Life and Fate: The WW2 Russian classic from the bestselling author of Stalingrad

Grossman's book is a stunning effort. He might lack Tolstoy's gift for character, but his magnum opus, smuggled to the west by Andrei Sakharov and other dissidents, is a brilliant novelised record of the Stalingrad conflict which shaped, and continues to shape, the modern world. He really needed an editor but as he had to write this in secret, he can be forgiven for his occasional repetitions and diversions. When Grossman asked for his novel to be published in Russia in the late 1950's the censor replied that he should be prepared to wait "for 200 to 300 years". It is an accessible and devastating attack on Stalinism and the way in which all authoritarian regimes, of both left and right, erode humanity and moral courage. BBC Radio 4 recently adapted this novel using an all-star cast. (Kenneth Branagh, Greta Scacchi and Ellie Kendrick). It was a good and honourable effort but necessarily so abbreviated it was never likely to be a substitute for the book itself. For example, the Radio 4 version began on page 134 of the book, leaving out some key scenes describing the political debates between Russian PoW's in the German concentration camp. The radio adaptation concentrates on relationships, whereas the book blends relationships, political ideas and military strategy. `Life and Fate' has sometimes been described as the `War and Peace' of the 20th century. It invokes the experience of a vast cast of 162 characters, Russians, Germans and Ukrainians in the main, who come together in the Second World War, between late 1941 and the spring of 1943, when the Russians first resisted, then drove back, the might of Germany's sixth army. This key battle was the fulcrum of the Second World War. The conflict is always present and is described graphically, often with visceral realism, as any authentic account of war demands. Grossman focuses our interest on a few key `players' who represent four broad groups: 1) The comfortable Russian middle-class scientific intelligentsia, (Vicktor Shtrum, his wife Lyudmila and their daughter Nadya. Viktor's colleagues). 2) The favoured, yet precarious, Russian political class, here represented by the Commissars, their families and their lovers. (Krymov, Getmanov). 3) The Russian military (Novikov, tank corps; Viktorov, airforce) 4) Perhaps the most poignant group comprises the defeated and despairing Russians. Some are held in Nazi concentration camps (Sofya Levinton, Mikhail Mostovskoy, the "Old Bolshevik", and Ikkonikov, the "Tolstoyan"). Others have been sent to the Lubyanka, as prisoners of Stalin, repeatedly enduring brutal three-day interrogations which eventually end in false confessions. Grossman's characters are made to face the awful moral quandaries he confronted in his own life as a writer and journalist. So the dilemma faced by his central character, Viktor Shtrum, who is urged to make false denunciations of innocent colleagues, is probably autobiographical. Both Grossman's and Shtrum's mothers were murdered early in the war. Both Shtrum and Grossman felt guilty that they could have done more to save them). The author, who had been a mining engineer and a chemist, volunteered for the Army but failed the medical. Having already published some articles and a novel, he was invited to work for Krasnya Zvezda (Red Star), the Army newspaper. He was attached to a branch of the journalist corps which stayed in Stalingrad throughout several months of constant battle, on a vast scale. Although he was not a communist, Grossman's reporting was soon popular and trusted both by the ordinary soldiers and by Stalin and the elite. He was favoured and allowed long interviews with top Russian generals and front-line soldiers, alike. Many incidents described in the novel are near-verbatim accounts of real events committed to his war journals. (See Anthony Beevor ,2006, "A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941-1945". Pimlico). As a Jew, Grossman was acutely aware of Stalin's growing paranoia about Jewish intellectual influence in the USSR. Our central character Viktor Pavlovich Shtrum, a theoretical physicist, declares that he had never even `felt Jewish' until he realised that many of his colleagues, who were no longer being promoted or recognised, were also Jews. Grossman shares Tolstoy's faith in the natural decency of the Russian peasant. There are touching scenes when an old Russian widow shares her meagre food with an escaped Russian prisoner who immediately vomits it up, because of weeks of starvation. Hunger, and its psychological effects, especially on soldiers and prisoners of both sides, is dealt with powerfully and at length. Grossman is not particularly convincing when writing about women. Too often his female characters are simple, slightly sentimentalised `saints' (Sofya, Marya Ivanova), although Shtrum's teenage daughter Nadya is a notable and delightfully `sassy' exception. When Shtrum is trying to work out his place in the hierarchy of Soviet science, he discovers that his rival, Sokolov, is getting 25 eggs per week, when he is only getting 24 (the average Russian saw none, of course). It takes his daughter to explain why. School gossip ensures that Nadya's classmates all know exactly who is `up' and who `down' in the Institute's rankings. Some of the most interesting and believable dialogue, full-blown political debate, occurs between the Old Bolshevik, Mikhail Mostovskoy, and his fellow prisoners in the German concentration camp. Later, when Mostovskoy is interrogated by the sinister, yet plausible, Obersturmbannfuhrer Liss, there is a sense that each knows his imminent fate, as Liss attempts to explain to the old Communist that Hitlerism and Stalinism share a similarly cynical view of man. The best writing is left to last, in chapter 60 of part three. Here, a few months after the German retreat, Stepan Spiridonov, the Stalingrad power station manager, is seen leaving the vast works, the power plant he has managed throughout the city's violent siege of daily aerial bombardment. He leaves demoted, because of a brief period of unofficial absence. When he takes leave of his old colleagues, who have suffered so much hardship and danger with him, there is great warmth. Before he is sent to the East, he presses his cheek against the huge flywheel of the electric turbine he had kept running throughout the worst of the war. We can all empathise with his outrage at the injustice of his exile. Such a long book with so many characters requires concentration. The writer assumes that the reader knows something of post-revolution Russian history and the basic distinctions between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. It will help if you know the reasons for Trotsky's murder in exile and why the Soviet `terror trials' of 1937 took place. If these events are unfamiliar, the following books might help: Simon Sebag Montefiore (2007) "The Young Stalin". Orion (final chapters) Martin Sixsmith (2011) "Russia, a 1000 year chronicle of the Wild East". Pages 119-211. BBC Books So, all in all, a major work demanding considerable attention. Was it worth it? You bet.

