Life and Fate

Stalingrad Trilogy #3

by Vasily Grossman, Robert Chandler (Translator), Linda Grant (Introduction )

THIS ORANGE INHERITANCE EDITION OF LIFE AND FATE IS PUBLISHED IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE ORANGE PRIZE FOR FICTION

Books shape our lives and transform the way we see ourselves and each other. The best books are timeless and continue to be relevant generation after generation. Vintage Classics asked the winners of The Orange Prize for Fiction which books they would pass onto the next generation and why. Linda Grant chose Life and Fate.

This is an epic tale of a country told through the fate of a single family, the Shaposhnikovs. As the battle of Stalingrad looms Grossman’s characters must work out their destinies in a world torn apart by ideological tyranny and war.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Russia, Historical Fiction, Russian Literature, War, Literature

855 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1960

About the author

Born Iosif Solomonovich Grossman into an emancipated Jewish family, he did not receive a traditional Jewish education. A Russian nanny turned his name Yossya into Russian Vasya (a diminutive of Vasily), which was accepted by the whole family. His father had social-democratic convictions and joined the Mensheviks. Young Vasily Grossman idealistically supported the Russian Revolution of 1917.

When the Great Patriotic War broke out in 1941, Grossman's mother was trapped in Berdychiv by the invading German army, and eventually murdered together with 20,000 to 30,000 other Jews who did not evacuate Berdychiv. Grossman was exempt from military service, but volunteered for the front, where he spent more than 1,000 days. He became a war reporter for the popular Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star). As the war raged on, he covered its major events, including the Battle of Moscow, the Battle of Stalingrad, the Battle of Kursk, and the Battle of Berlin. In addition to war journalism, his novels (such as The People are Immortal (Народ бессмертен) were being published in newspapers and he came to be regarded as a legendary war hero. The novel Stalingrad (1950), later renamed For a Just Cause (За правое дело), is based on his own experiences during the siege.

Grossman's descriptions of ethnic cleansing in Ukraine and Poland, and the liberation of the Treblinka and Majdanek extermination camps, were some of the first eyewitness accounts —as early as 1943—of what later became known as 'The Holocaust'. His article The Hell of Treblinka (1944) was disseminated at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal as evidence for the prosecution.

Grossman died of stomach cancer in 1964, not knowing whether his novels would ever be read by the public.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Life and Fate is an epical and panoramic canvas meticulously portraying the whole pivotal period in the life and fate of man, people, countries and the entire world.

The intuition of a deafened and isolated soldier often turns out to be nearer the truth than judgements delivered by staff officers as they study the map.
An extraordinary change takes place at the turning-point in a battle: a soldier looks round, after apparently gaining his objective, and suddenly finds he has lost sight of his comrades; while the enemy, who had seemed so weak, scattered and stupid, is now united and therefore invincible. A deep change in perception takes place at this mysterious turning-point: a gallant, intelligent ‘We’ becomes a frail, timid ‘I’, while the enemy changes from a hunted, isolated prey to a terrible, threatening ‘Them’.

Time to retreat and time to attack…

As he overcame the enemy resistance, the advancing soldier had perceived everything separately: a shell-burst here, a rattle of machine-gun fire there, an enemy soldier there, hiding behind that shelter and about to run… He can’t not run – he’s cut off from that isolated piece of artillery, that isolated machine-gun, that isolated soldier blazing away beside him. But I – I am we, I am the mass of infantry going into the attack, I am the supporting tanks and artillery, I am the flare lighting up our common cause. And then suddenly I am alone – and everything that was isolated and weak has fused into a solid roar of enemy rifle-fire, machine-gun fire and artillery fire. This united enemy is now invincible; the only safety lies in my flight, in hiding my head, in covering my shoulders, my forehead, my jaw…

Time to think and time to act…

Often, it is the understanding of this transition that gives warfare the right to be called an art. This alternating sense of singularity and plurality is a key not only to the success of night-attacks by companies and battalions, but to the military success and failure of entire armies and peoples.

Terror of war, horror of camps, dread of prisons, meanness of the state, misery of existence – everything turned helpless before the power of a common man and this common man in the end became a warranty of the great victory.

[Orsodimondo · Rating 5 out of 5]

QUI SI SCRIVE, NON SI VA A ZONZO



Qui si scrive, non si va a zonzo: così avrebbe detto Tolstoj se avesse potuto leggere Vita e destino.
Qui non si va a zonzo, sono pagine con peso specifico, importanti, ben oltre il lor numero (settecento).
Da anni, molti, non leggevo un libro così.
Così bello, così denso, così esigente, così ricco.
Arrivato a metà, ho istintivamente rallentato, per non finirlo troppo presto, per gustarlo a fondo, distillarlo.
Quando l’ho chiuso per l’ultima volta, ho deciso di tenerlo ancora sul comodino, di non metterlo subito via sullo scaffale, di non separarmene bruscamente e abituarmi con calma al silenzio che custodisce il ricordo di Strum, Zenja, Krymov e altri centocinquanta personaggi.
Che forse non diventeranno mai assenza.



Quando ho iniziato non avevo la giusta concentrazione, le parole mi bussavano al cervello, ma non venivano assorbite, come l’olio dall’acqua. Infatti, dopo duecento pagine mi son fermato, l’ho posato ed è rimasto a lungo in attesa.
Finalmente, l’ho ripreso, dalla prima pagina, e da quel momento si è messo in moto un piacere puro che è durato per tutta la lettura, senza cedimenti, cali, stanchezza.



Ho dovuto aiutarmi guardando cartine geografiche, con una mappa dei personaggi, che sono sterminati come la steppa e l’umanità dei lager e dei gulag, tutti provvisti di nome cognome patronimico e uno, se non due, diminuitivi; mi sono scontrato con i tenenti colonnelli e i tenenti generali e i commissari, le divisioni, le unità, i reggimenti, i battaglioni.
Una fatica pienamente ripagata.



