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The Best Fiction Books » Historical Fiction

Life and fate, by vasily grossman and translated by robert chandler.

Life and Fate , a novel set in World War II by Soviet writer Vasily Grossman , is one of our most recommended books on Five Books (including by historians). Modeled on Tolstoy’s War and Peace , Grossman brought into it his experience as a journalist, accompanying the Red Army at major battles, including Stalingrad and Berlin. He was also among the first to enter Treblinka and witness firsthand the horrors of the Holocaust . Sadly for Grossman, the book was considered too harmful to be published in his lifetime.

Life and Fate is a long novel. If you want to listen to it as an audiobook, there’s no unabridged version, BUT there is a dramatised version of Life and Fate , starring Kenneth Branagh and David Tennant, that lasts a manageable 8 hours.

(Stalingrad   is the precursor to  Life and Fate , translated into English for the first time in 2019 and also well worth reading )

Recommendations from our site

“ Life and Fate… is probably the most important work of fiction about World War II. But, in fact, it is more than just a fiction because it is based on very close reporting from his time with the soldiers. It is a deliberate act of literary homage to Tolstoy as one can see in the title. It is definitely the War and Peace of the 20th century.” Read more...

The best books on World War II

Antony Beevor , Military Historians & Veteran

“It’s the first novel to come out of the 1940s and 50s that attempts a comparative indictment of Hitlerism and Stalinism, the two varieties of totalitarianism that Grossman knew too well.” Read more...

The Best Vasily Grossman Books

Maxim D Shrayer , Literary Scholar

“Vasily Grossman was himself involved in the battle of Stalingrad, but he was also a frontline spectator of the rest of the war. He set out to write the equivalent of Tolstoy’s War and Peace . Well, he didn’t quite succeed in doing that, but it is nonetheless an amazing and terrifying account, not simply of the battles, but of the armies fighting them. Not simply the armies, but the regimes. Of course, behind the German army was the Nazi regime, the Holocaust, not just of the Jews but the massacres taking place as the German army advanced, committing mass murder of the civil populations they overran. Not to get rid of the partisans but because they were eliminating the Jews, eliminating Ukrainians and eliminating anyone who was going to get in the way of their conquering these countries. They were joined in that by other nationalities who did their dirty work for them as well. So there is the combination of the nightmare of the mass murders, mass shootings and the nightmare of the front line.” Read more...

The best books on War

Michael Howard , Military Historians & Veteran

“This is a wonderful, rich, melancholic, hopeful book. It’s a bit like Like A Tear in the Ocean : it embeds a piece of history in a well-crafted work of fiction and its characters represent the cornerstones of the period.” Read more...

The best books on The European Civil War

Andreas Wesemann , Entrepreneurs & Business People

“It is about the strange interval of freedom during the Second World War in which the Soviet regime had to trust its people because it couldn’t compel their loyalty.” Read more...

The best books on 20th Century Russia

Francis Spufford , Historian

The book, according to the author

“The current situation is senseless. I am physically free, but the book to which I have dedicated my life is in jail—but it is I who wrote it, and I have not repudiated and am not repudiating it.… I continue to believe that I have written the truth and that I wrote it loving, empathizing with, and believing in the people. I ask for freedom for my book.”

Quoted in Leon Aron, Roads to The Temple (2012)

“Tolstoy’s novel was the only book Grossman read during the war, and he read it twice; War and Peace hangs over Grossman’s book as a template and a lodestar, and the measure of Grossman’s achievement is that a comparison between the two books is not grotesque.”

"Good Day, Comrade Shtrum," John Lanchester, London Review of Books, 18 October, 2007

“The KGB immediately destroyed all copies of what Grossman called Life and Fate (Zhizn’ i sud’ba) except for two hidden by his friends, and he died in 1964 without ever seeing his work published.”

"The Russian Masterpiece You've Never Heard of," Leon Aron, Foreign Policy, October 12th 2010

Other books by Robert Chandler and Vasily Grossman

Stalingrad by vasily grossman, translated by robert and elizabeth chandler, everything flows by vasily grossman, russian magic tales by robert chandler, forever flowing by vasily grossman, the road by vasily grossman, a writer at war: vasily grossman with the red army 1941-1945 by vasily grossman, edited and translated by antony beevor and lyuba vinogradova, our most recommended books, green darkness by anya seton, the western wind: a novel by samantha harvey, the persian boy by mary renault, war and peace by leo tolstoy, the name of the rose by umberto eco, wolf hall by hilary mantel.

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Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman

T his autumn, the BBC's drama serial based on Vasily Grossman 's epic novel of Stalingrad , Life and Fate (1959), comes to Radio 4. It will have a starry cast, including Kenneth Branagh as the nuclear physicist Viktor Shtrum – the nearest thing in the vast human ensemble of the book to an alter ego for Grossman himself . With any luck, a public much larger than the one that encountered the novel in Robert Chandler's excellent English translation will soon recognise Life and Fate as all the things critics say it is: one of the great narratives of battle, a moral monument, a witness-report in fiction from the heart of 20th-century darkness, an astonishing act of truth-telling.

And it truly is these things. Grossman's deliberately plain prose has an extraordinary imaginative power. It leads you into situations observed so directly that it's as if the layers of literary artifice and equivocation have been scrubbed off them. I can remember being on the tube in London when I read chapter 48 of Life and Fate for the first time, and weeping silently and helplessly as I found that Grossman was going to follow his cattle-truck of deportees right into Auschwitz , trading the viewpoint to and fro between a frightened child and the brisk doctor who finds herself holding his hand; passing with them through the gas-chamber doors, staying with them into death, never flinching, never looking away, until the last beat of their hearts.

There are similar intensities of close vision to be found in the scenes set in "House 6/1", the besieged outpost in Stalingrad that becomes a kind of microcosm of what Grossman, as a war correspondent, had found to love in the Red Army . Meanwhile, around these cores of intensity, Grossman builds a huge, meticulous portrait of Stalin's Russia at war that systematically violates Soviet taboos on almost every page. Even as a complete outsider from the society he describes, when you read the book 50 years after he wrote it, you can't help but know you are witnessing a profound act of imaginative self-emancipation.

Yet at the same time there is a sense in which, as a westerner in the present, you are getting its emotional power, and even its iconoclasm, on excessively easy terms; so easy, in fact, that you may miss the difficulty that Grossman himself had in arriving at Life and Fate , and tempt you to underestimate it as an achievement. There is no resistance in us, as readers, that the book needs to overcome, no inner gridlock of loyalties to Stalinism. We are prepped by Antony Beevor . We know from the start that Soviet strategy at Stalingrad was brutally wasteful and sometimes counter-productive. We know, too, that at Stalingrad, one totalitarian evil was fighting another worse one. The analogy between nazism and Stalinism as systems represents the daring outer limit of what Grossman has to offer us in the way of political ideas, but in our time it has become pretty much the received wisdom. We know about the gulag. We possess the darkest secrets of the USSR as common knowledge. We know, in fact, what Grossman never could, since he died in 1964: that the whole Soviet project was doomed, and that everything endured in its name was pointless. (Except perhaps the defeat of Hitler.)

Perversely, it is now much harder for us to see what there was in Soviet experience apart from tragedy. Between us and the felt reality of the time there now lies a barrier, which is a kind of photographic negative of the problem Grossman faced in trying to introduce any tragedy into a compulsorily optimistic picture. To get plausibly inside the past, we need to allow it to have been, as well as tragic, also hopeful, funny, preoccupied and ordinary. Most uncomfortably, we need to let ourselves see what Stalinism meant to contemporaries apart from tyranny, lies and oppression. We need to let it be the other things that it once was to Russians: a way of being modern, a mode of self-understanding, a civilisation. Otherwise, we risk treating the past merely as a theatre in which our own wisdom is confirmed.

