Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant Thoughtful Work
Review: Vasily Grossman submitted his manuscript for Life and Fate in 1960 at the height of Khrushchev's post-Stalinist cultural thaw. Subsequent to a review of the manuscript Grossman was advised that the book (but not Grossman) was being arrested. The book, he was told, could not be published for at least 200 years. All copies (supposedly) of the manuscript were rounded up and sent to party headquarters for safekeeping. Why was Life and Fate arrested? Because it dared to imply that Hitlerism and Stalinism bore more similarities than differences. Grossman made this point obliquely by putting these words into the mouth of a despicable SS death camp commandant. Nevertheless this was too much for both Khrushchev and the apparatchiks at the National Union of Writers and the book was banned. Life and Fate was eventually published because a manuscript remained at large. A number of people, most notably Vladimir Voinovich, helped smuggle a copy to Switzerland, where it was published at last, 15 years after Grossman's death in 1965. The book was eventually published in the USSR in 1989 to sensational results. Nevertheless, Grossman remains relatively obscure outside Russia and that is a great pity. Life and Fate is a remarkable novel despite its sometimes unremarkable prose that bears witness to Grossman's earlier socialist realism style of writing.. The book's emotional core involves the issues of man's life Grossman addresses, most particularly mans struggle for freedom in an unfree world. The book's narrative line (general descriptions of the story line appear in the editorial reviews and will not be repeated in this review) centers on the bloodiest battle of the 20th century, the Battle of Stalingrad. Josef Skvorecky put the central question of Life and Fate thusly: "Does man lose his innate yearning for freedom? The fate of both man and the totalitarian State depends on the answer to this question. If human nature does change, then the eternal and world wide triumph of the dictatorial state is assured; if his yearning for freedom remains constant, then the totalitarian state is doomed." Grossman was born in Berdichev, Ukraine in 1905. Although Jewish by birth, Grossman was never particularly religious and his family supported the 1917 revolution. After receiving a degree in chemistry Grossman found work in the Donbass coal mines. Encouraged to write by Maxim Gorky, Grossman began writing short stories and plays. Grossman adopted to Stalin's maxim that writers were engineers of human souls and his work was firmly rooted in the rather tedious school of socialist realism. Grossman's play "If You Believe the Pythagoreans" attacked the philosophical rants of intellectuals and argued that they were garbage not "worth a good worker's boot." For all intents and purposes, Grossman was a true believer. How and why did this change? Grossman volunteered for the front after the German invasion in 1941 and worked as a reporter for Red Star, an army newspaper known for its forthright reports from the front lines, including Stalingrad and Kursk. Grossman received national fame due to his reporting. Grossman was the first reporter to write first hand accounts of German concentration camps and his work at Treblinka understandably had a devastating impact on his world view. Grossman learned after the war that his mother, who he failed to move from Berdichev to Moscow after the invasion perished in Hitler's genocide. It was the death of his mother and the post war anti-Semitic campaigns of Stalin that may have led Grossman to challenge his own acceptance of Soviet orthodoxy and set him to work on Life and Fate and his other major work, Forever Flowing. The scope of the story and the cast of characters are vast and in the tradition of both Tolstoy and Pasternak. The characters may be hard to keep track of but this edition contains a list of characters and their geographic location during the story. The central characters include Viktor Shtrum, a scientist, and his extended family. Other central figures include Captain Grekov, the leader of a group of soldiers doing battle with the Nazi's in a bombed out apartment building (much of the fighting in Stalingrad consisted of hand to hand fighting in factories and apartment buildings in the heart of the city). Grekov is an iconoclast doing battle with not only the Nazis but the political commissars (such as Nikolay Krymov, the first husband of Shtrum's wife). Key scenes in the book also take place in a German concentration camp, and a Russian labor camp. The relationships between the characters in Life and Fate form the connection between the disparate geographic settings in the book A letter from Viktor's mother to Viktor became the emotional heart of the book for me. Shtrum's mother, like Grossman's, was left behind in the Ukraine and fell victim to the SS. Shtrum's mother was able to get one last letter out to Viktor. In it she sets out her vision and her hope of how she would like Viktor to act in the face of adversity, oppression, and dead. One can only imagine Grossman's own emotions as he worked on this portion of the manuscript. The fact that Viktor does not live up to her mother's hopes when asked by the party to sacrifice his honor on a matter of principle sums up the desperate choices that must sometimes be made to survive in an oppressive regime. One can also guess that Grossman sought to honor his beloved mother's memory by writing Life and Fate and submitting it for publication. One can only hope that his mother somehow looked down and smiled as Vasily took his personal leap of faith. Life and Fate is a wonderful book. Grossman's assertion towards the end of his work that we can be slaves by fate but not slaves by nature is an important concept to keep a hold of today.
Rating: 
Summary: a history of endurance and hope
Review: Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate belongs the category of suppressed literature in the Soviet Russia. The author dared to submit the manuscript of this big book approval only after the death of Joseph Stalin. But the Party's cultural wing even then refused its publication for next 500 years! One night they took away all the manuscripts from author's apartment. Only in the 80's the manuscript was recovered and published in first time. This is a novel in a Tolstoyean mould. It has a lot characters. The story hangs in and around Victor, a nuclear physicist, and his family and friends. The events happened during the period of second world war, when Russia was attacked by the forces of Nazy Germany. The Russians called it great Patriotic War. Every problems of soviet system was swept aside in the defence of fatherland. The novel was conceived in the mind of Vasily Grossman during years of new purge against the jews in the USSR after the second world war. People were hunted down or isolated again by the soviet authorities in the name of race, religion and ationality. Vasily Grossman once a communist now understands he is a jew also. The Central character in the novel, Victor, is the alterego of the author himself. Victor works as a scientist.He has a wife and one daughter.Victor's character is always in clash with his wife.His tender relationship with his friend's wife is the only spiritual solace for him. When war broke out everybody starts speaking for the war against German forces is to protect freedom and honour of people. Vasily Grossman finds the irony of such a slogan. A People without a freedom and individual honour for many terrible years under Stalin now think they go to protect it. When Victor's political stand threatens his own existence he becomes fearful and starts to think of an apology before the authorities. Everybody treats him as an alien and people fear his arrest is near. In such a lonely and desperate night Victor got a telephone call from Joseph Stalin himself.... The narrative is simple. Victor's mother's last letter from the German concentration camp is one of the moving chapters in the novel.The scenes at the Russian labor camp are also interesting and informative. Life anf Fate gives a total, let me say, accurate picture of the Soviet Union. As some critics said, while other writers went out of the soviet system and wrote about it, Vasily Grossman lived in and through the troubles of soviet society and wrote about it. Like Dr. Zhivago this is also an important book for them who who love great fiction.
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