Grossman affronta il suo racconto senza paura e senza soggezione.
Eppure ci sarebbe da tremare: l’universo concentrazionario dal punto di vista di un osservatore e non della vittima.
Grossman conosce la materia, l’ha vista da vicino, c’era quando è successo.
È una marcia in più, uno sguardo tanto più acuto profondo e illuminante.

Conosce il cielo di cemento, i muscoli forti dell’acciaio, i crateri delle bombe, un fiume allagato di fiamme, il freddo la fame e la paura, un mondo di spie e uomini non fra i migliori, parecchi dei quali hanno guardato il male dall’alto in basso, mentre la morte faceva il suo lavoro e gli uomini il proprio.

Poi, il suo talento ha fatto il resto.



Non credo nella bontà universale, nel bene generato dal socialismo o dal cristianesimo. Credo nei piccoli atti di generosità.
Così dice uno dei personaggi di queste settecento pagine, e sembra di sentire Cechov.
Coerentemente, a me sembra che qui la condanna sia per ogni forma di totalitarismo, non solo quello nazista e sovietico: come se Grossman dicesse che basta ci sia un solo ghetto perché tutto il mondo viva nel ghetto, che basta un solo gulag perché nessuno possa sentirsi libero.

Non è per lettori frettolosi, direi: ma a tutti saprà regalare bellezza e profondità.


Alexandr Deineka: Difesa di Sebastopoli, 1942.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have to use the “M” word for this panoramic portrayal of the Soviet experience of World War 2—masterpiece. I was moved and uplifted, enlightened and devastated, and ultimately made into a better person wit more empathy and understanding of the human condition.

This is an insider’s view, as is made clear by the wonderful background provided by the translator, Robert Chandler. Grossman was a Ukrainian Jew who studied chemistry in his youth, became a novelist with the support of Gorky, and with the advent of war became a renowned war correspondent who covered Stalingrad and the fall of Berlin and who pieced together for the first time in print the hidden story of the operations of a German death camp, Treblinka. This book was completed in 1960, but the manuscript was seized and suppressed by the KGB. Fortunately, a copy was smuggled out a decade later (through the efforts of Sakharov and Voinovitch) and reached print in the West in the early 80s.

The novel is very ambitious in portraying seminal events from a range of perspectives, from peasants to scientists, from partisans to generals, with brief forays into viewpoint of German soldiers as well. What helps with integration across its broad scope is that most of the stories are confined to the Winter of 1942-43 during which the Battle of Stalingrad became the turning point in the war. Also, in the tradition of “War and Peace” (which I haven’t read), the narrative places various members of one large extended family at the core of most of the scenarios used to bring to life a nation and a society at war: the elderly Shaposhnikova matriarch, stuck in Ukraine at the onset of war, ends up confined by the Germans in a Jewish ghetto that is later massacred; her son Viktor, a Jewish theoretical physicist who is driven by pure science and tested in his integrity by politics; his wife’s ex-husband, who is placed in a Soviet work camp among Trotsky-style Bolsheviks purged in 1937; his sister-in-law who is torn between her ex-husband and her fiancé, the first a party true-believer who serves as a political officer in Stalingrad and is later falsely accused and imprisoned in Moscow as a traitor, and the latter a colonel of a tank brigade who leads the Soviet counterstrike at Stalingrad; Viktor’s sister, a Moscow physician caught while traveling, bravely experiences a trip by cattle car to meet her fate in a gas chamber.

There is a pervasive tender compassion for all, but not for the true enemies, the totalitarian states of Hitler and Stalin, which Grossman shows to be mirrored twins in so many ways. Grossman’s compassion comes from wanting to give voice to the dead, such as his own mother, who was killed with about 30,000 other Jews in Bedichev in Ukraine and to whom the book is dedicated. Like others writers who have borne witness to the Holocaust, he is concerned with how it affects our conception of what it means to be human and the nature of good and evil. How so many held on forlornly to hope and passively obeyed. How millions could ignore what was happening and let people be led like lambs to the slaughter. And how others rebelled and resisted, in small ways or at great risk to themselves. Grossman breaks through from the narrative to speak of these things, but mostly he brings these themes to life through his characters, and in both approaches uses transcendent language full of sublime or horrific beauty.

Reading this book takes a special commitment, not just of the investment of time it takes to read such a massive tome, but also in emotional trust that it will not just wrench you pitilessly and leave you like a rag in despair. Grossman somehow achieves the miracle of infusing hope at every turn in a way that transcends death. For example, there is a point where a poet in a work camp expounds on how simple human kindness, such as sharing a scrap of bread with an enemy, is a core of humanity that persists despite all brutality and despair. In this quote, Viktor’s mother speaks eloquently of resilient hope in a letter to him from a doomed Jewish ghetto:

The more sorrow there is in man, the less hope he has of survival—the better, the kinder, the more generous he becomes.
The poorest people, the tailors and tinsmiths, the ones without hope, are so much nobler, more generous and more intelligent than the people who’ve somehow managed to lay by a few provisions. The young schoolmistresses; Spilberg, the eccentric old teacher and chess-player; the timid women who work in the library; Reyvich, the engineer, who’s more helpless than a child, yet dreams of arming the ghetto with hand-made grenades—what wonderful, impractical, dear, sad, good people they all are! …
People carry on, Vitra, as though their whole life lies ahead of them. It’s impossible to say if that is wise or foolish—it’s just the way people are.