I felt this particularly myself when I was trying, as a non-Russian-speaking foreigner, to write my way into the Soviet life of the 1950s and 60s in my book Red Plenty . I suspect other writers who've recently attempted the Soviet past from outside, such as Helen Dunmore and Ed Docx , will have had similar experiences; but it applies to reading too, if we want to pay the dues we should to the otherness of other times. We have to find a way to make allowances for things in the past that are genuinely resistant to the easy enlightenments of the present.

And the Russian writer I found it most helpful to read as I tried to feel my way into the perspective of the past was Grossman, as he struggled to feel his way out of it; or at least, to invent for himself, from scratch, with no aid from conventional wisdom, the tools of feeling required to name the events of his time differently, and to interpret it differently. One of the strangest truths about Life and Fate is that it is a sequel. If, reading it, you find yourself wondering why the strands about the Shaposhnikov sisters don't really seem to tie together, and why the strand about the manager of the Stalingrad power station doesn't go anywhere much, the answer is that they are trailing stubs of plots much more developed in the previous volume.

Za Pravoe Delo , or " For a Just Cause ", has never been translated; perhaps it will be now. Though bold enough to get Grossman into trouble when it was published in 1952, it was, nevertheless, a conventional socialist-realist novel, respectful of the main outlines of Stalinist piety. In it, by all accounts, recognisable versions of the people we know in Life and Fate in scrubbed-bare form exist deeply layered, varnished in acceptable feeling and Stalinist sentiment. Viktor Shtrum and all the others were imagined complicitly before they were imagined fearlessly. This is the resistance Grossman had to overcome; this is the position he had to feel and think his way out of. Not just Stalinism as something imposed and official, something comfortably alien, but something intimate to his patriotic, upwardly mobile Soviet generation, from which, with astonishing and lonely determination, he managed to alienate himself.

Life and Fate begins on Radio 4 on Sunday 18 September 2011. A special edition of Start the Week on 9 September will discuss Grossman and his influence .

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The Individual Soul

WRITING THE STORY of the Holocaust is a futile ambition—not because the events of 1939 to 1945 are too horrible to be told, but because they are too various to be compressed into one definitive or representative story. The 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis came from every part of Europe, from every social class and profession and age group, from every point on the spectrum of Jewish life between militant atheism and traditional piety. All these stories had a similar ending—but then, so do all human stories, and the monotony of death does not annul the immense multiplicity of life.

Inevitably, however, we tend to create a generic Holocaust narrative out of the tales we hear most often, and find most easy to identify with. As Americans, we respond to stories of assimilated Western European Jews who are gradually shut out of their country’s life, like that of the German diarist Victor Klemperer. As city dwellers, our imaginations are compelled by Anne Frank’s experience of hiding out in a crowded apartment, invisible in the multitude. And as members of an advanced industrial society, we are compelled by the image of the gas chamber, which writers since Hannah Arendt have made the central emblem of the Holocaust—the ultimate reduction of human life to inanimate matter.

All of these are truths about the Holocaust, but they are not the only truths. As many Jews died by simple shooting as in gas chambers; far more died in Eastern Europe than in Western Europe; millions were killed almost as soon as their towns and villages were occupied by the Germans, with no chance to hide out or adjust in any way to life under Nazism. Statistically speaking, the representative Holocaust story might not feature concentration camps or hiding places or repressive laws at all; it might simply be the story of waking up one morning to find German tanks in your street and a month later being shot and buried in a mass grave. It might sound like this:

People carry on, Vitya, as though their whole life lies ahead of them. It’s impossible to say whether that’s wise or foolish—it’s just the way people are. I do the same myself. There are two women here from a shtetl and they tell the same story as my friend did. The Germans are killing all the Jews in the district, children and old men included. The Germans and Ukrainian police drive up and recruit a few dozen men for field-work. These men are set to dig ditches and two or three days later the Jewish population is marched to these ditches and shot. Jewish burial mounds are rising up in all the villages round about. …

Our turn will come in a week or two, according to plan. But just imagine—I still go on seeing patients and saying, “Now bathe your eye regularly with the lotion and it will be better in two or three weeks.” I’m taking care of one old man whose cataract it will be possible to remove in six months or a year. … Meanwhile the Germans burst into people’s houses and steal; sentries amuse themselves by shooting children from behind the barbed wire; and more and more people confirm that any day now our fate will be decided.

This is the voice of Anna Semyonovna Shtrum, writing her last letter to her son Viktor, in Vasily Grossman’s epic novel Life and Fate . Anna’s letter takes up a whole chapter of the novel, and it haunts the 800-page book just as it haunts Viktor, a Soviet nuclear physicist who is one of its half-dozen main characters. Viktor lives in Moscow, which never fell to the German Army, so he and his family survive the war. If only Viktor had allowed his mother to come and live with him, she would have survived; but his wife, Lyudmila, didn’t get along with Anna, so she remained in Berdichev and died. It’s a situation Grossman could have invented out of sheer authorial sadism, in order to burden Viktor Shtrum with the maximum amount of guilt—except that it was Grossman’s own story. Grossman’s mother never had a chance to smuggle a letter out of Berdichev before she died, so the son invented one for her, setting down the grief and guilt that defined his postwar life:

But my fate is to end my life alone, never having shared it with you. Sometimes I’ve thought that I ought not to live far away from you, that I love you too much, that love gives me the right to be with you in my old age. And at other times I’ve thought that I ought not to live together with you, that I love you too much. Well, enfin, Always be happy with those you love, those around you, those who have become closer to you than your mother. Forgive me.

What most strikes the American Jewish reader about this story, and about Life and Fate as a whole, is how close Berdichev feels to Moscow. We are inclined to think of Berdichev and the other traditional centers of Jewish life in Eastern Europe as places out of time, shtetls frozen in a photograph. But Grossman, who was born there in 1905, knew that Berdichev became part of the Soviet Union in 1917, and that by 1943 its life was thoroughly dominated by the Soviet version of modernity. And part of that Soviet identity was a willing surrender of Jewishness, a refusal to think of oneself as in any way defined by tradition or religion. Viktor Shtrum “thought incessantly about his mother,” Grossman writes. “And he thought about something he would never have thought about but for Fascism: the fact that he and his mother were Jews.”

The same thing happens, even more dramatically, to another Jewish character in the novel, Sofya Levinton. Sofya, a middle-aged Jewish doctor, is a classic example of homo [or mulier ] sovieticus: For her, the coming of Communism meant liberation and a world of opportunities that would have been impossible for a Jewish woman under Tsarism. When she finds herself in a cattle car being deported to a German death camp, she is surrounded by similarly emancipated, Sovietized Jews—teachers, radio technicians, engineers, veterinarians. “Previously, such professions had been unheard of in the shtetl,” Sofya reflects.

Yet the Jewishness of these Soviet citizens, long discarded and suppressed, has become the central—the only—factor determining whether they would live or die. “The most fundamental change in people at this time,” Grossman writes, “was a weakening of their sense of individual identity; their sense of fate grew correspondingly stronger.” And Sofya Levinton’s fate is a Jewish fate. After a day in the cattle car, Grossman writes, she finds herself beginning sentences with the words “ Brider yidn ”—fellow Jews, a Yiddishism from a childhood she thought she had put behind her.

Sofya Levinton and Anna Shtrum are just two of the hundreds of characters in Life and Fate , an epic whose title, structure, and themes demand comparison with Tolstoy’s War and Peace . Grossman even makes a little joke at Tolstoy’s expense, when a Red Army commander complains about the way Soviet newspapermen cover the Great Patriotic War: “They’re certainly no Tolstoys. People have been reading War and Peace for a century and they’ll go on reading it for another century. Why’s that? Because Tolstoy’s a soldier, because he took part in the war himself. That’s how he knew who to write about.” Another officer is left with the unenviable task of pointing out that the commander is mistaken: Not only did Tolstoy not take part in the Napoleonic Wars, he was writing half a century after they took place.

