Life and Fate

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More About This Book

Overview

A book judged so dangerous in the Soviet Union that not only the manuscript but the ribbons on which it had been typed were confiscated by the state, Life and Fate is an epic tale of World War II and a profound reckoning with the dark forces that dominated the twentieth century.

Interweaving a transfixing account of the battle of Stalingrad with the story of a single middle-class family, the Shaposhnikovs, scattered by fortune from Germany to Siberia, Vasily Grossman fashions an immense, intricately detailed tapestry depicting a time of almost unimaginable horror and even stranger hope.

Life and Fate juxtaposes bedrooms and snipers’ nests, scientific laboratories and the Gulag, taking us deep into the hearts and minds of characters ranging from a boy on his way to the gas chambers to Hitler and Stalin themselves.

This novel of unsparing realism and visionary moral intensity is one of the supreme achievements of modern Russian literature.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly
In 1961, this epic WWII Russian novel about the battle of Stalingrad was seized for being ``anti-Soviet'' by the KGB; it was finally published almost 20 years after the author's death, when a dissident publisher smuggled a microfilm copy to the West. (Jan.)
Library Journal
Grossman (1905-64) hoped that Life and Fate (1960), the sequel to his World War II novel In a Just Cause (Za Pra voe delo, 1954; no English translation), would appear in the USSR. Even dur ing the 1960s ``thaw,'' that proved im possible. The translator compares the book to War and Peace , but it is closer to Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle in portraying a society that knows neither physical nor spiritual peace. Grossman uses one family's experiences of the months of the Stalingrad campaign to show the entire mad tapestry woven by Stalin and Hitler. Like Solzhenitsyn, he depicts laboratories, prisons, and the Soviet elite's uneasy privilege, but he also covers both sides of the front and follows Jews to the gas chambers. This sprawling, uneven novel is wrenching, and compelling in its portrait of loyal citizens who repel the Nazi invaders only to face renewed repression at home. Mary F. Zirin, Altadena, Cal.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781590172018
  • Publisher: New York Review Books
  • Publication date: 5/16/2006
  • Pages: 896
  • Sales rank: 69,718
  • Series: New York Review Books Classics Series
  • Product dimensions: 5.26 (w) x 8.00 (h) x 1.82 (d)

Meet the Author

Vasily Grossman (1905—1964) was born in Berdichev in present-day Ukraine, the home of one of the largest Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. After studying chemistry and working as a mining engineer, he was discovered by Maxim Gorky, whose support enabled him to begin publishing his writing. Grossman was a combat correspondent during World War II, covering the defense of Stalingrad, the fall of Berlin, and writing the first account in any language of a German death camp. Although the manuscript for Life and Fate was initially seized and suppressed by the KGB in 1960, and Grossman did not live to see it published, it was smuggled out of the USSR a decade later with the help of Andrei Sakharov and Vladimir Voinovich. The novel was eventually published throughout Europe and North America in the early 1980s; it appeared in Russia in 1988. A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941—1945, a collection of Grossman’s journalistic writings and notebook entries, was published in 2006.

Robert Chandler is the translator of selections of Sappho and Apollinaire, as well as of Pushkin’s Dubrovsky and Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. His co-translations of Andrey Platonov have won several prizes in both the UK and the US. He is the editor of Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida; his most recent translation is of Hamid Ismailov’s The Railway.

Customer Reviews

Average Rating 4.5
( 10 )

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  • Posted February 6, 2010

    the greatest western novel of the 20th century?

    Maybe it is and maybe it's not. After all, there's Proust, there's Ulysses.
    But it's definitely the War and Peace of the 20th century - a long, profoundly detailed, anguished, and completely absorbing account of the Soviet Union during WW II that does not hide from the horrors of what looks more and more like the Dark Ages - Stalinist repression, war itself, the Nazis, and the Holocaust. It sounds grim and it is but it is the most compelling novel I've read in years and am amazed that it is not far more famous. If I wanted someone to know about the 20th century and could assign only one book, it would be this one, even before Joyce or Proust.