The woman doctor in her last moments is here uplifted by communion with a boy she helped on the cattle-car to the gas chamber:
Her eyes—which have read Homer, Izvestia, Huckleberry Finn and Mayne Reid, that had looked at good people and bad people, that had seen the geese in the green meadows of Kursk, the stars above the observatory at Pulkovo, the glitter of surgical steel, the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, tomatoes and turnips in the bins at market, the blue water of Issyk-Kul—her eyes were no longer of any use to her. If someone had blinded her, she would have felt no sense of loss.
…Sofya Levinton felt the boy’s body subside in her arms. …This boy, with his slight, bird-like body, has left before her. “I’ve become a mother,” she thought. That was her last thought.
Her heart, however, still had life in it: it contracted, ached, and felt pity for all of you, both living and dead; Sofya Osipovna felt a wave of nausea. She pressed David, now a doll, to herself; she became dead, a doll.

The political commissar in the besieged tractor factory at Stalingrad is suddenly uplifted by music in a pause in the fighting:
Somehow the music seemed to have helped him understand time. Time is a transparent medium. People and cities rise out of it, move through it and disappear back into it. It is time that brings them and time that takes them away. …
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.
In yesterday’s fighting, time has been torn to shreds; now it emerged again from the plywood fiddle belonging to Rubunchik the barber. This fiddle told some that their time had come and others that their time had passed.
‘I’m finished,’ Krymov said to himself. ‘Finished!’ …
Suddenly, Krymov remembered one summer night: the large, dark eyes of a Cossack girl and her hot whisper … Yes, in spite of everything, life was good.
The fiddler stopped and a quiet murmur became audible: the sound of the water flowing by under the wooden duckboards. It seemed to Krymov that his soul was indeed a well that had been dry and empty; but now it was gently filling with water.

I end this excessively long review with samples of the many kernels of truth that help make the journey of this book worthwhile:
Having established man’s readiness to obey when confronted with limitless violence, we must go on to draw one further conclusion that is of importance for an understanding of man and his future.
Does human nature overcome 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 depends on the answer to this question. If human nature does change, then the eternal and world-wide triumph of the dictatorial State is assured; if his yearning for freedom remains constant, then the totalitarian State is doomed.

From examples over history of individual and group defiance of these destructive forces, Grossman finds that:
All these bear witness to the indestructability of man’s yearning for freedom. The yearning was suppressed but it continues to exist. Man’s fate may make him a slave, but his nature remains unchanged.
Man’s innate yearning for freedom can be suppressed but never destroyed. Totalitarianism cannot renounce violence. If it does, it perishes. eternal, ceaseless violence, overt or covert, is the basis of totalitarianism. Man does not renounce freedom voluntarily. This conclusion holds out hope for our time, hope for our future.

In the words of a poet in a Soviet work camp, I find sustenance in Grossman’s vision of the eternal in individual consciousness:
When a person dies, they cross over from the realm of freedom to the realm of slavery. …
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.

[William2 · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I first learned that Vasily Grossman's model for this novel was War and Peace, I thought he was setting his sights astronomically high. There are huge differences between the two books, of course. Remember Tolstoy's lovely modulated long sentences? Grossman doesn't even try to compete on that level. By contrast, his language tends toward the so-called "Soviet" realism of the day. This was a style in which many of the Party hacks also wrote. The difference between those scribblers and Grossman is the fact that he told the truth. Nor is there anything in Life and Fate to compare with Tolstoy's fantastic scenes of the nobility. There's no crystal or caviar, no six-horse barouches, no perfumed décolletage, no placid landscapes, and of course no character even remotely like Field Marshal Kutuzov who, when he hears of the retreating French, mutters to himself: "I shall make them eat horse meat!" Late in Life and Fate, however, when the Germans encircled at Stalingrad were hacking away at a frozen horse, this reader could think of nothing else.

This is the first book I've read that has given me a sense of how World War II affected the whole of the USSR. It's all here: the Battle for Stalingrad, the Siege of Leningrad, the evacuation of Moscow and other major cities, life in the country, the miserable rationing system, the sheer sense of deprivation. The canvas is huge but Grossman, who can describe entire crowds in a brief paragraph, never pulls focus so far back that the individual is lost. This approach, the only one possible, seems a refutation of the Communist raison d'être itself. One is reminded why so much of the Communist Party agitprop failed. It was not only because it was horribly written--though in the West even poorly written pulp novels are to a certain extent readable, see Philip K. Dick et al.--no, it was because agitprop ignored the individual, who, when he or she did appear, was rendered meaningful only to the extent that he or she supported the group. It goes without saying of course that novels are dependent on characters, not crowds.

Grossman's narrative consists of the following interlarded story lines involving a single extended family, the Shaposhnikovs. What I will provide here is just the barest outline. First, there's physicist Viktor Pavlovich Shtrum, married to the shrill Lyudmila Nikolaevna. Viktor, a great theoretical genius and a Jew, undergoes a crisis of conscience. How can he possibly support his criminal, genocidal state? The crisis all but tears him to pieces. He's also in love with a colleague's wife, so there's ample heartbreak. Second is the story of the Battle for Stalingrad before and after the German capitulation. Here, one Krymov, a political commissar, and as such, like his fellows, a perpetual thorn in the side of army officers, discovers that no amount of blind alliegiance will ever protect him from the capricious and paranoid hand of Beria's state security apparatus. (It's a miracle Stalingrad was won. Thank God for Lend-Lease!) A third story line deals with the remnant of Red Army soldiers who have remained alive in Nazi death camps after the first terrible year of the war during which three-million were captured and killed. Fourth, is the story of Abarchuk, Lyudmila's first husband, and his life in the Gulag. Even Solzhenitzyn's Gulag Archipelago did not prepare me for the drama here. Fifth, we have the story of the indecisive Yevgenia Nikolaevna, and the harm she causes while vacillating between two men: Krymov, the husband she's left, and her new love, Novikov, commander of a tank battalion and one of the heroes of Stalingrad. There's much more, of course. No summary can do even provisional justice to this 900 pager.

