Life and Fate (novel)
삶과 운명 (소설)
An epic novel written by Vasily Grossman in 1950-1959. Centred on the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942-1943, it sets Nazi and Soviet camps, the Holocaust and the Great Terror side by side through the fate of one family. The KGB seized the manuscript in 1961; a smuggled copy was published in Switzerland in 1980, and Soviet publication came in 1988.
In depth
What is the story?
September 1942 to February 1943, with the Battle of Stalingrad at the centre and a great chain of characters. The core is the Shaposhnikov family. The grandmother Alexandra has three daughters, Lyudmila, Marusya and Zhenya, and a son Dmitri. Dmitri and his wife were taken in the terror of 1937-1938 and their son Seryozha is fighting at Stalingrad. Lyudmila's son has fallen in battle; Marusya dies there. Zhenya left her party-bound husband Krymov for the tank officer Novikov, yet when Krymov is arrested she carries parcels to the Lubyanka.
The most unforgettable figure is Lyudmila's husband, the Jewish physicist Viktor Shtrum. His mother dies in the shooting of the Jews of Berdichev, as Grossman's own mother did. He makes a great discovery, comes under antisemitic attack at his institute, refuses to repent publicly and resigns. Awaiting arrest, he gets a telephone call from Stalin himself, apparently because of the military value of nuclear research, and his fortunes reverse at once. Then he signs a letter denouncing two innocent men, and is racked by guilt.
Another strand is the camps. The Old Bolshevik Mostovskoy, in a German camp, is questioned by the SS officer Liss, who says Hitler learned from Stalin: those who look on us with horror look on you with horror too. Mostovskoy cannot accept this, nor put it out of his mind. The army doctor Levinton goes to the gas chamber as a Jew. The Tolstoyan Ikonnikov refuses to work on building one. Krymov is jailed in the USSR on a denunciation of knowing Trotsky.
What is Grossman's answer? That small acts of kindness survive against ideological hatred. A Soviet scout and a German soldier in one shell crater do not shoot each other. A German commandant frees the starving prisoner Semyonov. A woman of ruined Stalingrad, ready to tear apart German prisoners carrying bodies from the former Gestapo cellar, finds herself handing an officer a piece of bread.
Why was it banned?
Grossman began as a Soviet writer: the earlier novel For a Just Cause (1952) kept within Socialist Realism. Life and Fate, written after Stalin's death, went on to compare Nazism with Stalinism. On 19 December 1960 the Novy Mir editors called it "anti-Soviet", and on 14 February 1961 the KGB seized the manuscript and typescripts. Who passed it on remains disputed: Vadim Kozhevnikov, editor of Znamya, is often named, but there is no documentary proof and his daughter denies it. Solzhenitsyn remembered it being taken from the Novy Mir safe.
Grossman appealed to Khrushchev, writing that his book had been arrested. On 23 July 1962 Mikhail Suslov received him, told him the book would not appear and said it could do more harm than Doctor Zhivago. Suslov's famous "not for two hundred years" is unconfirmed by recent research into the documents. Grossman died in 1964.
How did it survive?
A copy kept by the poet Semyon Lipkin was got abroad in the 1970s with the help of Andrei Sakharov, Bulat Okudzhava and Vladimir Voinovich, and published by L'Age d'Homme in Switzerland in 1980. In the USSR it appeared during perestroika, in 1988. That October a fuller manuscript surfaced in Maloyaroslavets, hidden since 1960 by his friend Vyacheslav Loboda, with the dedication "To my mother, Yekaterina Savelyevna Grossman".
How is it judged?
"The War and Peace of the twentieth century" is the phrase that follows it, though the comparison also breeds dissent. Dmitry Bykov, citing Lev Anninsky's line that Tolstoy has flowing water and Grossman sand, complained that he preaches. Solzhenitsyn called it a contribution to Russian literature while faulting its pale language and its picture of Germany, and read it as the path many crawled out of Soviet murk. Valery Shubinsky found it uneasy to depict a woman walking to the gas chamber with Tolstoyan subtlety.
How to encounter it?
Lev Dodin's stage version (2007), BBC Radio 4's 13-part dramatisation (2011), which took the book to the top of the British bestseller list, and Sergei Ursulyak's series (2011-2012). The credits of the film Stalingrad (2013) also acknowledge chapters of the novel.