Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


How to do justice to this book. I think Linda Grant, who wrote the introduction of my copy of Vasily Grossman's utterly extraordinary 'Life and Fate' summed it up best: "It took three weeks to read and three weeks to recover from the experience." It took me longer than three weeks to read and I am still recovering.

'Life and Fate' is an epic story of an entire nation - Russia - told through the trauma, hopes and fate of one family, the Shaposhnikovs. It is set in the Second World War, as the bloody and barbaric siege of Stalingrad is reaching its climax, the final turning point in Russia's against-all-odds defeat of the advancing German army. The world Vasily Grossman takes us to is therefore torn apart - by starvation, death, disease, atrocities of a magnitude beyond our conception - all the more powerful for the way it is depicted through the personal struggles of the scattered Shaposhnikov family. Whether at home or close to the action, they are each fighting to survive, not just the obvious enemy - Hitler's Germany - but also the far more insidious threats from within their own repressive regime. This is the reign of Stalin. Being a hero in battle, making scientific breakthroughs in developing weapons, keeping your Jewish faith discreet, being a good citizen - no virtues afford protection against anything. Friends tell lies about friends. No one can trust or be trusted. One suspected treacherous thought - let alone action - and torture, death and incarceration are minutes away. Such was the reach of the iron rod of fear and cruelty.

In such a world no single pocket of life is safe. The terror - at home, at war - is unspeakable and yet Grossman dares to speak it. Before turning to fiction, he was a journalist who reported from the thick of the Stalingrad siege for the Russian newspaper The Red Star. This means that his writing has the forensic power of fact, coupled with the depth of emotional insight that can only come from personal experience. Grossman's own family suffered in exactly the ways the Shaposhnikovs do. This is why the truth of what the characters endure in the novel rings so true, and why at times it is almost unbearable to read.

Vasily Grossman did not write 'Love and Fate' until the 1950s, completing it in 1960. Even then the contents were seen as such a threat by the authorities that the book was banned from publication and confiscated by the KGB. Four years later Grossman died from cancer. 'Love and Fate' only reached this country sixteen years after that, in 1980, thanks to a microfilm of the novel being smuggled out of Russia. 1980! I was twenty years old and reading books and newspapers, and somehow - how? - this momentous publication passed me by.

We are surrounded by things we do not see, by things that need calling out, things that matter. If a writer's duty is to bear witness, 'Love and Fate' offers no greater example. Grossman's vivid exposition of the siege of Stalingrad and its aftermath will stay with me; but even more seared on my memory are the horrors of the Stalinist regime, horrors that linger on in the Russia we know today. Guilt and innocence become meaningless when a state decides the nature of reality. Anyone will confess to anything if the war with truth and morality has already been lost. The question is, how can humans hang onto their humanity in such conditions?

It is a question which Grossman asks and answers, with wisdom, courage and every ounce of his own humanity, shining a light in the dark. No stars are enough for ‘Love and Fate’. This is a work that must be read.











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