Grossman's style is deceptively flat. Look at how concisely he describes an entire barrack's full of people, one at a time. It's masterful. Or the way he evokes the moods of the Volga and the apocalyptic cityscape of Stalingrad. What was especially interesting to me was how adroitly he switched from one subplot to another while sustaining interest. If he has a tendency toward the occassional purplish passage, and a penchant for pseudo-philosophical musings, he makes up for it with the overarching thrust of his narrative. Grossman transcends his model. I've never read anything like it. Recommended with brio!

[Katia N · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a masterpiece. I do not think I can do its justice. Firstly, to describe Grossman’s achievement one needs to write a thick volume - this novel encompasses a multitude. Secondly, I am so strongly moved by its subject matter that I find it really hard to have a dispassionate conversation about its literary value. I have not even been born when he wrote this book. But the history of my own family is very much in there. And that is probably true for a lot of people with the roots in Eastern Europe.

Nevertheless, I cannot stop thinking about it.

First of all, I am puzzled why any discussion of this novel is starting with the comparison to War and Peace. If anything, this novel is a total antithesis to Tolstoy. In his book, Tolstoy celebrates the collective - a certain Russian spirit of the ordinary “muzhiks”, the birth of the national power from below which is initially overlooked and then used and admired by the aristocracy. He does it with the help of elaborate carefully crafted prose and by contrasting a glamour of the high society, its affairs and the salons’s life and with the raw visceral pictures of the battlefield.

Grossman is almost the opposite. He writes about desperate attempts to safeguard the individual under the violent pressure of the collective, national and extreme totalitarian. These forces orchestrate enormous effort to annihilate any differences and convert the individual human beings into a single obedient biomass.

Gone through the whole calamity as a war correspondent, he has seen a lot. He evidenced the whole battle for Stalingrad; he was the one of the first people who were allowed into Treblinka, the concentration camp after its liberation. He has seen the victims of the collectivisation in the 30s, he has lost many close friends in the purges of 1937 and later. It is incomprehensible though how was he able to intellectually process all of this so deeply as shown in this novel.

Also unlike Tolstoy’s ‘War and Piece”, “Life and Fate” is a fragmentary novel, the one of the rare successful ones on such a scale. It is striking how Grossman builds up the whole through numerous smaller stories. He does not try to forcibly create a coherent narrative. There are many lines of storytelling, digressions and enormous cast of characters. Some characters appear for only few pages to disappear forever. Even the main characters’ stories left unfinished.

But exactly this mosaic structure is a powerful way to form an eagle view of that incomprehensible time. It also allows absorbing the magnanimity of it all without losing the focus on the individual lives. It is overwhelming, shocking but warm and never abstract.

If one needs to pick up the big name from the Russian 19th century literature, I would compare it Chekhov. If Chekhov would ever write a big novel I could imagine it similar to this Grossman’s masterpiece. A lot of stories of the individuals taken together to produce a unique diverse and profound whole about human nature. It is unlikely coincidental that Chekhov has been mentioned quite a few times on the pages of “Life and Fate”.

In spite of or indeed maybe because of the hell on the Earth context, Grossman manages to bring something very Chekhovian into the way how he tells his individual stories:

A six year old boy letting out a beetle he kept in a match box before entering a gas chamber.

During the hopeless defence of a stand-alone building, its captain orders a girl and a boy who found some solace in loving each other to leave it. That is just before the final destruction. And that is at the same time while, deprived of human warmth, this captain secretly hopes for the girl’s attention. He has got all the power to do whatever he wants with her but he manages not to.

A woman drops her new love and returns to her ex-husband when he is arrested. She hardly even can hope to see him. But she goes to Lubyanka, writes the letters to help his fate. She gives up her personal happiness for this and she even cannot explain to herself why.

A Ukrainian woman safes from starvation a Russian prisoner of war after her husband has died from Holodomor imposed by the Russian state and the Russian requisitioners.

Or, a very different story - a man unburies himself after a failed execution by the Russian military tribunal, but he does not try to escape and, wounded, comes back to his executioners.

That is the Chekhov’s way. But Chekhov did not explicitly pose the existential question in his writing. He focused on the idea that a human being is the highest possible value without any reference to her wealth, occupation, ethnicity or nationality. But Grossman, faced with the fight between the two thoroughly destructive evil forces goes farther. He has to. And his question is who would survive the totalitarian state or the individual. He is clear they cannot co-exist. And that is the main theme that unites the fragments of this wonderful novel. It has got a lot of “faces’ to it: Russian state or German state; Gulag or Holocaust, the front or the rear; science or a battle. But essentially they are all the part of this same question.

And the big part of it is personal freedom.

Many people in the Western democracies do not appreciate what freedom means, or more importantly - the lack of it. At least not I the same way as people who live under other regimes. In majority of cases, they take it for granted. But when I hear someone in the West says that different nations are more used to different systems and personal freedom might not be suitable or even desired by the Russians or Chinese or whoever else- I am simply appalled. What can I say? They simply never could imagine the experience of sticky fear when waiting in the queue for something as innocuous as a new passport. Yes, the feeling of fear mixed with guilt without any reason. That feeling which Grossman so well articulated when you get in trouble not because you’ve done something, but simply for the reason that you do not fit a certain profile and you might do something in the future. Another aspect of it when you do not know whom you can trust, even including your close friends. I think only people in the West who could understand this toxic mixture of feelings are refugees. And it is very sad.

