It is written, despite attempting to get away from it, in the socialist realist style, which can make it seem odd in parts to western readers.[9]. Grossman also focuses on Sofya Levinton, a Jewish woman on her way to a Nazi extermination camp. Getmanov later denounces Novikov and he is summoned for trial, even though the tank attack was a complete success. still in Stalin's lifetime, and then - in the novel "Life and Fate".[22]. To look and stand upon the burning tapestry of history, greater men have experienced these events in person and have also idly stood by. Rarely have I felt when finishing a book I've closed a page on history. [16] But, just as much as it takes place as a part of the Second World War, it takes place as part of the history of Stalinist Russia. “When a man is plunged up to his neck into the cauldron of war, he is quite unable to look at his life and understand anything.” (Grossman 255) This statement sets up the book to be looked at from two different perspectives: those whose lives are entirely immersed in war, and those who either straddle or are more distanced from it. I won't be killed in a gas chamber, my body searched for gold and burned, or be made to lie on a pile of dead bodies awaiting a bullet to my head, or be sent to prison camp, subjected to beatings and forced into hard labour. As for everyone else—they had deserved their sentences. He finds that his two lives begin to split as he becomes more and more pressured from both sides. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. Grossman tells the stories of Russian citizens and soldiers as they face the Nazi invasion and their own oppressive government in WWII. Despite being presented with an excellent cause to abandon the Party, Abarchuk maintains his faith. ... Don't you recognize yourself, your [strong] will in us?" What a wonder it is to have Grossman tell us of history! This idea is depicted in the last few lines of the book, as Grossman writes, “Somehow you could sense spring more vividly in this cool forest than on the sunlit plain. Modeled on Tolstoy’s War and Peace, it bore witness to the horrors of both the Soviet experience of World War II and the Holocaust. However, I have read that Anna Shtrum's letter to Victor (part 1, chapter 18) was set to music. But it's the constant juxtaposition of the tragic and the comic, the grand and the banal, that gives this novel its true heft. Kenneth Branagh stars in BBC Radio 4's ambitious eight-hour dramatisation of Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman's epic masterpiece set during the Battle of Stalingrad.This powerful work, completed in 1960, charts the fate of both a nation and a family in the turmoil of war. The main character, Viktor Shtrum, is a “self portrait” of Grossman himself,[21] though Shtrum also had a real-life prototype - the Soviet nuclear physicist Lev Yakovlevich Shtrum (1890-1936), who was a family friend of Grossmans in Kyiv. Grossman also includes another German concentration camp where one of his main arguments takes place concerning communism and fascism. Novikov, the commander of a Soviet tank corps, meets General Nyeudobnov and Political Commissar Getmanov, both of whom are Party hacks. Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman Life and Fate is a totally engrossing, journalistic account of the momentous struggle between fascism and Stalinism. – Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman. In it you could hear both a lament for the dead and the furious joy of life itself. Instead, they focus on the thoughts of the human, the individual who is participating. figure of Life and Fate and in many respects a self-portrait, is a nu-clear physicist. Grossman’s novel is an argument against all forms of collectivization and homogenization; whether it be the machine of Nazism, Stalinism, Communism or collectivism, all of these act as a thresher which ultimately strip us of our humanity, leaving in its wake a shallow husk of a human being, Rarely have I felt when finishing a book I've closed a page on history. The characters suffer from starvation and thirst. Viktor Shtrum is in part a reflection of Grossman's own character. Most of the events of Life and Fate take place in the Soviet Union during the late autumn and winter of 1942-43. [9] Suslov told Grossman that his novel could not be published for two hundred years. [27] The tragedy of the common people is that they have to fight both the invaders and the totalitarianism of their own state. Soon the house would be filled with the tears and laughter of children, with the hurried steps of a loved woman and the measured gait of the master of the house. Let your soul be assuaged by this opinion, or rather, let it sit idly by, always idly, in apprehension knowing that your current lifestyle stands upon the very events the world has now condemned but will never really understand sufficiently, nor will ever provide the adequate "human" aspect to these events past generalizations and footnotes. 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 at, I'm lucky to have been born in 1980 and not 1920. Where to begin? His father had social-democratic convictions and joined the Mensheviks. A Russian nanny turned his name Yossya into Russian Vasya (a diminutive of Vasily), which was accepted by the whole family. It was still cold and dark, but soon the doors and shutters would be flung open. Viktor finds himself engaging in anti-Soviet conversations at the home of his colleague, Sokolov, partly to impress Sokolov's wife, Marya (Lyudmila's only friend). Does one have to read In a Just Cause in order to read Life and Fate? Evil is impotent before it. No matter how great the evil may be, this basic “kernel” of good is a key part of human nature and can never be crushed. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. There has been much speculation on the Soviet response. In this way, there is a stark difference in perception inside and outside of Stalingrad. Despite his acknowledgement of the world's great evil, Grossman believes humanity to be fundamentally good. Grossman's inclusion is historically accurate, since there are records of many Russians in Nazi labor and death camps. Inspired by Tolstoy's War and Peace and the siege of Russia by Napoleon, Grossman depicts the siege of Stalingrad by Hitler. Grossman, in many chapters involving Seryozha Shaposhnikov and Novikov, portrays the stark difference between life on the battlefield and in the cities. His interrogator, Liss, asserts that Fascism and Communism are two sides of the same coin, which upsets Mostovskoy greatly. Life and Fate. It was written in the 1950s and submitted for possible publication to Znamya magazine around October 1960. Welcome back. As Grossman paints it, war completely devours those involved, becoming in many ways an alternative reality irreconcilable with their former reality. Very quickly after it was submitted, the KGB raided his apartment;[6] the manuscripts, carbon copies and notebooks, as well as the typists' copies and even the typewriter ribbons were seized. It is difficult to summarize the novel, but the plot can be boiled down to three basic plotlines: the Shtrum/Shaposhnikov family, the siege of Stalingrad, and life in the camps of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. He was one of the first journalists to write about the genocide of people in Eastern Europe and was present at many famous battles. Alexandra Popoff—. Technically, it is the second half of the author's conceived two-part book under the same title. The list of characters is vast and the dramatis personae in my edition was well used. [17] However, on 22 June 1941, Hitler unilaterally terminated the pact by invading the Soviet Union. In Chapter 17 of Part One, Viktor discourses on the new strides made in physics during the forties and fifties. I will not be treated as subhuman because of my race. The novel at heart narrates the history of the family of Viktor Shtrum and the Battle of Stalingrad. Yo La Tengo kept pushing immediate questions: why not, why not? But it's not so simple, for “after despairing of finding Good either in God or in Nature, I began to despair even of kindness... Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. Once a decision has been made, is it the stepping stone to the next event in our life? It focuses on the Battle of Stalingrad, but covers a Science Institute, various prison camps and a concentration camp. 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. Atomic phenomenon Fate by Vasily Grossman his men not receive a traditional Jewish education thought! Portrayal of the novel `` Life and Fate, with Leo Tolstoy 's and! Package from her and realizes that he still loves her but may never be released from prison Krymov. 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