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Life and FateThis is an intimidatingly long book, translated from Russian. Like much great Russian literature – Solzhenitsyn, Pasternak – it was suppressed by the Soviet authorities as subversive during the life of the author, a Russian Jew.
The title was chosen to echo Tolstoy’s opus, War and Peace, and the author’s self-confidence is not misplaced here. Life and Fate is a sprawling epic, that has many characters and plotlines – so many that I spent a lot of the book flipping to the character/setting list at the back of the book to orient myself.
It is extremely critical of Stalin, which explains why it would have been suppressed. It’s equally critical of the Nazis, and addresses the holocaust with an unsparing eye. There is a short set piece of a couple of chapters that directly describes the mechanics of the death chambers and looting of the bodies by German workers, through characters, including a child, who walk to their murders. Reading it is a harrowing experience.
I checked it out of the library, but I think I will put it on my list of books to purchase because I want to read it again, now that I am firmly oriented within the characters, locations and plotlines. I feel that I barely scratched the surface with this reading. Grossman has two other books in this loose trilogy: The People Immortal, Stalingrad, and Life and Fate. Everything that I’ve read so far suggests that Life and Fate is the masterpiece of the three, but all of them are available in translation from NYRB classics, so I plan to tackle them in order in 2025.
Very coincidentally I asked my husband last night if I should consider reading them as we own them. I’m trying to get up the nerve.
I am a very fast reader, and it took me over a month to read – although I do read multiple books at a time, so it would have taken less time if I had only been reading it.
It is definitely worth reading, but it is a major commitment, to be sure. If you enjoy Russian literature in general, or even Victorian literature with large character lists, I think you would find it to be a worthwhile endeavor. It’s not the sort of book that you close and say “oh, I loved that!” because the subject matter is often very grim, but there is a major sense of accomplishment at finishing it!
Without looking for it I just found The People Immortal at the library so I guess I’ll start with that one.
I read this one a while back and it was indeed intimidating and fascinating. I’m not sure how eager I will be to revisit Grossman, but I probably will after some time. I appreciate the character lists, especially in long Russian novels, but I wish they would also include all the possible variants of the name, since they way people are addressed changes with familiarity, and sometimes it’s confusing. This despite my already being aware of the various nicknames and methods of address. Whenever I read a Russian novel that doesn’t have the list of names, I quickly get mixed up.
I spent so much time flipping to the character list in this book! And you’re right – it can be hard to figure out which character is being referenced because they all have dimunitives and other variants in use constantly!
And not obviously related or starting with the same letter like ours usually are Dmitri–Mitya, Nikolai–Kolya, Ivan–Vanya. Yikes!