Grossman: “ Invisible force was pushing him down…. Only people who never experienced this force are able to be surprised by those who submit to it. Those who felt this force at least once would be amazed by the other thing - the ability by someone to become disobedient at least for an instant, to express a feeble, quick gesture of protest, to exclaim at least one angry word.” Within such state systems, It is extremely difficult, almost impossible not become subdued, not to feel that everything around you is inevitable and totally give up on any personal responsibility. But in Grossman novel, many characters stand for his strong belief that “a human being cannot be destroyed inside the individual without him being complacent in this destruction”.

In the one of the episodes, an ex-commissar and former communist true believer says to his friend: “We did not understand freedom. We destroyed it. And Marx underestimated its value: freedom is the foundation, the meaning, the basis under the basis. There is no revolution without it. … We are going through gulag, taiga believing that our faith (in our rightness) is the strongest. But it is not a strength, it is the weakness, the act of self-preservation.”

However in another episode, a prisoner in Lubyanka, ex-chekist thinks very different. His ideal of the future society is when the gulag fence is not necessary anymore not because there is no need for gulag, but because the life on the both sides of the fence has become identical. Such was his vision. I hope collectively walk away from that. I really do.

The one of the main characters is Strum, a nuclear physicist and a Jew. He refuses to denounce his scientific breakthrough and his Jewish colleagues. He does not feel very happy about it, but he feels that he has done something he ought to have done. However, later he did not quite manage to do the same in different circumstances. Grossman shows how difficult it is each time not to submit to this.

Strum also receives a personal call from Stalin. Stalin used to do such things. It was always very short and might mean very good news for the recipient or otherwise. The one of the most famous instances was his call to Bulgakov. I cannot even imagine the mixture of emotions these people experienced.

Grossman also asks the question which still haunts anyone thinking of Holocaust and Gulag. How is that there was such little protest from those people about to perish. Why they were so obedient in their majority. How to comprehend all of this? “What saves people when their bovine melancholy, their mute fatalism yields to a piercing sense of horror - what saves people then is the opium of optimism.” People did not lose hope to the end. And according to Arendt, “Hope in dark times is not substitute for actions.”. But I am not sure I can totally agree with both of them I cannot imagine people behaving differently in those circumstances, hope or not. One should remain rational to act, but the rational response is also fear. One needs to lose all the fear. But how? I know that there were moments in some events when this sense of fear or self-preservation disappear. The last time I’ve seen it during the Revolution of Dignity in the Ukraine 2014. But there in the camps? I am still thinking about it.

There is another idea in the novel which is very different from Tolstoy. The one of the characters in the German concentration camp is thinking about the difference between the idea of the common good versus simple individual human kindness. Any idea of the common good pretends to be universal. But then there are quite a few different ideas what constitute this “common good”. So those ideas would necessary fight each other. And more often than not it would be people fighting under the slogan of those ideas. Even more often one idea would exclude some group of people. Be it the rich, the poor or the Jews, the Palestinians or immigrants, refugees, cosmopolitans - the list could go on and on. While a simple act kindness of the one human being towards another rarely leads to such things.

There are so much more thoughts to discuss. But one needs to finish somewhere. And I cannot finish this long and messy piece of writing without mentioning the letter to Strum from his mother who would have perished in a ghetto by the time he got it. Grossman’s own mother has perished this way in Berdichev in the Ukraine. Though there was no letter, but Grossman was writing back to her until his own death. One does not need to read the whole novel. This letter could be read stand alone - it is the Ch 18 in the novel. It is so poignant it could not leave anyone unmoved. My family have lost my great-grandmother and her youngest 13 year old daughter in the similar circumstances not far from Berdichev. I’ve read this letter as if it was addressed to me. But I think it is addressed to all of us. And it ends:

“Live, live, live…”


PS
The article about Hanna Arendt and hope:

https://aeon.co/essays/for-arendt-hop...

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phew! Where to begin? I took a while to decide whether to mark this 4 or 5 stars. In the end I felt it was closer to 5 stars for its sheer ambition, epic scale, and for some of the most memorable passages in any novel I have ever read.

I hadn't really heard of Vasily Grossman until a couple of years ago, other than I had a vague notion he was a WWII Soviet propagandist. However, I listen to the radio a fair bit (my job involves a lot of driving) and a couple of years ago BBC radio serialised excerpts from "A Writer at War," enough to get me interested in Grossman's work. The introduction to the edition I have of "Life and Fate" explains that Grossman tried to get it published in the Soviet Union in 1961 at the height of the Khrushchev "thaw" in censorship. In some ways this was not as naïve as it may sound - "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" was published in the USSR in 1962 - but Grossman's book was not published, and in fact it was confiscated by the KGB, along with 2 copies held by friends. Grossman successfully concealed the fact that 2 other friends also held copies, and it was these that were photographed and smuggled to the West. The background is significant in that Grossman was never given the chance to edit his novel, a factor perhaps in its enormous size.

It's not surprising that the Soviet regime baulked at allowing "Life and Fate" to be published. "Ivan Denisovich", though an important novel, could be portrayed by the Khrushchev regime as a comment on the excesses of Stalinism. "Life and Fate" provided a far greater challenge to Soviet communism. Grossman even includes the ultimate heresy of comparing the Soviet regime with that of Nazi Germany. At one point, an SS Officer interrogating a Soviet POW, who is also an ardent communist, tells his captive, "...if you should conquer, then we shall perish only to live in your victory." and "Do you think the world looks on us with horror and you with hope and love? ... No! The world looks on us both with the same horror!"

