn you now that it is a challenge. It is long, complex, and also emotionally devastating. I read it over months, savoring each chapter, reading many passages out loud to my wife, crying openly at several. I'm still having a hard time writing this response.

A quick introduction: Life and Fate is an epic novel centered on the battle of Stalingrad, WWII's turning point. Vast swarms of characters appear, from refugees and tank commanders to Hitler and Stalin. War and Peace is clearly present as an aspirational model throughout, and is actually name-checked several times.

Successful journalist and novelist Vasily Grossman submitted the novel for publication in 1960. In response, the KGB seized the manuscript and even Grossman's typewriter ribbons, "arresting the book" and preventing its appearance in print. Grossman died shortly after this. Years later one of the author's friends smuggled a copy abroad, where it was published by a French house. It appeared in Russia around the USSR's fall, and then in English.

(The best author photograph in all of human history)

So, the novel itself. It's daunting to summarize 900 pages of what feels like that many characters, and with so many scenes of horror and devastation, but I will try. Grossman sets characters into criss-crossing paths from Berlin to central Asia, using their multiple perspectives and experiences to give us a nineteenth-century-style social novel kaleidoscopic view of the titanic struggle between Nazi German and the Soviet Union. Stalingrad is the locus, the novel's gravitational center, but action moves around it in space, and reaches both backwards and forwards in time. The rise and fall of fascism as a social movement and human problem is thus encompassed, as is the Holocaust, European anti-semitism and Stalinism.

The people: there is a Jewish scientist who makes a massive breakthrough in atomic theory, an "Old Bolshevik" (veteran ofd 1917, a comrade of Lenin) arrested by the secret police, a tank commander, a striving commissar, a homeless grandmother, an eye doctor caught up by the Nazis, a heroic soldier, a devoted water plant manager, mathematicians, war widows, wives of Gulag prisoners. Each is confronted by the pressures of the time: of war, of Stalinism, of antisemitism; of family relations and micropolitics. We follow the commissar as he tries to bring a heroic yet rogue unit to heel. One character befriends a young boy, and Grossman takes them - and us - unflinchingly into the gas chambers and death. Denizens of camps both Nazi and Soviet struggle to survive, consider rebellion, consider betrayals and being betrayed, and confront their titular lives and fates. So many suffer. So many fail. So many die.

This narrative richness and scope allows Grossman to explore all kinds of ideas and issues. He agonizes over the problem of human cruelty, examining the many ways people decide to commit horrors upon each other. He ponders our moments of cruelty. He probes when we rise up in opposition to fate or horror, and when we acquiesce. He explores the question of if and how a totalitarian state can reshape human character. Perhaps most important in the novel is the question of how and when we offer kindness to other people, especially when such actions seem senseless. 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.(410)The final idea the book leaves us with is a desperate focus on individuality, a kind of stark, sad humanism:

whatever life holds in store – hard-won glory, poverty and despair, or death in a labour camp – they will live as human beings and die as human beings, the same as those who have already perished; and in this alone lies man’s eternal and bitter victory over all the grandiose and inhuman forces that ever have been or will be . . .(862) 

In many ways Life and Fate is focused on Soviet and Russian history. That's the geographical domain of much of the text and the original of most of the cast. Characters constantly reflect on the Russian Revolution, the Civil War, collectivization, the Gulag, the campaign against the kulaks and the starvation of Ukaine, and especially the Great Purge around 1937. They meditate on how these events shaped their world, and imagine what will occur after the Nazi defeat. They respond to Stalin's cult of personality with dread, love, and confusion. The book is a kind of frank sociological treatise of Soviet life during its first generation.

Grossman sets up parallels between the USSR and the Third Reich. We follow characters in camps within both regimes. The roles of heroic leaders, propaganda, militarism, socialism, and quashing internal dissent appear side by side. 