The joke is also at Grossman’s own expense. He was a former engineer turned writer who became famous as a journalist covering World War II for the Red Star newspaper; his dispatches were immensely popular and made him one of the Soviet Union’s leading writers. That’s why it came as such a shock to the authorities when, in 1960, he submitted the manuscript of Life and Fate for publication. It is, on the one hand, a paean to Soviet heroism in World War II, especially at the crucial battle of Stalingrad, which forms the backdrop to the novel. Yet at the same time, it is a brilliantly honest account of the horrors of Stalinism, and its running theme is that Communism and Nazism were two sides of the same coin.

One of the central scenes in the novel is a dialogue between a Gestapo officer, Liss, and a Russian prisoner of war, Mostovskoy, who is an old and loyal Bolshevik. In this dialogue, deliberately patterned after the Grand Inquisitor scene in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov , the Nazi tells the Communist that their warring systems are in fact identical: “When we look one another in the face, we’re neither of us just looking at a face we hate—no, we’re gazing into a mirror. That’s the tragedy of our age.”

It’s no wonder that, even during the relative openness of Khrushchev’s thaw, Grossman’s book was judged too incendiary for publication. Indeed, the KGB confiscated not just the manuscript but even the ribbon from Grossman’s typewriter. Life and Fate would not be published in the West until after Grossman’s death in 1964, and not in Russia itself until the glasnost period under Gorbachev.

Grossman’s evolution from Soviet propagandist to dangerous dissident was driven, above all, by his experience as a Jew. He was one of the Jewish writers involved with “The Black Book of Fascism,” a documentary record of the Holocaust, and was shocked when Stalin derailed the project after World War II: Suddenly, it became politically unacceptable to point out that the “victims of fascism” were primarily Jewish. The murders of Yiddish writers and the 1953 Doctors’ Plot confirmed that Stalin was preparing to follow Hitler down the road of anti-Semitism. “Today you’re appalled by our hatred of the Jews,” Liss tells Mostovskoy. “Tomorrow you may make use of our experience yourselves.”

In Life and Fate , this resurgence of Soviet anti-Semitism, which actually took place in the late 1940s and early ’50s, is fictionally backdated to the World War II period, so we can see it unfolding in the life of Viktor Shtrum. As a brilliant nuclear physicist, Shtrum enjoys a life of privilege under the Soviet regime: As the novel opens, he has been evacuated from wartime Moscow to the safety of Kazan, and he soon returns to his cushy life in the capital. But when he makes an important theoretical breakthrough—which Grossman describes in necessarily vague terms—Shtrum incurs the jealousy and backbiting of his colleagues, who accuse him of being too oriented to Western science, not deferential enough to the spirit of Lenin, and—above all—too Jewish. “Your work stinks of Judaism,” one colleague announces, and another calls it “Talmudic.” Shtrum’s Jewish assistants in his laboratory are fired, and he is subjected to public criticism of the kind that usually leads to arrest. Only a last-minute intervention by Stalin himself saves Shtrum from annihilation.

Life and Fate is about more than the Holocaust, and more than Jewish life under Stalinism—it is a panorama of Soviet society in the war years, and for that reason one of the really indispensable books about the twentieth century. But, as if it were in spite of himself, Grossman came to realize that Jewishness and anti-Semitism and the Holocaust were central to any diagnosis of his age. “The first half of the twentieth century may be seen as a time of great scientific discoveries, revolutions, immense social transformations and two world wars,” he writes. “It will go down in history, however, as the time when—in accordance with philosophies of race and society—whole sections of the Jewish population were exterminated.”

That is why writing about the Holocaust leads Grossman to the novel’s central ethical and political conclusions, about the value of human freedom and the preciousness of every human life. After an almost unreadably powerful description of a young boy’s death in the gas chamber, Grossman asks the question that lies at the heart of Life and Fate : “Does human nature undergo a true change in the cauldron of totalitarian violence? Does man lose his innate yearning for freedom? The fate of both man and the totalitarian State depend on the answer to this question.”

There are no simple morals or happy endings in Life and Fate : Grossman constantly reminds us of the way totalitarianism forces people to betray others and themselves, making fear the mainspring of society. But he concludes that life can never be completely subdued by death. This is the lesson of the Holocaust itself: “When a person dies, they cross over from the realm of freedom to the realm of slavery. Life is freedom, and dying is a gradual denial of freedom.” And Life and Fate is one of the very greatest Holocaust novels because it has the courage to move from the most unsparing description of death to the most convincing affirmations of the value of each individual life:

What constitutes the freedom, the soul of an individual life, is its uniqueness. The reflection of the universe in someone’s consciousness is the foundation of his or her power, but life only becomes happiness, is only endowed with freedom and meaning, when someone exists as a whole world that has never been repeated in all eternity. Only then can they experience the joy of freedom and kindness, finding in others what they have already found in themselves.

This piece originally appeared in Tablet .

Adam Kirsch is a senior editor at The New Republic.

Adam Kirsch is an editor at The Wall Street Journal ’s weekend Review section. His new book of poems, The Discarded Life , will be published in May by Red Hen Press.

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Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman Review—A Stunning WWII Epic

In the first chapter of the novel, Grossman muses:

…How could a man be unhappy outside the camp?

This remains one of the most impactful introductions to a book that I’ve read. Such striking and evocative turns-of-phrases whisk you through the pages of Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate .

Today we’ll review his war epic, often dubbed the Soviet War and Peace …

Spanning across Russia’s Eastern front, from the encircled Stalingrad to the southernmost steppes, and from there into German death camps and Russian gulags— Life and Fate is a stunning tour de force. It follows the lives of the Shaposhnikov extended family throughout Russia during the later years of World War II, as they’re torn apart by the brutality of war and senseless unpredictability of life in a totalitarian state.

Life and Fate is equal parts inspiring, moving, and devastating. It focuses on life’s ‘impossible complexity’ during a time of dizzying contradictions. Grossman asks: how could the height of rapid modernisation also be the era of such calculated inhumanity? How could the century of Einstein and Planck also be the century of Hitler? How could revolutionary progress in the fields of science, education, and technology coincide with war and the death camps—with such indescribable suffering and death?

As I read, I like to dog-ear each page that contains something gripping, inspiring, or noteworthy. Life and Fate was one of those books that I left with more of its 800-something page corners crinkled than unblemished. And that’s thanks to quotes like this:

Such is time: everything passes, it alone remains; everything remains, it alone passes. And how swiftly and noiselessly it passes. Only yesterday you were sure of yourself, strong and cheerful, a son of the time. But now another time has come—and you don’t even know it.

One thing that always strikes me on reflection is how seamless things appear when you view them from the privilege of retrospect. Not only in my life, but looking at the totality of history too. Looking back, you see things as an object, thinking: of course things worked out the way they did—how could they’ve been different?

But as you experience time first-hand in its all-encompassing immediacy, everything seems a maelstrom—a chaotic collision of thoughts, events, anxieties. A constant series of ifs, buts, and maybes. The lens of the present is clouded, whereas the past always seems so clear. The Russians didn’t know they were going to win the war. They only knew of the unimaginable cost either way.

This novel does an incredible job of painting those feelings of uncertainty. Of breathing life into the struggle of an entire country. If you’ve ever been curious about life in Russia during WWII, here would be a great place to start.

A background on Vasily’s Grossman’s life and on Russian novels

One tip for reading Russian books: don’t worry about remembering all of the names.

They have patronymic surnames that change according to gender, and diminutive nicknames for each other that are often entirely different from their true name. Names like Yevgenia ‘Zhenya’ Nikolaevna Shaposhnikova. Yeah… you’re not going to remember that on the first try. But you don’t have to! You’ll remember the most important characters as you get to know them, as page by page their actions and circumstances sink freely into your memory. Don’t be put off, it’s not the big issue it might seem.