It is impossible to do justice to this book, which is Grossman's masterpiece and one of the great books of all time . Vasily Grossman was a Ukrainian scientist and writer, who reported on the Battle of Stalingrad for the Red Army journal. He spent the most savage days of the second world war in the center of a city under siege. Hitler was determined to conquer Stalingrad, which was not essential to his attack on Russia, because of the prestigious name of the city. Stalin was equally determined he wasn't. Between them they dispatched vast quantities of destructive power against each other there and destroyed the city. Grossman was there throughout and his reports were read at all levels of the Red Army and Kremlin. He did not interview or take notes. He worked along side soldiers and recalled his conversations with them later. He scarcely mentioned the high command in his reports, rather he concentrated on the ground troops shared their lives and reported on their bravery and patriotism. After the War he wrote this astounding novel, which moves between the Ukrainian town of his upbringing, research labs in and around Moscow, meetings of commissars, senior party and scientific research chiefs, the KGB prisons in Moscow and Siberia, German occupation prisons and extermination camps all linked by an extended family of Ukrainian Jews, who regard themselves as Russians and Soviet citizens. This is a broad canvass with a host of characters, whom the reader gets to know well. Some are historical figures like Stalin and Paulinus, the German General in charge of the siege of Stalingrad. There is no real way to describe a book of this magnitude and brilliance. It has to be read. It is an experience not to be missed. In spite the terror and horror the reader experiences along with the characters it remains a positive statement, not only of human endurance but of rapture and delight too. Clearly this is not a casual comfort read. It is for real, really is an experience one feels honored to have been allowed to share in. It takes several days to read and will effect the rest of your life.

Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman is a huge, sprawling novel that is ambitious in its aim to give insight into the conditions or the life and fate of a vast array of characters set in the context of the battle of Stalingrad during the second world war. It is a realist novel grounded in the reality of the German invasion of Russia and the impact of that invasion. Yet at the same time the novel displays some modernist tendencies in so far as there is not clear linear plot but instead the reader is subjected to a series of subplots and character vignettes. Along with the vast amount of characters, structuring the novel around subplots command a careful and well concentrated read. Life and Fate is also a novel that aims to analyse two forms of totalitarianism: the Nazi regime under Hitler and communism under Stalin. From this perspective a broad sweep of early twentieth century history is conveyed but interestingly as the narrative moves back and fort in time Grossman manages to create an illusion that the novel is static focusing on the battle of Stalingrad. So what holds this sprawling novel together? A number of approached is at work in the novel. First, the novel focuses on a family, the Shaposhnikovs, with Viktor Pavlovich Shtrum as its head and Lyudmila Nikolaevna Shaposhnikova, Viktor's wife, as a matriarchal figure. Along with this central family and their acquaintances, Grossman shapes his narrative by moving around a number of settings - for example, a German concentration camp, a Russian labour camp and of course some of the action around the battle of Stalingrad. There is no doubt that it is Grossman himself telling the story because at times he stands back from the main story line and injects his own philosophical mussing a la Tolstoy in War and Peace. One of the things I enjoyed and that kept me reading through this long novel is Grossman's philosophical mussing. In pastiche fashion, as if in homage to Tolstoy, Grossman's mussing are profound and thought provoking. Here is an example, seen through the eyes of the central character Viktor where Grossman reflects on the relationship between fascism and humans: "Man and Fascism cannot co-exist. If Fascism conquers, man will cease to exist and there will remain only man-like creatures that have undergone an internal transformation. But if man, man who is endowed with reason and kindness, should conquer, then Fascism must perish, and those who have submitted to it will once again become people." The novel is littered with many thought provoking reflections as the one above. Life and Fate depicts a great understanding of what it means to be a human being. The scope of human issues covered is broad, and Grossman handles them with great deftness and due attention. He has the ability to shift from a moving account of Jews going to their deaths in the gas chambers to an unemotional account of Viktor Pavlovich Shtrum's success as a physicist. Then there are passages of shear brilliance for example where Grossman imagines Hitler's psychological state when he learnt of the defeat of German forces during the battle of Stalingrad. Perhaps above all Life and Fate is a novel about war. Grossman's grasp and understanding of the chaos and mishaps of military planning and war is profound and rendered clearly. He is certainly no romantic but a hard nose realist. This is how he describes the failure of an attack on the Germans after all the careful preparations: "This is when the madness of war becomes most obvious ... An hour later there is nothing to show for all your work except some broken-down, burning tanks with twisted guns and torn tracks. Where are the hard months of training now? What has become of the patient, diligent work of the mechanics and electricians?" Another strength of the novel is to be found in Grossman's depiction of love between two people or the ménage a trios between Viktor, his wife Lydia and Marya Ivanovna. Grossman's analysis of Yevgenia love for her former husband Krymov reveals the intensity of her feelings brilliantly. In one passage he tells the reader: "the thoughts and feelings she had repressed, the secret pain and anxiety from the time she and Krymov had separated, the tenderness she still felt for him, the way she still felt somehow accustomed to him - everything had flared up with renewed intensity during these last weeks". Or in the case of Viktor's love for two women as the impact upon the lives of those involved is described the writing is quite simply profound: "It was only by renouncing his love that he could deliver himself, Lyudmila and Marya Ivanovana from these lies. But when he realised this was what he had to do, he was dissuaded by a treacherous fear that clouded his judgement: `This lie isn't so very terrible'. After all the praise, this is not a novel that I enjoyed reading as much as I had anticipated. One is easily lost among the huge amount of characters and some the detailed description of manoeuvrings became a little tedious. Furthermore, central to the novel is obviously a realistic depiction of the life and fate of a broad range of characters against the backdrop of the Germany's invasion of Russia during the second world war. However, my experience of reading the novel suggests that, as a realist novel, it lacked a cohesive thread that could easily weave the reader into its large canvas. Tribute must be paid to Robert Chandler for his insightful introduction and what appears to be a consistent translation. If you think you have the patience and time then read the novel and you might experience a good fictionalised and humane account of the lives of some characters who experienced the battle of Stalingrad.