The novel's prose is largely direct and spare, with descriptions short in favor of dialog. Some of the descriptions accumulate details that climax in ferocity:The barbed wire of the camps, the clay of the anti-tank ditches and the walls of the gas ovens brought together millions of people of different ages, professions and languages, people with different material concerns and different spiritual beliefs. All of them – fanatical believers and fanatical atheists, workers and scroungers, doctors and tradesmen, sages and idiots, thieves, contemplatives, saints and idealists – were to be exterminated. 
The Gestapo limousine sped down the autumn autobahn.(478)Or this Gothic description of Stalin's terror:The hide was being flayed off the still living body of the Revolution so that a new age could slip into it; as for the red, bloody meat, the steaming innards – they were being thrown onto the scrapheap.(841)There are also times when Grossman the journalist comes to the fore, and even reaches levels of beauty:Novikov chose instead to go outside and be alone for a moment. 
It was early in the evening, very quiet, and the air was extraordinarily transparent; even the smallest objects were clearly and distinctly visible. The smoke rose vertically from the chimneys. Logs crackled in the field-kitchens. A girl was embracing a dark-haired soldier in the middle of the street, her head on his chest, weeping. Boxes, suitcases and typewriters in black cases were being carried out of the buildings that had served as their HQ. Signallers were reeling in the thick black cables that stretched between corps headquarters and the headquarters of each brigade. A tank behind the barns backfired and let out puffs of exhaust smoke as it prepared to set off. Drivers were filling the petrol tanks of their new Ford trucks and removing the thick covers from their radiators. Meanwhile, the rest of the world was perfectly still.(227-228)
There are impressionist passages, coming close to stream of consciousness, as when a Nazi soldier reflects on his doom in a very Joycean way:

The snow fell on Bach’s shoulders; it was as though flakes of silence were falling on the still Volga, on the dead city, on the skeletons of horses. It was snowing everywhere, on earth and on the stars; the whole universe was full of snow. Everything was disappearing beneath it: guns, the bodies of the dead, filthy dressings, rubble, scraps of twisted iron. This soft, white snow settling over the carnage of the city was time itself; the present was turning into the past, and there was no future.(743)Or when a prison, beaten and exhausted, is overcome by memories:

The pain had lessened, but his chest, his face and the palms of his hands were all covered in sweat. His thoughts took on a deceptive clarity. His conversation about evil with the Italian priest became confused with a number of different memories: with the happiness he had felt as a boy when it had suddenly begun to pour with rain and he had rushed into the room where his mother was sewing; with his wife’s bright eyes, wet with tears, when she had come to visit him at the time he was in exile by the Yenisey; with pale Dzerzhinsky whom he had once asked at a Party conference about the fate of a young and very kind Social Revolutionary. ‘Shot,’ Dzerzhinsky had answered . . . Major Kirillov’s gloomy eyes . . . Draped in a sheet, the corpse of his friend was being dragged along on a sledge – he had refused to accept his offer of help during the siege of Leningrad. A boy’s dreamy head and its mop of hair . . . 
And now this large bald skull pressed against the rough boards. These distant memories drifted away. Everything became flatter and lost its colour. He seemed to be sinking into cold water. He fell asleep – to wake up to the howl of sirens in the early-morning gloom.(391-392)And there is surreal, dark humor, as when an old and now arrested secret policeman ruminates between interrogations:

‘The concept of personal innocence is a hangover from the Middle Ages. Pure superstition! Tolstoy declared that no one in the world is guilty. We Chekists have put forward a more advanced thesis: “No one in the world is innocent.” Everyone is subject to our jurisdiction. If a warrant has been issued for your arrest, you are guilty – and a warrant can be issued for everyone. Yes, everyone has the right to a warrant. Even if he has spent his whole life issuing warrants for others.(635) Not to mention bouts of fantasy and science fiction, as when Stalin imagines the murdered dead coming after him like zombies (645), Shtrum's friend fantasizes about bringing inanimate planets to life (690) (an echo of cosmism there), or the terrifying, Borgesian imagination of a world where prison camps fuse with everyday life (845).

There are too many plot points that I'd like to share. I need to put some behind spoiler shield, like (view spoiler)[when Stalin's phone call saves Shtrum - what a scene! - or the death of his mother in the camps. (hide spoiler)] But for now I can only end, as the book does in its final sentence, in awe and silence.

THE ORIGINAL TRANSLATION BY ROBERT CHANDLER, UPDATED AND REVISED The twentieth century War and Peace, a broad portrait of an age and a searing vision of Stalinist Russia, Life and Fate is also the story of a family, the Shaposhnikovs, whose lives in the army, the gulag, a physics institute, a power station and a concentration camp are stunningly evoked, from their darkest to their most poetic moments. Judged so dangerous by the Soviet authorities that the manuscript was immediately confiscated when completed in 1960, Grossman's masterpiece was finally smuggled into the West and published in 1980. The Vintage Classic Russians Series- Published for the 100th anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution, these are must-have, beautifully designed editions of six epic masterpieces that have survived controversy, censorship and suppression to influence decades of thought and artistic expression.

Life and Fate

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