Grossman was not only an author but a journalist too. He was a reporter for the Red Army newspaper, posted at Stalingrad and various sections of the Eastern front.  He spent approximately 1,000 days on the front lines, witnessing 3-4 years of conflict and many major battles and retreats.

His work has been used as a first-hand source for historians, and even at the Nuremberg trials ; there’s something here for Russian literature and history lovers alike. After the events of Life and Fate,  Grossman marched with the Red Army to Berlin and then wrote the first published article about a death camp. Quite a story.

Grossman trudged through the eye of history’s storm—witnessing earth-shattering events in miniature and interviewing people in the cities and trenches of Russia. And then he converted it all into prose, into a gripping novel.

Life and Fate is incredible journalism and first-hand history, packaged for us readers into the novel format: frenzied Soviet retreats, the famous defence of Stalingrad, the colossal tank battles of Kursk. His prose was plastered over newspapers and played through radios across Russia, devoured by soldiers and citizens alike (while he was still in Stalin’s good books…).

It’s crazy to think that we inhabit the same world; that we inhabit the future of Grossman’s present. And our present moment is the determining past of something yet to come. Can you imagine, seeing the fluidity of history in such stark images before your very eyes? Watching as everything solid in the world melted into the air?

Grossman didn’t have to imagine. He witnessed the last World War and its atrocities as a Russian of Jewish descent. This is what I find to be the most incredible thing about Grossman’s novel: he was writing during what was perhaps the most turbulent period of social, political, and militaristic upheaval of all time—WWII. A time when nothing made sense. Fascism, purges, death, suffering, war. He lived through it, yet found the resolve to synthesise his experiences into an enduring piece of literature.

In a world where survival was a dice rolled each day, Grossman found the space to create art.

The autobiographical aspect of Life and Fate

Fiction is always autobiographical to some degree. The author always writes themselves in either consciously or subconsciously. And  Life and Fate  is no exception. For Grossman, though, it was very conscious. He had some stories to tell. Many of the deaths in the novel mirror deaths Grossman witnessed and grieved. 

In one instance, a grenade falls at the feet of Major Byerozkin but miraculously fails to explode. Turns out, this is something that happened to Grossman himself!

Also in the novel, the Russian-Jewish scientist Viktor Shtrum learns about the death of his mother as we read her last letter. She sends it from a Jewish ghetto in Ukraine before she was murdered by a Nazi death squad. In what is perhaps one of the most emotional excerpts I’ve ever read, she writes:

I’ve realised now that hope almost never goes together with reason… It seems that nowhere is there so much hope as in the ghetto… blindly rebelling against the terrible fact that we must all perish without trace. Don’t imagine Vitenka, that your mother’s a strong woman. I’m weak. I’m afraid of pain and I’m terrified to sit down in a dentist’s chair… After the war life will begin to stir once again, but we won’t be here, we will have vanished—just as Aztecs once vanished. Once I send [this letter] off, I will have left you for ever… You have been my joy… I’ve remembered everything… Well, enfin … Always be happy with those you love… How can I finish this letter?… Live, live, live for ever… Mama.

Sorry—I quoted very liberally there, but I didn’t want to lose the letter’s power. I’ll give you a second to dry your eyes.

This letter, tragically, reflects the death of Grossman’s real mother. Hope wasn’t enough. What other passage could you think of to rival the poignancy, the sheer humanness in these words?

The agonising tragedy of a woman, understanding slowly, seeing her death is coming; realising that this would be her last link with her only son—and that soon she’d be gone forever. 

And through her words, she represents millions of lives lost during the war. I’ve re-read it many times.

Vasily Grossman’s writing style

It’s not always expressive writing that draws you in as you read Life and Fate, though. Often it moves on with the simplest of descriptions, using plain language. No, it’s the overall subject matter that makes it gripping. From life in the encircled and mostly-obliterated house 6/1, where every soldier’s breath mocks death, to the child named David’s narrative that shockingly leads into the gas chamber of Auschwitz itself.

The novel takes the reader to places almost beyond the scope of imagination.

It’s not a book you can tear through, turning pages without thinking—nor does it aim to be. It’s literature that makes you stop, empathise, and think.

How easily death annihilated people. How hard it is to go on living.

There’s no poetry in these words stylistically, is there? It’s not like Primo Levi (also recommended!) No, it’s the unashamed directness, the raw truth of his words, that makes Grossman captivating. Perhaps he felt he shouldn’t plant flowery language where it didn’t need to grow. Does brutal struggle and chaos need any overwriting? As Adorno wrote, ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’. *

Grossman directly addresses the difficultly of describing tragedy:

How can one convey the feelings of a man pressing his wife’s hand for the last time? How can one describe that last, quick look at a beloved face?

Isn’t it terrifying, thinking of how each life before death—each Ukrainian farmer, each child of Auschwitz, each soldier in the trenches—struggled on, endowed with the same consciousness as you and me? That everyone has their own fears, anxieties, hopes, and dreams that they clung to? And then, to go on, to apply that understanding, that empathy, to the grand scale of disaster during this period—across all of life, all of history. It brings such crushing clarity to it all in a way that’s almost too much to bear.

Grossman captures this exact feeling in Sofya Levinton’s story on her journey to Auschwitz. Sitting, crammed into the back of a windowless vehicle, she…

Suddenly realised with absolute clarity that all this was really happening to her… ‘Who am I? In the end, who am I?’ Sofya Osipovna wondered. ‘The short, snotty little girl afraid of her father and grandmother? The stout hot-tempered woman with tabs of rank on her collar? Or this mangy, lice-ridden creature?

Grossman does not venture to answer such a question. Instead, he’ll drop in phrases such as:

Fascism anihilated tens of millions of people.

That’s the whole sentence, given its own line, and only tangentially linked to the text around it. The book is sombre in tone and possesses great directness; Grossman didn’t dance around what he wanted to say. What more could he say? Can anyone say?

In one of the books most memorable passages, Grossman paints a detailed picture of one soldier in Ukraine, crawling from hut to hut, emaciated—dying. The sense of overwhelming brutality of Soviet life and the suffering of WWII is laid bare here, conveyed in this book like no other I’ve read. You can viscerally feel Grossman attempting to get to grips with it himself as you turn the pages.

Just because the writing is often stark doesn’t mean it’s not vivid, though. Plainness can often be very vivid, and Grossman was skilled at writing effortlessly universal descriptions. In one scene Zhenya Shaposhnikova queues to hand over a parcel of food for ex-husband Krymov, who’s being interrogated in the Lubyanka KGB headquarters. She suddenly, beautifully, notes how a person’s back can reveal everything:

She never realised a human back could be so expressive, could so vividly reflect a person’s state of mind. People had a peculiar way of craning their necks; their backs, with their raised, tense shoulders, seemed to be crying, to be sobbing, and screaming.

Or this scene, where two Russian soldiers idle around on a field, laughing and smoking before an imminent offensive:

They were obviously close friends; you could tell from their certainty that whatever happened to one was of equal interest to the other.

Can’t you just imagine it—calling someone’s name, and seeing two heads turn rather than one, because the first is so familiar, so entangled with the second? These effortless descriptions of life that are so subtle you don’t even notice they’re universal. These frequent observations have always jumped out of me in Russian classics, and I enjoy them greatly.

How was Life and Fate  received?

Unsurprisingly, it’s a miracle that Life and Fate  was ever published.

Grossman was antifascist and against Stalin’s regime. His work had an almost journalistic quality, and this honesty meant that Life and Fate was confiscated by the KGB and only smuggled out to the West in 1980.

Grossman submitted the book for publishing in the Soviet Union under Krushchev, but was famously told by Politburo ideology chief Suslov that his work could ‘not be published for two or three hundred years’.