So what of the novel itself? Epic in scale, theme, and ambition (it is thought that in choosing the title "Life and Fate", Grossman was deliberately inviting comparisons with "War and Peace"), the novel is an amalgam of more than a dozen separate plots, all set at the time of the Battle of Stalingrad, with a sprawling cast of characters. The edition I read had a handy reference guide to the characters at the back. If your copy doesn't have this I would strongly recommend making notes about each character as you encounter them. For the most part the characters are connected in some way to two sisters, Lyudmila and Yevgenia Shaposhnikova. The other characters are too numerous to list in full although some of the main ones are Lyudmila's second husband Viktor Shtrum, a Jewish scientist and a semi-autobiographical portrayal of Grossman himself; her former husband Abarchuk, now in the Gulag; Krymov, a Red Army Commissar and Yevgenia's former husband; and Novikov, a Tank Corps Commander and Yevgenia's lover. Every character in the book is swept along by forces outwith their control. The Kafkaesque workings of the Stalinist state mean that some characters fall foul of the authorities for reasons they can little more than guess at. On the other hand, one Red Army officer receives praise and promotion because his battalion resisted a German attack, though the officer concerned spent the battle trapped in a collapsed bunker and played no part in his troops' achievement. The brutal nature of the war is reflected in the way characters are suddenly killed off. One moment the reader is wondering how a certain character's relationship with his sweetheart will develop, when without warning the character is killed in battle. The fate of the Jewish characters is perhaps the most affecting. One chapter consists largely of a letter written to Shtrum by his mother, trapped in the Nazi occupied zone, and is one of the most moving descriptions I have read of the fate of Europe's Jewish population. Another section of the book concerns a group of Jews en route to a death camp, and affected me so much I found it difficult to read. As is often the case in a totalitarian society, the characters are all forced into moral choices that are the stuff of nightmares. Grossman's characters are neither heroes nor villains. At times, Shtrum shows astonishing courage in standing up to the authorities, at other times he is totally craven. In one short section Semyonov, a starving Soviet soldier, cut off in the German occupied area, is taken in by Khristya, an old woman in a Ukrainian village. At considerable risk to herself she feeds and takes care of Semyonov. After he recovers a neighbour calls at the house and Khristya and he talk about the terrible Ukrainian famine of 1930, a famine caused entirely by the Soviet state. Semyonov is amazed to hear that the rest of "Aunt" Khristya's family all starved to death and she only just survived. Semyonov then answers a question about where is from:

"You're from Moscow?" said Khristya very slowly. "I hadn't realised you were from Moscow."

Nothing more is said, but the reader is left with the thought that Khristya may not have saved Semyonov, had she known from the start he was from the same place as those who killed her family.

Throughout the book Grossman sets out his own feelings of despair at intolerance, fanaticism and group hatred, and how it is the lives and loves of the individual that represent what is best in humanity. In one chapter, Ikonnikov, a "holy fool" incarcerated in a Nazi concentration camp, sets out how most of the evil in the world is carried out by those who believe themselves to be doing good. Describing Christianity he comments "Humanity had never before heard such words" but then continues "And what did this doctrine of peace and love bring to humanity? ...the tortures of the Inquistion...the conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism...the crushing yoke that lay for centuries over science and freedom...the Christians who wiped out the Heathen population of Tasmania...More suffering than all the crimes of the people who did evil for its own sake." Continuing onto Soviet communism "I saw people being annihilated in the name of an ideal as good and fine and humane as the ideal of Christianity...I saw whole villages dying of hunger...This idea was something fine and noble - yet it killed some without mercy, crippled the lives of others, and separated wives from husbands and children from fathers."

I could quote pages and pages from this novel, but writing this review a few days after fanatics murdered 17 people in Paris in the name of religion, I'll finish with one more:

"Human groupings have one main purpose: to assert everyone's right to be different...people join together in order to win or defend this right. But this is where a terrible, fateful error is born: the belief that these groupings in the name of a race, a God, a party or a State are the very purpose of life and not simply a means to an end. No! The only true and lasting meaning in the struggle for life lies in the individual, in his modest peculiarities and in his right to these peculiarities."

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

A monumental novel in the Great Russian tradition which has been rightly compared with War and Peace. It focuses on the Battle of Stalingrad, but covers a Science Institute, various prison camps and a concentration camp. The list of characters is vast and the dramatis personae in my edition was well used.
Grossman was a journalist who covered the Battle of Stalingrad from the front line and his experience shows. However this is, like War and Peace, very much not just a war novel. Its scope is broad and it provides a penetrating analysis of the Soviet system and Stalinism in particular. As you would expect the plot is interwoven with numerous themes. Grossman was a Jew and Jewish identity is explored through one of the main characters, the scientist Victor Shtrum. The description of the gas chamber is a very powerful piece of writing, focussing as it does on a child and an unrelated woman who provides comfort.
“Her eyes—which have read Homer, Izvestia, Huckleberry Finn and Mayne Reid, that had looked at good people and bad people, that had seen the geese in the green meadows of Kursk, the stars above the observatory at Pulkovo, the glitter of surgical steel, the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, tomatoes and turnips in the bins at market, the blue water of Issyk-Kul—her eyes were no longer of any use to her. If someone had blinded her, she would have felt no sense of loss.
…Sofya Levinton felt the boy’s body subside in her arms. …This boy, with his slight, bird-like body, has left before her. “I’ve become a mother,” she thought. That was her last thought.
Her heart, however, still had life in it: it contracted, ached, and felt pity for all of you, both living and dead; Sofya Osipovna felt a wave of nausea. She pressed David, now a doll, to herself; she became dead, a doll.”