This really is a remarkable book, billed as the 20C War and Peace it is set against the siege of Stalingrad in 1941. This edition comes with a helpful introduction by Linda Grant. In many ways the novel is grim. It describes life in German concentration camps and the lead up to the gas chamber in poignant detail. Grossman draws the parallel between the German camps and Russian labour camps set up to deal with dissidents, criminals and Jews. There is little difference between communism and fascism. We read about the torture in the Lubyanka, about the rise and fall and rise again of a Jewish scientist in Russia. There are many examples of how the whims of life and fate change people. One minute, a party official has power over his peers, the next he is interrogated and incarcerated himself, because someone, anyone it seems, has denounced him as an enemy of the people. There are stories of grasping, selfish individuals who are corrupted by the state, interspersed with stories of great individual courage and defiance. There is the tank corps commander who delays his attack for a few minutes to protect his men and make victory more likely. He is assured enough to stand against the orders of his commanders, but will he too be denounced and reduced? Will he share a similar fate to the manager of the power station who sticks to his post whilst under siege for all but the last day when the battle is finally won? The scope of the work is immense, but it is very readable. Perhaps it could have benefitted from tighter editing, but the vast canvas gives it credibility and depth. It is essentially about the life and fate of people against the huge power of the state. Many die. Many are wasted. Many are small and petty-minded, but in some, the human spirit lives on, and this is Grossman's message. Much of the book is grim, but there is a thread of humour and strong theme of humanity. Grossman died before the publication of his masterpiece. Thus, he shared the fate of many of his contemporaries whose work was stifled by the state. The irony is that the battle for Stalingrad was the battle for freedom, yet the freedom won did not allow the publication of this novel. Peerless! But beware, contemporary novels seem thin a vapid in comparison.

I'd never heard of Vitaly Grossman, despite having read a lot of Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak between 1970 and 2000. The Times book review section on Saturdays has a small section, "I've been re-reading" and Life & Fate was the subject a few weeks ago. I enjoyed the review and bought the book. Its' history is eccentric as it was "arrested" by the KGB in 1960 - they confiscated the only copy, but left the author, a distinguished journalist on the Front Line during WWII, alone. In 1980 a microfilm copy of the typewritten manuscript was smuggled out of Russia to the West. How the manuscript got microfilmed is not explained in the translator's preface, but the book is technically 'unfinished' in that Grossman never got a chance to edit or polish it. Which probably explains the extreme length at 857 pages. That, actually, is evident in reading it, but I believe that the book is the better for being unpolished. Clearly it is largely a fictionalised version of either what Grossman experienced at first hand during the siege of Stalingrad, or what he heard from eyewitnesses during and after the war. It's remarkable and very touching and shows that the human spirit cannot be quenched by psychopaths such as Hitler and Stalin. They may kill millions of us humans, but the race survives, and that's important to remember when there's another Russian psychopath currently running amok in the Ukraine. At the back of the book is a list of all the characters and their inter-relationships - very helpful.