Even after being smuggled into the West, it had to be translated and wasn’t made public until 1985—going relatively unnoticed under the shadow of writers such as Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn. Only recently is it gaining traction, with critics taking a keen interest and Penguin publishing a beautiful new cover in 2017 as part of their Vintage Classic Russians Series:

But I’m thankful that it was published! Life and Fate is one of the most essential books of the 20th century; it’s somehow panoramic yet minutely detailed and richly alive, all at once.

On Grossman’s vivid characters and journalistic approach

Despite the enormity of Life and Fate’s historical backdrop, it truly feels like his characters shine through.

This was likely down to his journalistic approach. Grossman knew people from all walks of life and was able to capture incredible scale and range in the novel. He was said to have an extraordinary talent for interviewing—he could speak to people openly and plainly, remembering everything without taking notes.

The book reads as if Grossman peered through the eyes of people witnessing history unfold around them—from the perspective of their own interior lives and struggles—rather than writing about grand events and then populating them with characters. This is a nuanced but key distinction, and it’s highly reminiscent of the way Tolstoy wrote his rich, believable characters. Though, perhaps not quite to the same quality. Tolstoy wrote pure realism, where his protagonists grew of their individual will, to their own ends—embodying György Lukács’ brilliant quote: ‘no writer is a true realist if he can direct the evolution of his own characters at will.’

But Grossman did not write realism for realism’s sake.  Life and Fate is more a historical novel that was heavily inspired by, and structured around, Tolstoyan realism—and its commitment to rich, three-dimensional characters. Grossman navigates the senselessness of his era by focusing on the interior lives of the honest, gripping people within it.

You could say that the Grossman used the vehicle of realism to portray a truly historical novel; and through his character’s lives, he mirrored the smothered reflection of Stalinist Russia—trying desperately make sense the time he inherited.

In Grossman’s own words, he simply wrote the truth, and ‘wrote this truth out of love and pity for people, out of faith in people.’

Ultimately, Grossman finds meaning in senselessness. Not in senseless cruelty, but in its opposite: senseless kindness. In a beautiful passage in the German camp, the Russian preacher Ikonnikov lays down his tools and refuses to be a part of constructing gas chambers. He instead declares his departing realisation: that humanity’s hope lies in the kindness of everyday people.

Critics have often said that Ikonnikov’s words stand in for Grossman’s own philosophy. As you read Ikonnikov’s speech, the tone shifts. The words ring out loudly, the sentences gaining urgency—growing alive, singing; you inch your head closer into the book, intently, to read quicker, more closely. The way Grossman writes Ikonnikov’s letter reads as a painstakingly crafted outpouring—in a soul-crying-out kind of way—suggesting that Ikonnikov acts as a mouthpiece for Grossman. Here’s what he has to say:

There is everyday human kindness. The kindness of an old woman carrying a piece of bread to a prisoner, the kindness of a soldier allowing a wounded enemy to drink from his water-flask, the kindness of youth towards age, the kindness of a peasant hiding an old Jew in his loft. The kindness of a prison guard who risks his own liberty to pass on letters written by a prisoner not to his ideological comrades, but to his wife and mother. This kindness, this stupid kindness, is what is most truly human in a human being. It is what sets man apart, the highest achievement of his soul. No, it says, life is not evil!

The end of this letter is amazing, and I’ve saved it for this review’s imminent conclusion.

Grossman also continually stresses the importance of freedom and human uniqueness. The overall redeemability of human nature. How how ‘what constitutes the freedom, the soul of an individual life, is its uniqueness. Despite being a sombre book about one of the darkest periods in history, it’s also inspiring. One second it’ll shock you to your core. The next, it’ll fill you with a grand and warm sense of what makes us humans, well, human. He continues:

Life only becomes happiness, is only endowed with freedom and meaning when someone exists as a whole world that has never been repeated in all eternity. Only then can they experience the joy of freedom and kindess, finding in others what they have already found in themselves.

Isn’t that what we’re all searching for? To be free—to express and live a whole, unique world within our time on this earth? Yet so many had their chances snatched away.

Grossman grieves for them all, yet never loses hope in the ultimate kindness and redeemability of humanity.

Are you still with me?

Do you remember that emaciated, dying soldier we spoke about earlier? Well, people turned him away as he hobbled and crawled from hut to hut. No surprise, after Soviet collectivization in Ukraine: the horrors of Holodomor in 1932-33.

But one old, lonesome woman takes pity on the soldier. She nurses the dying Russian to health, even though she barely has enough for herself—even though it barely makes sense  for her to do so.

Robert Chandler, the talented translator of my version of Life of Fate,  had this to say in the foreword:

Grossman witnessed many terrible things. Nevertheless, he remains one of the most human and humane of writers. His novels are lit by brilliant flashes of humour and he shows love and understanding towards almost all his characters, Russians and Germans alike.

There’s more from Robert Chandler here:

Life and Fate looks at ‘the forgotten people during an unforgettable time’ in Grossman’s own words. People who are pitiful, heroic, loving, or cruel—but all vividly believable. From the neurotic but sympathetic thoughts of Viktor Shtrum, to the smiling veneer that hides the evil of commissar Getmanov. There are interesting scenes written from Stalin and Hitler’s perspectives, but they are a mere few pages each. Mainly, it’s a book about people during WWII—a portrait of life in motion.

Life and Fate made me grapple with and visualise the everyday lives of those during one of the most staggering eras of history.

And to remember that history is not just history—dates, figures, arrows of troop movements on a map—it’s people’s unresolvable struggles and iron-willed commitment to survival. Within each of those lives contains a multitude; millions of individuals, each living through their own unique stories of hardship, giving up their lives—voluntarily or involuntarily. It’s so important to remember those unforgettably forgotten.

Life and Fate : my concluding thoughts

The book is incredibly moving. I found myself having to put it down often, gazing away into the middle distance. It intersperses grand philosophising and scientific theories while capturing the lives of everyday people during the time. And isn’t that what great, epic literature of this kind is about? Would it truly be a Russian great, if it didn’t wrestle with the meaning of life? Maybe not.

This review has gone on for a lot longer than I intended, and yet I feel that I’ve only scratched the surface. I’m finding it difficult to form any sort of conclusion on a book so grand, with such depth. But I’ll try.

Ultimately, Grossman grapples with a nonsensical and horrifying time by emphasizing the meaning of life as existing in everyday acts of kindness. It’s very Tolstoyan in that sense, but in a completely different time and circumstance—interestingly, Grossman said that the only book he could stomach reading during his time at the front was War and Peace.  It must have given him not only an escape, but also the strength to keep writing and reporting.

Grossman witnessed one of the darkest and shocking periods of humanity. He captures that decaying, shrieking emptiness and the depths of despair and terror; the spiritual crisis of a country, a society, a world.

And yet, in the end, you feel inspired. It sounds twisted just writing that, after talking about all of this horror. But it’s true. Grossman found a way to inspire , without underplaying the horror of war and genocide. To enshrine individuality and freedom in a time that tried to destroy it. To find a way, somehow, for goodness—for humanity—to navigate all of the inhumanity.

I hope that I’ve done justice by this book and not misrepresented anything he tried to say.

Tragically, Grossman died in 1964, without knowing if his life’s work would ever see the light of day.

Should you read this book? Well, that’s up to you. I will say this: this book affected me as no other has before.

I’ll end this meditation on Life and Fate with the lines I promised earlier. The end of Ikonnikov’s letter, which pops up in my mind often, sporadically and without warning:

This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning. Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil, struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.

Thanks for taking the time to read. If you enjoyed this literature post, be sure to check out my others here!

* There’s a lot more to Adorno’s quote than the way I used it, to be honest. Adorno was talking more about how the totality of society came to produce the conditions needed for world wars and death camps. But that’s beyond the scope of this review.