Grossman, despite the horrors he describes, clearly still believes in the fundamental goodness of humanity.
One of the main focuses of the book is the criticism of Stalinism, the sheer pointless stupidity of a totalitarian regime. A number of the characters in the novel are old Bolsheviks who are struggling to come to terms with Stalin’s regime and especially with the mass arrests of 1937. We see a number of them in camps and prisons trying to create some meaning in their situation.
The comparisons with War and Peace have some limitations. Tolstoy was looking back; Grossman was actually there and his journalistic training shines through. He is able to compare the regimes of Hitler and Stalin and note the similarities.
This is a great novel which takes you along with its sheer power and the magnificence of the writing. The canvas may sometimes be like a Breughel but Grossman’s writing is suffused with optimism about humanity despite it all.

[Jan-Maat]

A confession in three parts
I
Well, I was completely wrong about this book, and I am pleased to admit it. To nuance that, if I was going to give it a Goodreads star rating it would be two star, maybe two and a half, or 2.47.

I was even so unwise to tell a very dear friend that in my opinion it was no more than a 20th century rewrite of War and Peace, which it is but...more importantly it emphatically is not.

I had also imagined that it was about the battle of Stalingrad, reading, I see that really it is about anti-Semitism, actually the issue of being Jewish in modern totalitarian states (in which number I include on the grounds of laziness the so-called nation-states which have admittedly increasingly only implicit notions of exclusivity). ( Part 2, chapter 31 treats anti-Semitism in detail but it is present throughout in a range of forms, notably none of the Jewish characters seem to be observant, nor Yiddish speaking, while people who use Ukrainian words are pointed out but don't experience prejudice).

It is also an explosively anti-soviet book, which was banned because it hurt the Soviet regime where it really hurt (ie in the Party's claim to have played a guiding role in achieving victory in WWII, here even the 'fighting commissars' are just another level of privileged people confusing the command structure and telling tales on the serious soldiers who want to fight effectively and efficiently without massive casualties) I now see that Solzhenitsyn was by contrast with Grossman merely a literary Donald Trump or Nigel Farage - an exemplar of the politics of the whinging of the relatively privileged citizen.

It is rather journalistic, less a novel than a series of reports with reoccurring characters and themes, but do I imagine that it will live with me like War and Peace no, not for an instant, and yet it emphatically is not War and Peace and so will find its own place.

II
Let me drain the glass and roll up my sleeves. I don't know. And specifically I don't know what kind of achievement Life and Fate is. Firstly a very basic problem, if you grab a copy and hold it before you - it's ok, take your time, I am not going anywhere, what you have is not what the author intended. Grossman died in 1964. The MSS down to his typewriter ribbons had been taken from him by the KGB in 1960 and it remains with them and now I guess, lays in some FSB storage facility, however somehow two MSes emerged and were microfilmed, these microfilms were smuggled out of the USSR and constructed into a text published in 1980. This reconstruction has been translated, in my edition missing sections are marked with an ellipses. How complete the version current available is, or how far or close it is to the author's vision we can not know, what we have represents a work in progress, interrupted.

IIa
I confess I read War and Peace first and that this was and was not a mistake. It is hard to come across opinion of Life and Fate which does not refer to War and Peace, this is understandable and unhelpful, I, a miserable sinner, carried my memories of War and Peace into my reading of this and it was a glass of vinegar poured into my jug of milk. W&P is a tight family saga over a long period of time, it has the implicit message that we have to understand people in the context of the spirit of their times plus the effects of the times they live through - the people of 1805 are different in 1825 in response to what has happened to them in those twenty years. L&F begins in media res - like an epic. It follows an awful lot of people over a short period of time most of their stories are not given any-kind of closure or conclusion. Sometimes characters are introduced only to die, abruptly or after an interval sometimes after several hundred pages a connection emerges between a couple of characters in separate locations. One might say it is rather like the Iliad. If like me you set to reading L&F imagining it to be as I wrongly thought a WWII, 20th century W&P, the effect is disconcerting, one is overlaying Tolstoyian expectations on a writer who was attempting to tell a different kind of story.

While Tolstoy tells the story of the growth Russian chauvinism as a good thing, Grossman sees this differently, again the war is transformative, but he sees the death of Internationalism and tolerance for diversity within the Soviet Union as a narrow and exclusive Russian nationalism comes to the fore in which Russian come first for promotions and non-Russians are objects of suspicion and assumed to be unworthy.

Tolstoy was never interested in tolerance in W&P, but Grossman writes himself close to the centre of the 20th century experience, exclusive forms of identity quickly become exclusionary and given to persecute minorities, the purist example of this is Fascist Germany the opposite extreme would be the tolerance of Chekhovian Democracy, but this hasn't existed anywhere so far. I guess there are some people who may not have heard yet how WWII turns out and would prefer not to have the ending spoiled There's an irony for Grossman in the Soviet Union delivering the killing blow to Fascism as people celebrate to the north of the now liberated Stalingrad, Grossman tells us that ten years later forced labourers will complete work on a dam at that spot - a touch which reminded me pleasantly of The Leopard .

Grossman express his philosophical difference from Tolstoy in his characterisation as well, if as above for Tolstoy character is the past plus events for Grossman the only reality is change, his characters are mysteries even to themselves and spend at times the latter part of a chapter wondering why they responded in a certain way at the beginning of it, acting 'in character' is a luxury that they aspire to. In practise a physicist is ashamed that he signed a letter letter which his friends believe he wouldn't have done, a soldier wonders why in company he culminated against the Kalmyks when he actually had found them very interesting people and not at all despicable, this sense of flux is reinforced by the fact that characters are continually in motion, soldiers moving up towards the front, civilians in evacuation quarters beginning to move back to Moscow or to a hole in the ground in what was Stalingrad, on a boat going somewhere searching for an injured son, queuing for news of an imprisoned ex-husband. Everybody is in motion. The story feels as though it spills out of the book, the officer ordered to Headquarters - is he going to be executed, imprisoned, reassigned to a different command, will the gentlemen in the Lubyanka be sent north of the Arctic Circle or to the Far East? Will another officer be able to meet up again with the elegant lady of mature years to whom he gracefully lost at cards with the hope of wining at love?

