Category Archives: Grossman, Vasily

Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman Translated from: Russian Rating: ★★★★★ Series: Stalingrad #3 Publication Date: January 1, 1960 Genre: fiction, war Pages: 904 ReRead?: No 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.

This 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.