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Life and Fate

By vasily grossman , translated from the russian and with an introduction by robert chandler.

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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.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics ISBN: 9781590172018 Pages: 904 Publication Date: May 16, 2006

Life and Fate . . . has been widely hailed as one of the greatest books of the 20th century. For my money, Life and Fate is one of the greatest books, period. —Becca Rothfeld, Jewish Currents

Vasily Grossman is the Tolstoy of the USSR. —Martin Amis

What better time to read Life and Fate , Vasily Grossman’s epic novel about the second world war, to put our current troubles into perspective? Grossman’s book, which traces the fate of the family of the brilliant physicist Viktor Shtrum at the time of the Battle of Stalingrad, records how humanity endured the monstrous evils of Nazism and Stalinism, surviving like weeds in the cracks of concrete slabs. —John Thornhill, Financial Times

No. 1 on Antony Beevor's "Five Best of World War II Fiction" list — The Wall Street Journal

One of the greatest works of literature to come out of Russia during the 20th century, Life and Fate could be looked at as the closest thing the Second World War had to a War and Peace . An absolute sprawling and haunting masterpiece that should be on every list. — Flavorwire

A delightfully readable 2006 translation by Robert Chandler, this edition preserves nearly all the color of Russian sayings and dark humor while remaining a devastating portrait of Stalin's Russia. Grossman shows how Russian communism was a moral and ideological dead end, an almost exact counterpart to Hitler's Nazism that was preordained from the moment Lenin began killing his opponents instead of talking to them...In the end, he leads the reader to the inescapable conclusion that Communism, like Nazism, had only one goal: power. Coming from a man who once sat in on the privileged inner circles of this government, as an acclaimed journalist and author, this is a devastating message indeed. — Forbes

A chronicle of the past century's two evil engines of destruction-Soviet communism and German fascism—the novel is dark yet earns its right to depression. But it depresses in the way that all genuinely great art does—through an unflinching view of the truth, which includes all the awfulness of which human beings are capable and also the splendor to which in crises they can attain. A great book, a masterpiece, Life and Fate is a book only a Russian could write. —Joseph Epstein, The Wall Street Journal

The greatest Russian novel of the 20th century.... Life and Fate will continue to dazzle and inspire—as unerring a moral guide today as it was 50 years ago. — Foreign Policy

It's a masterpiece. —Frederic Raphael

Grossman's depiction of Soviet citizens as they struggle to survive is magnificent. Life and Fate has been called the greatest Russian novel of the 20th Century. I agree. — Daytona Beach News

World War II's War and Peace . Written (mainly) from the vantage point of a Soviet Jew, this masterpiece was judged far too ambivalent in its treatment of the 'Great Patriotic War' to be published in the author's lifetime. —Niall Ferguson, The New York Times

Life and Fate is not only a brave and wise book; it is also written with Chekhovian subtlety. — Prospect Magazine

. . . [A] classic of 20th century Russian literature. — The New York Times

Grossman's account of Soviet life—penal, military and civilian—is encyclopedic and unblinkered . . . enormously impressive . . . A significant addition to the great library of smuggled Russian works. — The New York Times Book Review

Takes its place beside The First Circle and Doctor Zhivago as a masterful evocation of the fate of Russia as it is expressed through the lives of its people. — USA Today

Among the most damning indictments of the Soviet system ever written. — The Wall Street Journal

To read Life and Fate is, among other things, to have some sense of how it feels not to be free . . . In more ways than one, Life and Fate is a testament to the strength of character that terrorized human souls are capable of attaining. It is a noble book. — The Wall Street Journal

Read it, and rejoice that the 20th century has produced so thoughtful and so profound a literary humanist. The sufferings and self-revelations of these characters provide us with some of the most troubling and occasionally uplifting examinations of the human heart to be found in contemporary literature. A novel for all time. — Washington Post Book World

[An] extraordinarily dark portrait of Soviet society. —David Remnick, The Washington Post

Fascinating and powerful . . . Life and Fate does something that, as far as I know, no other novel has tried to do fully—and that is to portray believing Soviet Communists as ordinary characters, rather than as predictable embodiments of evil. — Vogue

Life and Fate has no equals in contemporary Russian literature . . . I would go so far as to say that Grossman in Life and Fate is the first free voice of the Soviet nation. — Commentary

Vasily Grossman's novel ostensibly concerns World War II, which he covered as a Soviet war correspondent. But his true subject is the power of kindness—random, banal or heroic—to counter the numbing dehumanization of totalitarianism. . . . By the novel's end, both communism and fascism are reduced to ephemera; instinctive kindness, whatever the consequences, is what makes us human. —Linda Grant, The Wall Street Journal blog

LIFE AND FATE

by Vasily Grossman ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1986

A popular Russian author and wartime journalist, Grossman (19051964) witnessed firsthand the historical events that inspired this massive novel: the Nazi siege and Soviet defense of Stalingrad in 1942, Equally critical of Stalinism and Fascism, Grossman's lengthy manuscript met with a chilly reception from Soviet censors, even though it was submitted during the post-Cold War ""thaw."" Completed in 1960 and smuggled west years later, this powerful indictment of the modern totalitarian State wasn't published until 1980 in France, and is only now translated for the first time into English. Four generations of the extended Shaposhnikov family and their friends, scattered throughout Eastern Europe by the war, come together here to form a Tolstoyan panorama of Russian life. Their stories, varied in length and seldom overlapping, encompass a vast landscape--from Siberia to the Ukraine--and introduce characters representative of all strata of Soviet life, privileged New Class types as well as victimized peasants. One plot, for example, centers on the members of a physics institute in Moscow: the lowly laboratory assistants, the eminent Academicians, and the capricious Party functionaries. A number of other plots unfold at the Stalingrad front: generals famous from history devise and execute strategy; a fighter squadron loses two planes during a major offensive; a tank corps leads the ground attack, pushing its way towards Berlin; and a motley group of soldiers courageously defends a surrounded building. Behind enemy lines, Russian prisoners conspire in a concentration camp and Hitler himself orders the 6th army to certain defeat. On the train to the gas chamber and among the Russian prisoners at Lubyanka, Grossman juxtaposes acts of personal heroism with scenes of institutionalized hatred. Elsewhere here the kindness, generosity, and love manage to surface, survive, and at times flourish amidst the carnage and bureaucratic terror. And it's these moments, in particular, which carry along the otherwise somber narrative of events. Those who've slogged through Solzhenitsyn's historical novels will find this more rewarding and relatively easy-going, despite lots of lumpy philosophy and enough characters to fill a seven-page appendix.

Pub Date: March 1, 1986

ISBN: 1590172019

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1986

Categories: FICTION

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Life and Fate (New York Review Books Classics) Paperback – 16 May 2006

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

• Print length 896 pages
• Language English
• Publisher New York Review of Books
• Publication date 16 May 2006
• Dimensions 13.21 x 4.62 x 20.07 cm
• ISBN-10 1590172019
• ISBN-13 978-1590172018
• See all details

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Product description

"What better time to read Life and Fate , Vasily Grossman's epic novel about the second world war, to put our current troubles into perspective? Grossman's book, which traces the fate of the family of the brilliant physicist Viktor Shtrum at the time of the Battle of Stalingrad, records how humanity endured the monstrous evils of Nazism and Stalinism, surviving like weeds in the cracks of concrete slabs."--John Thornhill, Financial Times

#1 on Antony Beevor's 2009 "Five Best of World War II Fiction" list ( The Wall Street Journal )

"One of the greatest works of literature to come out of Russia during the 20th century, Life and Fate could be looked at as the closest thing the Second World War had to a War and Peace . An absolute sprawling and haunting masterpiece that should be on every list." -- Flavorwire

