Life and Fate (novel)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Author | Vasily Grossman |
|---|---|
| Country | U.S.S.R. |
| Language | Russian |
| Publisher | |
| Released |
Life and Fate (Russian: Жизнь и судьба) Vasily Grossman's 1959 novel is his magnum opus. Technically, it is the second half of the author's conceived two-part book under the same title, but while the first half (the novel For the Right Cause), written during the reign of Joseph Stalin and first published in 1952, expresses loyalty to the regime, Life and Fate sharply critcises Stalinism. Le Monde described it as "the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century."[1]
Contents |
[edit] History of the manuscript
After Grossman submitted the manuscript for publication to the Znamya magazine, the KGB raided his apartment. The manuscripts, carbon copies, notebooks, as well as the typists' copies and even the typewriter ribbons were seized.
With the post-Stalinist Khrushchev Thaw period underway, Grossman wrote to Nikita Khrushchev:
"I ask you to return freedom for my book, I ask that my book be discussed with editors, not the agents of the KGB. What is the point of me being physically free when the book I dedicated my life to is arrested... I am not renouncing it... I am requesting freedom for my book."
On July 23, 1962, the Politburo ideology chief Mikhail Suslov told the author that if published, his book could inflict even greater harm to the Soviet Union than Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. Suslov notified Grossman that his novel could not be published for at least two hundred years. Both the presumption of the censor and recognition of the work's lasting literary value have been noted in the comment.
Grossman died in 1964, not knowing whether his novel would ever be read by public.
It was published in 1980 in Switzerland with the help of fellow dissidents: Andrei Sakharov secretly photographed draft pages preserved by Semyon Lipkin, and Vladimir Voinovich managed to smuggle the films abroad.
As the policy of glasnost was initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev, the novel was finally published on Russian soil in 1988 in the Oktyabr magazine and as a book.
Some critics compared Grossman's war novels with Leo Tolstoy's monumental prose.
[edit] Plot summary
The novel at heart narrates the history of the Shaposhnikov family and the Battle of Stalingrad. It is written in the socialist realist style, which can make it seem odd in parts to western readers.
Life and Fate is a multi-faceted novel, one of ideas being that the Great Patriotic War was the struggle between two comparable totalitarian states. The tragedy of the common people is that they have to fight both the invaders and the totalitarianism of their own state.
The multitude of subplots include events in a German labour camp, a Jewish group on their way to a German extermination camp, the senior staff and individual fighting units in both the city of Stalingrad and those involved in the Operation Uranus counter-offensive, events at the Stalingrad power station, scientists in exile from Moscow and on their return and prisoners of the MGB in various locations. Both Hitler and Stalin appear as characters the work.
In one scene, Sturmbannführer Liss tells old Bolshevik Mostovsky, a Nazi concentration camp inmate, that both Stalin and Hitler are the leaders of qualitatively new formation: "When we look at each other's faces, we see not only a hated face; we see the mirror reflection. ... Don't you recognize yourself, your [strong] will in us?"
Grossman describes the type of Communist party functionaries, who blindly follow the party line and constitute the base for the oppressive regime. One such political worker (политработник), Sagaidak, maintained that entire families and villages intentionally starved themselves to death during the collectivisation in the USSR.
An entire chapter is dedicated to the evil of anti-Semitism.
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ Tolstoy Studies Journal: Ellis, Frank. Concepts of War in L.N. Tolstoy and V.S. Grossman. Volume II, 1989, pp. 101-108
[edit] External links
- Noise, Fire, and Hunger By Josef Skvorecky Review at The New York Review of Books Volume 33, Number 12. July 17, 1986.
- review at London Review Bookshop
- Life and Fate By Vasily Grossman Translated by Robert Chandler review at The Jewish Reader. March, 2004