It has taken me a long time to finally finish reading this difficult, painful book. Not because it is poorly written, but because its subject matter, set around the siege of Stalingrad, and the squaring up of 2 totalitarian systems against each other, carries too much awful cruelty and dreadful reality to easily stay with. We are talking the atrocities of both the Nazi concentration camps and the Soviet gulags here. The systematic excesses of ideologies which believed that the ends justify the means. Wherever such isms get in the way of 'humanity', the road to expending humanity itself as an unfortunate statistic is walked down. Grossman's powerful book achieves its effect not through a blow-by-blow graphic account of torture, elimination and cruelty, but through a constant searching for, and a belief, in the ordinary, powerful smallness of the individual, through a passionate belief in the value of the individual - not in some ghastly Randian hierarchical way - in a way which values the unique preciousness of each individual life. Time and again, Grossman sets the impersonalities of the state machine (whether of the left or the right) its inhumaneness and its ability to negate and destroy life, individual experience, warm connection and empathy, versus the sometimes irrational reality of the 'human' response. Powerful images of what this means are given in such instances as the actions of the childless, middle aged Jewish doctor, instinctively seeking to shield the motherless young boy with her own body, as they stand in the killing shower rooms, breathing in cyanide gas. This image, of humanity breaking through surfaces again in the elderly Russian woman, against all reason, offering a crust of bread to a German, following the surrender of the German army. Grossman understands the pressures by which our humanity is eroded. This is a book written not in hatred of 'the enemy', be they 'the Germans' 'the kulaks' 'the Bolsheviks' 'the Mensheviks' - but with a passionate affirmation that the answer can only lie in 'the human response', not in the ideological response. Despite the dreadfulness of the subject matter, and what it says about us as a species, this remains a passionately hopeful book, one on the side of 'life', giving us, again and again, these images of the human moment, the friendship, the love, the compassion, the empathy, the very persistence of life itself, seeking to break through.

This is a superb book.

There is no doubt Life and Fate is a difficult book to read - it is 855 pages long, has well over a hundred characters and deals with topics that aren't exactly light. It jumps from one character and setting to another every dozen pages, and so it's not easy to keep track of what is going on. However, it is an interesting and gripping book if you give it a try and persevere! To enjoy this book, one should be interested in World War II or Stalinism, or ideally both. The book deals with the lives of people involved in the battle of Stalingrad as well as civilians. The best idea probably is to read through the list of characters first, but I found that it doesn't really matter how exactly all the characters are connected as the story goes back and forth between so many different people that it's easy to become involved in each character's story without worrying about who is whose uncle or commander. Apparently, the main character in the book is Viktor, but his story doesn't occupy a particularly central role in the book; it is, ironically, one of the least interesting storylines in the book, since it seems that very little happens in Viktor's life except constant musings, getting annoyed with everyone and the occasional political conversation. Other storylines are a lot more interesting, especially the ones dealing with labour camps and the prison, as these are most closely related to the central theme of the book. Other reviewers have mentioned that some of Grossman's more philosophical passages are quite shallow and silly (I couldn't follow the argument about death being slavery either), but his central theme is the role of State and its power over people. This is quite brilliantly developed across the various storylines - perhaps the best one is the story involving Krymov - and it gives a very vivid impression of the fear and paranoia caused by living in a totalitarian state. As such, it is much more effective as a description of Stalinism than any factual book on the matter I've come across. There isn't any specific condemnation of Stalinism spelled out, but it is clear that the way Grossman depicts the role of State was the reason for the banning of the book (as well as his idea that Stalinism and Nazism are actually the same thing). Much like Satanic Verses, this is a controversial book for its subtle theme rather than any outright proclamations of offence. Probably the biggest weakness of the book is that in trying to cover every angle on the battle of Stalingrad, it creates too many shallow characters rather than a few strong ones. Especially among the military characters, it often becomes difficult to distinguish who is who because they are all essentially the same swearing, drinking, lice-ridden character. The passages involving German soldiers seem rather superfluous, especially when a lot of them just simply describe technical matters rather than actually give insight into the character of the soldiers. Finally, the end comes rather abruptly (if such a word can describe something that comes after hundreds of pages) and, although its emotional message is clear, it gives very little final resolution of at least some of the stories in the book. Overall, though, Life and Fate is a very good book and gives a very powerful insight into the life under Stalin from a perspective Western authors simply cannot cover.