"A delightfully readable 2006 translation by Robert Chandler, this edition preserves nearly all the color of Russian sayings and dark humor while remaining a devastating portrait of Stalin's Russia. Grossman shows how Russian communism was a moral and ideological dead end, an almost exact counterpart to Hitler's Nazism that was preordained from the moment Lenin began killing his opponents instead of talking to them. . . . In the end, he leads the reader to the inescapable conclusion that Communism, like Nazism, had only one goal: power. Coming from a man who once sat in on the privileged inner circles of this government, as an acclaimed journalist and author, this is a devastating message indeed." -- Forbes

"A chronicle of the past century's two evil engines of destruction-Soviet communism and German fascism--the novel is dark yet earns its right to depression. But it depresses in the way that all genuinely great art does--through an unflinching view of the truth, which includes all the awfulness of which human beings are capable and also the splendor to which in crises they can attain. A great book, a masterpiece, Life and Fate is a book only a Russian could write." --Joseph Epstein, The Wall Street Journal

"It's a masterpiece." --Frederic Raphael

"Grossman's depiction of Soviet citizens as they struggle to survive is magnificent. Life and Fate has been called the greatest Russian novel of the 20th Century. I agree." -- Daytona Beach News

"World War II's War and Peace . Written (mainly) from the vantage point of a Soviet Jew, this masterpiece was judged far too ambivalent in its treatment of the 'Great Patriotic War' to be published in the author's lifetime." --Niall Ferguson, The New York Times

"[A] classic of 20th century Russian literature." -- The New York Times

"Grossman's account of Soviet life--penal, military and civilian--is encyclopedic and unblinkered . . . enormously impressive . . . A significant addition to the great library of smuggled Russian works." -- The New York Times Book Review

"Takes its place beside The First Circle and Doctor Zhivago as a masterful evocation of the fate of Russia as it is expressed through the lives of its people." -- USA Today

"Among the most damning indictments of the Soviet system ever written." -- The Wall Street Journal

"To read Life and Fate is, among other things, to have some sense of how it feels not to be free. . . . In more ways than one, Life and Fate is a testament to the strength of character that terrorized human souls are capable of attaining. It is a noble book." -- The Wall Street Journal

"Read it, and rejoice that the 20th century has produced so thoughtful and so profound a literary humanist. The sufferings and self-revelations of these characters provide us with some of the most troubling and occasionally uplifting examinations of the human heart to be found in contemporary literature. A novel for all time." -- Washington Post Book World

"[An] extraordinarily dark portrait of Soviet society." --David Remnick, The Washington Post

"Fascinating and powerful . . . Life and Fate does something that, as far as I know, no other novel has tried to do fully--and that is to portray believing Soviet Communists as ordinary characters, rather than as predictable embodiments of evil." -- Vogue

"Vasily Grossman's novel ostensibly concerns World War II, which he covered as a Soviet war correspondent. But his true subject is the power of kindness--random, banal or heroic--to counter the numbing dehumanization of totalitarianism. . . . By the novel's end, both communism and fascism are reduced to ephemera; instinctive kindness, whatever the consequences, is what makes us human." --Linda Grant, The Wall Street Journal blog

From the Back Cover

About the author.

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 .

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ New York Review of Books (16 May 2006)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 896 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1590172019
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1590172018
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.21 x 4.62 x 20.07 cm
• 18,309 in Psychological Fiction (Books)
• 22,589 in War Story Fiction
• 88,328 in Historical Fiction (Books)

About the authors

Robert chandler.

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Vasiliĭ Semenovich Grossman

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Why we haven't reviewed it yet: Had a go at it, but didn't quite live up to all build-up Chances that we will review it: Still a possibility, but it's not a high priority - Return to top of the page -

   Review Consensus :   It's a masterpiece    From the Reviews : "The book's real subject is the daily endurance of the human spirit amid the monumental pressures of absolute war and totalitarian rule, communist as well as fascist. There are terrible scenes, searingly described. And yet, if it were possible to distil the subject matter into one word - and it is so rich a work that the attempt is probably futile - that word would be freedom. This is a novel about what it is to be a free human being." - Martin Kettle, The Guardian "As it sweeps between world-shaking events and the exquisite minutiae of private life, Grossman's narrative energy and inexhaustible humanity light up every page of an absolute masterpiece." - Boyd Tonkin , The Independent "That greatness is to do with scale. This is one of the hardest qualities to demonstrate, and it is made harder by the unpyrotechnic flatness of Grossman�s writing; although it has its virtuosities and set pieces, these are at the level of the character sketch rather than the brilliant sentence or flashy paragraph. Once you get used to this, it comes to seem a virtue; there�s no writerly showing-off. What there is is an immense depth of feeling and experience. (...) One test of greatness in fiction is unflinchingness, and Life and Fate is utterly unflinching, taking the reader both into the prison camps of the Soviet state and the death camps of the Nazis (.....) Life and Fate still seems to me to be a grossly under-read book." - John Lanchester, London Review of Books "As in the classic Russian novels, dozens of characters wander through these pages, with fascinating appearances by both Hitler and Stalin as well as other historical figures. There are no villains, no melodramatic scenes; every word is confident, lucid, certain. None of the characters is ideal, but all of them, even the Germans, are more noble when suffering than when on top of things." - Charles Nicol, National Review " Life and Fate is a great novel not least because it captures what Grossman once called the "ruthless truth of war," and the even more ruthless truth of absolutism, whatever its ethos. That artistic legidmacy is not sacrificed in the process is quite astounding." - Michael Weiss, New Criterion "With such boldly expressed heresy, it's perhaps not surprising that Life and Fate caused a stir upon its completion in 1960." - Phil Mongredien, The Observer "Grossman's literary re-creation of the soldiers' war experience has arresting power because it came directly out of his own life and the lives of people close to him." - Jochen Hellbeck, Raritan Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review 's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

Notes about the Reviews and the Book's Reception :

       Pretty much universally hailed, everyone seems to consider Life and Fate the World War II counterpart to Tolstoy's War and Peace .

About the Author :

       Soviet author Vasily Grossman (Василий Семёнович Гроссман) lived 1905 to 1964.

© 2007-2010 the complete review Main | the New | the Best | the Rest | Review Index | Links

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Life and Fate Paperback – International Edition, October 24, 2006

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• Print length 912 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Vintage Classics
• Publication date October 24, 2006
• Dimensions 5.1 x 1.84 x 7.76 inches
• ISBN-10 0099506165
• ISBN-13 978-0099506164
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage Classics; New Ed edition (October 24, 2006)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 912 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0099506165
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0099506164
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.36 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.1 x 1.84 x 7.76 inches
• #24,065 in War Fiction (Books)

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Vasily Grossman

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Steve Gleason’s Unflinching Memoir of Living With A.L.S.

In “A Life Impossible,” the former N.F.L. player opens up about outliving his life expectancy — the challenges, loneliness and moments of joy.

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By Buzz Bissinger

Buzz Bissinger is the author of “Friday Night Lights” and “The Mosquito Bowl.”

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A LIFE IMPOSSIBLE: Living With ALS: Finding Peace and Wisdom Within a Fragile Existence, by Steve Gleason with Jeff Duncan

After you turn 70, as I will this year, any celebration will be muted by an ever-increasing awareness of mortality. I fear death, but what I fear even more is the way in which I’ll die. I hope it’s a heart attack in the dark of night — quick and painless, here today, gone tomorrow.

I’m terrified that the cause will be amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as A.L.S. or Lou Gehrig’s disease. It fundamentally destroys the nervous system, not all at once but in excruciating steps, leading to loss of muscle and the inability to speak, swallow or breathe on your own, constipation, drooling: You name it, A.L.S. will destroy it. The one area not affected is your brain. You understand what’s happening; you’re conscious of every indignity and humiliation until you die, usually within two to five years of diagnosis.