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  • Posted March 16, 2009

    One of The Greatest Books Ever!

    Life and Fate is an amazing book. The writing is fabulous and the plot, although unstructured, is great. It is the story of a Russian family in World War II. In the beginning there is no real sense of plot but it still manages to keep the reader interested. The writing is great, managing to give a real feel of the time period. The translation by Robert Chandler is a little bit slow in the beginning pages because of the length of the first few sentences but quickly gets better. By the end of the book it feels like the reader is no longer reading a translation but what the author originally wrote. The characters are realistic and the dialogue is very lifelike. Overall, Life And Fate is a brilliant book. Anyone that is interested in Russian history or World War II should definitely read this terrific book.
    Reviewed by: Noah Famously

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  • Anonymous

    Posted June 15, 2008

    Genius of the highest order

    This masterpiece published by New York Review of Books Classics enters my Top 5 among novels by James Joyce 'Ulysses', Proust 'La Recherche du Temps Perdu', Tolstoy 'War and Peace' and Gaddis 'JR': it is pure genius in its epic scope. Inspired by Tolstoy's War and Peace and the siege of Russia by Napoleon, Grossman depicts the siege of Stalingrad by Hitler. Grossman narrates the epic from the perspectives of diverse players into whose lives the reader becomes immersed. The cast is vast and the Russian names are daunting to track but Grossman enables us to understand what it was like to experience the fate of Russians in World War II. The catastrophe was overwhelming as millions of people's lives were adversely impacted by the power of two great warring states on the front lines of Stalingrad. Yet somehow the resourcefulness, courage, strength, faith and every virtue of her people, tested under the worst human conditions, Russia was able to withstand the siege of Hitler only to suffer subsequently the immense cruelty of Stalin. The writing in this novel is nothing short of magnificent: it is great literature and profound philosophy by a novelist who knew his subject thoroughly. It's no wonder that Stalin wanted not only the manuscript but its carbon copies because the truth evident in this novel was certainly starkly and baldly critical of the State. At the end of the novel an old woman, Alexandra Vladmirovna, who to me symbolized Mother Russia, returns to the ruins of her home in Stalingrad and admires the spring sky wondering: 'why the future of those she loved was so obscure and the past so full of mistakes, not realizing that this very obscurity and unhappiness concealed a strange hope and clarity, not realizing that in the depths of her soul she already knew the meaning of both her life and the lives of her nearest and dearest, not realizing that even though neither she herself nor any of them could tell what was in store, even though they all knew too well that at times like these no man can forge his own happiness and that fate alone has the power to pardon and chastise, to raise up to glory and to plunge into need, to reduce a man to labour camp dust, nevertheless neither fate, nor history, nor the anger of the State, nor the glory or infamy of battle has any power to affect those who call themselves human beings. No, whatever life holds in store -- hard won glory, poverty and despair, or death in a labour camp --they 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 ever will be...' The translation by Robert Chandler was as masterful as the original writing itself: Chandler was articulate, true to the text and humble in bringing to light without affectation or coyness or ego the profundity of this master work. I wish there had been maps of the front lines, which I found on the Internet to help me gain my bearings with unfamiliar geography. Having read War and Peace, Grossman gives the master, Tolstoy, a real run for his money in this epic: don't let this masterpiece pass you by! It's a novel fated to change your life.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted July 24, 2001

    Simply fantastic

    Probably the masterpiece of 20th century Russian Literature. Epic story, moving prose.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted April 10, 2000

    A very personal, touching account of people living under Stalin during World War II

    This was an excellent book! I don't usually find myself reading history, let alone Russian history, but once I started I couldn't put this book down. I particularly liked how Grossman went right to the heart of the people. As someone who grew up after World War II, it was hard for me to imagine what life must have been like during Stalin's reign, and during the battle for Stalingrad. The characters, as portrayed in this book, led you through their lives and the effects of war, Facism, socialism, the 'state' and anti-Semitism on them. I found it very readable, very sad, and very moving.

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