This is a large novel, extremely ambitious in scope, covering a large canvas, with deep insights into totalitarianism, politics and human psychology. It is unfortunately also just a bit patchy in places. Personally, I found many parts striking a chord. For example, somewhere at the beginning, the description of how the camp is run reminded me of India under British rule. Likewise, much of the political action seems to ring true, (based on other peoples' writings), and in comparing communists to Nazis, the author had both great clarity of vision and great courage to even think of making the comparison. There are one or two places where the thread seems to be lost, and the ending seems a trifle abrupt, but considering the history behind this novel, it can be understood that some parts of it may have been lost. However, the parts which seemed relatively unrealistic pertain to the war itself, which is ironic considering that the author was a war correspondent. It seems like a typically sanitized, jingoistic, glorified version, which sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb, because it is in such stark contrast to the rest of the work, where, in general, the author is extremely clear sighted and even handed in his treatment of both the Russians and the Germans. (Note: the translator also refers to a related point: i.e. the debate about the true motivations of the defenders of Stalingrad.) Possibly, these issues might have been rectified in the due process, had the author been able to review the book. Even so, this is an exceptional work.

Excellent

僕がこの本を手にとったのは、FinancialTimes紙の編集長が2011年の読書の中で最高の作品だと絶讃していたからだ。この本は、1960年に当時のソ連の作家によって書かれたものだが、体制批判の内容であるがためにKGBによって没収され、長く陽の目を見なかったところ、1980年に西側に密かに持ち出されて、喝采を浴びたとの経緯がある。 物凄く内容の濃い作品だ。1942-3年、第二次世界大戦の重大な転換点となった独ソ間のスターリングラード攻防が繰り広げられる中、ある家族を焦点に据え、親兄弟、その妻、夫、親戚、友人など一人一人がどのように生きていくかが丁寧に描かれている。 登場人物は様々だ。主人公の一人の科学者は、スターリン圧政が進む世相において良心を貫こうとする中、研究所では彼の業績評価は歪められ、完全な孤立といつ逮捕されるかもしれないとの不安に苛まれる。一方で、自分の地位を護るためにどうしようもなく体制側のいかさまレターにサインをさせられるともに、これまで大事にしてきた誇りを失い、失意にひしがれる。筋金入り共産党政治教員は、これまで勇猛に戦列を率いてきたのに、ある時、言われなき密告を受けて、政治犯として逮捕され、秘密警察から苛烈で不条理な尋問を受ける身に転落する。スターリングラードの市街戦においてドイツ軍の激烈な砲火攻撃を受けながら地下壕や工場跡で耐え忍ぶソ連軍人の荒々しい息づかいがとても細やかに描かれている(そんな時でも必ずヴォッカを飲んでいるのはおもしろい)。ソ連戦車部隊を率いる指揮官は、戦闘の最中にあって、政治的功名心から軍事ロジックに横槍を入れようとする部隊付きの共産党政治教員を相手にしなければならない。そしてそのような政治教員に抗うことがどんなに勇気のいることか。ドイツに占領されたウクライナでは、ユダヤ人が迫害を受け、動物同然の扱いで収容所に運び込まれ、毒ガス室で殺される。このプロセスを管理し、死体処理を行わせられるのもユダヤ人だ。その一人一人の思いはどうなのか、とても身に染みる。ドイツと戦い、ソ連に自由を勝ち取ろうとして自らの命を犠牲にするロシア戦士。でも、彼らが守るソ連はスターリンの専制によって自由が失われているというのはなんたる皮肉なのか。 登場人物は百人を超え、様々なプロットに分かれた構成になっているので、正直、読みづらいし、ロシア革命の変遷に無知な僕にとってはその迫真をどれ位十分に噛み締められたかは不安もある。だが、その分ストーリーが重層的で、これまで知らなかった当時のソ連社会の様子が市民個々人のレベルまで非常によく伝わってくる。とても読む価値のある貴重な作品である。

Classic read

Amazingly good book, albeit demanding to read.