Which leads us to Steve Gleason’s memoir, “A Life Impossible,” written with Jeff Duncan. More than a decade after learning he had A.L.S. at the age of 33, Gleason has survived with the help of faith, resilience and the support of his wife, Michel, who has endured her own share of suffering.

I greatly admire “A Life Impossible” — its unflinching honesty and candor — but I’m not sure I am better off for reading it. Sometimes, ignorance is a mercy.

Gleason was a football player from Spokane, Wash., one of those athletes who supplemented his talent with a relentless work ethic, measuring himself by how much pain he could withstand, the more the better. He went to Washington State University, where he was a star linebacker on a team that went to the Rose Bowl. He wasn’t drafted but several teams expressed interest in signing him. For eight years, until his retirement in 2008, Gleason played on special teams with the New Orleans Saints, making his presence felt on every kicking play.

He was a physical kamikaze, fighting off blocks to get to kickoff and punt returners, all at blazing speed, a magnet for pain and adrenaline. He led the team in special teams tackles for several years and was named to ESPN’s All-Pro team for his performance during the 2002 season. But when the Saints returned to the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina, Gleason made a career-defining play: On the very first series of downs, he blocked a punt by the Atlanta Falcons that led to a Saints touchdown. It was an electrifying moment for New Orleans.

Unfortunately, Gleason’s post-football career wasn’t quite as triumphant. He lost $1 million in a series of ill-advised real estate investments, but then became determined to rebuild his financial life. Self-pity doesn’t appear to be part of Gleason’s vocabulary; the harder the challenge, the more he reveled in beating it.

Until Jan. 5, 2011, when he was diagnosed with A.L.S. after experiencing involuntary muscle twitches in his arms and shoulder. Over a period of years the disease wormed its way into Gleason’s body, reaching a point where he was unable to move, swallow, breathe or eat on his own, ultimately requiring a ventilator and feeding tube. He did learn to communicate using eye-tracking technology on a computer tablet and a “letter board” that facilitates communication via eye movements.

“My body is a prison,” Gleason writes. “I face insurmountable adversity each day, yet my family and I are able to survive within this miraculous, wonderful life. And I have learned to accept things that are out of my control, to transform suffering into strength.”

He does have advantages. He has used ongoing attention from the likes of Bill Gates to raise millions for Team Gleason, which is dedicated to helping people live with A.L.S. and finding a cure that currently does not exist.

The most moving parts of the book are the journal entries and emails between Gleason and his wife.

On their sixth anniversary, Michel wrote: “I worry about our future. I wonder how long you’ll be here, how old I’ll be when you are gone and if I’ll be too old to find someone else?”

Gleason’s response: “If I die before you, l hope you find someone to grow old with, or maybe find someone now, is that crazy?”

Gleason tends to wax poetic at times, quoting from the likes of Hermann Hesse, Pearl Jam, Yuval Noah Harari, Dave Grohl, Maynard James Keenan and Marcus Aurelius. Ultimately, though, Gleason is a symbol of resilience, hope and optimism. There are lessons to be drawn from “A Life Impossible”; some will undoubtedly come away from it with a message of uplift, and I should be among them. But as I turned each page with one eye shut and the rest of my body cringing, my greatest takeaway is that my fear of A.L.S. has only heightened.

I am not Steve Gleason. I don’t have the strength. How many out there really do?

A LIFE IMPOSSIBLE : Living With ALS: Finding Peace and Wisdom Within a Fragile Existence | By Steve Gleason with Jeff Duncan | Knopf | 288 pp. | $30

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Two new novels investigate what makes magic, what is real and imagined

May 15, 2024 6:00 AM | Updated: May 16, 2024 1:55 AM

• Marcela Davison Avilés

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In an enchanted world, where does mystery begin? Two authors pose this question in new novels out this spring.

In Pages of Mourning by the Mexican magical realism interrogator-author Diego Gerard Morrison, the protagonist is a Mexican writer named Aureliano Más II who is at war with his memory of familial sorrow and — you guessed it — magical realism. And the protagonist Alma Cruz in Julia Alvarez's latest novel, The Cemetery of Untold Stories, is also a writer. Alma seeks to bury her unpublished stories in a graveyard of her own making, in order to find peace in their repose — and meaning from the vulnerability that comes from unheard stories.

Both of these novels, one from an emerging writer and one from a long celebrated author, walk an open road of remembering love, grief, and fate. Both find a destiny not in death, but in the reality of abandonment and in dreams that come from a hope for reunion. At this intersection of memory and meaning, their storytelling diverges.

Pages of Mourning

Pages of Mourning, out this month, is set in 2017, three years after 43 students disappear from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College after being abducted in Iguala , Guerrero, Mexico. The main character, Aureliano, is attempting to write the Great Mexican Novel that reflects this crisis and his mother's own unexplained disappearance when he was a boy. He's also struggling with the idea of magical realism as literary genre — he holds resentment over being named after the protagonist in 100 Years of Solitude, which fits squarely within it. He sets out on a journey with his maternal aunt to find his father, ask questions about his mother, and deal with his drinking problem and various earthquakes.

Morrison's voice reflects his work as a writer, editor and translator based in Mexico City, who seeks to interrogate "the concept of dissonance" through blended art forms such as poetry and fiction, translation and criticism. His story could be seen as an archetype, criticism, or a reflection through linguistic cadence on Pan American literature. His novel name drops and alludes to American, Mexican and Latin American writers including Walt Whitman, Juan Rulfo, Gabriel Garcia Márquez — and even himself. There's an earnest use of adjectives to accompany the lived dissonance of his characters.

There's nothing magical, in the genre sense, in Morrison's story. There are no magical rivers, enchanted messages, babies born with tails. Morrison's dissonance is real — people get disappeared, they suffer addictions, writer's block, crazy parents, crazier shamans, blank pages, corruption, the loss of loved ones. In this depiction of real Pan-American life — because all of this we are also explicitly suffering up North — Morrison finds his magic. His Aureliano is our Aureliano. He's someone we know. Probably someone we loved — someone trying so hard to live.

The Cemetery of Untold Stories

From the author of In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents , The Cemetery of Untold Stories is Julia Alvarez's seventh novel. It's a story that's both languorous and urgent in conjuring a world from magical happenings. The source of these happenings, in a graveyard in the Dominican Republic, is the confrontation between memories and lived agendas. Alvarez is an acclaimed storyteller and teacher, a writer of poetry, non-fiction and children's books, honored in 2013 with the National Medal of Arts . She continues her luminous virtuosity with the story of Alma Cruz.

Alma, the writer at the heart of The Cemetery of Untold Stories , has a goal - not to go crazy from the delayed promise of cartons of unpublished stories she has stored away. When she inherits land in her origin country — the Dominican Republic — she decides to retire there, and design a graveyard to bury her manuscript drafts, along with the characters whose fictional lives demand their own unrequited recompense. Her sisters think she's nuts, and wasting their inheritance. Filomena, a local woman Alma hires to watch over the cemetery, finds solace in a steady paycheck and her unusual workplace.

Alma wants peace for herself and her characters. But they have their own agendas and, once buried, begin to make them known: They speak to each other and Filomena, rewriting and revising Alma's creativity in order to reclaim themselves.

In this new story, Alvarez creates a world where everyone is on a quest to achieve a dream — retirement, literary fame, a steady job, peace of mind, authenticity. Things get complicated during the rewrites, when ambitions and memories bump into the reality of no money, getting arrested, no imagination, jealousy, and the grace of humble competence. Alma's sisters, Filomena, the townspeople — all make a claim over Alma's aspiration to find a final resting place for her memories. Alvarez sprinkles their journey with dialogue and phrases in Spanish and one — " no hay mal que por bien no venga " (there is goodness in every woe) — emerges as the oral talisman of her story. There is always something magical to discover in a story, and that is especially true in Alvarez's landing place.

Marcela Davison Avilés is a writer and independent producer living in Northern California.

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