And at the same time in the same breathe, I confess further L&F is profoundly interwoven with W&P, indeed with much of the canon of Russian Literature. A section in the aforementioned Lubyanka reminded me of Dostoevsky's Grand inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov, indeed the informant and the inquisitor are the moral guardians of this state just as in Ivan Karamazov's Spanish fantasy. There's a reference to Gogol's story of how the two Ivans quarrelled, and various references to W&P from a reversal of Tolstoy's fleeing soldier giving a false impression of the whole battle to one character telling another to the latter's indignation and rage that W&P is a fiction - Tolstoy wasn't even alive at the time of the events (thereby hinting to us that we can accept L&F as having a greater degree of veracity).

Anyway in the Lubyanka - possibly my favourite section in the novel while one character under interrogation has a vision of the ideal society rather like Christ in BK wanting to kiss the Inquisitor another who had been in the Cheka recounts watching the political prisoners march out in columns to work under the Northern Lights on a railway north of the Arctic circle, most of them will die and the railway will barely serve any useful purpose, but to the prisoner that sight was pure poetry, when in 1984 we are told of the vision of a boot stamping on a face for all eternity we never get a sense that this is an aesthetically moving experience rather just a crude expression of power, here the suffering of others has become poetry and the prisoner goes on to outline his vision of the Gulag and the non-gulag becoming one - in a system of political original sin as it were, everybody obviously belongs in prison, were their labour can be optimally utilised, in this vision Stalin is Pharaoh and deviation from his will the only crime, one of which everyone is guilty, and the purpose of labour to fulfil his vision, in short Grossman sums up in two paragraphs the whole of The First Circle except for the silk underwear and the telephone boxes don't get over excited.

III
Which means that I must confess that after rambling on I guess I think this book is closer to four stars than to my original position, not a masterpiece but certainly a contender. Its vision of the spectrum of tolerance shading into intolerance is wide ranging - an officer receives a letter from his sweetheart in which she tells him that she is going to stick with her ex-husband who it seems will be sent into exile - shades of Nekrasov here - at this the officer deploys several choice words and expresses his wish to strike her on the jaw - the natural end point of patriotism for Grossman is narcissism, Russians first, another way of saying me first, or me only. How far away we are from Chekhov and the tolerance he showed for the strange wanderings and distinctive needs of the human heart.

Anyway on the downside for me this novel only really got going and started to feel like a potential masterpiece after page 600, which in a 870 page book is more than just a slow start, so I can't recommend it universally, it could be the great 20th century novel with WWII as the central event of the century and anti-Semitism the central feature of that war. The book is then in that way a brick in the hard road to a tolerant society.

[Magrat Ajostiernos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reseña completa: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V0py...
Aunque este libro está ambientado durante la batalla de Stalingrado, realmente lo que muestra son retazos de vidas durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial... Puntos de vista muy dispares, personajes que sufrieron desde los campos de trabajo a los de concentración, el asedio, las bombas, la vida en el frente y la angustia por los familiares desaparecidos.
'Vida y destino' es mucho más que una crónica, habla de arte, literatura, dignidad, amor... está plagado de dudas y sufrimiento y hubo un capítulo en especial que me rompió el corazón. Aún así lo he disfrutado muchísimo, por su crítica política tanto al comunismo como al fascismo, como especialmente por esa brutal humanidad que desprende.

[julieta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sin duda es uno de los libros más hermosos que he leído en mi vida. Cuando uno se pregunta, (de vez en cuando) por qué leer? Bueno, para encontrarte con libros como este.

Es sobre la batalla por Stalingrado, entre el Ejército Rojo (rusos) y el Aleman, en la segunda guerra mundial. Y muestra a distintos personajes que han sido afectados por esta guerra. Pero es más que eso, es que el autor tiene una empatía, un nivel de comprensión de cada una de las personas en distintas situaciones. Es como si te hubiera metido ahí, al lugar, todo lo que se habla, todo lo que sienten lo sientes, te mete en la piel de cada uno de ellos.

Aquí hay de todo, hay despedidas dolorosisimas, encuentros, hambre, amor en todas sus formas, violencia, horror, incomprensión, diferencias políticas, todo lo que los seres humanos podemos sentir seamos de donde sea, tengamos las creencias que sean.

Qué siglo el siglo XX! Pasaron tantas cosas horribles. Sí, qué horror Hitler, es un verdadero horror lo que hizo, hay escenas que te sacan toda la angustia humana posible, no puedo comprender, por más libros que lea sobre el tema, el antisemitismo, lo que hizo de las personas, el que hayan muerto tantos y tantos por algo sin sentido;
y qué horror Stalin!!! Qué horror el no poder decir lo que piensas, no poder hablar con tus amigos sin miedo, preocupandote de que te delaten si es que dijiste algo sin saber. Qué nivel de angustia no poder saber nunca si te va a tocar que te salgan con que eres un traidor. Tener que mirar por tus espaldas a ver si una persona que conociste hace décadas, no resulta ser un delator. Y todos lo son! el miedo los empuja a la sumisión.

Una vez que la batalla de Stalingrado termina, habiendo vencido a los Alemanes, parecería casi un descanso, pero no lo es! Es angustiante y confuso lo que sigue, el Estado es aún más fuerte, acaba de vencer a los alemanes, vengan todos y sean cobijados en su poder, en sumisión total, y sin dudas. Ahora que han vencido a los Alemanes, qué será de los Rusos?

Es una oda a la libertad del ser humano, la libertad de conciencia, de poder hablar, pensar, sentir lo que te dicta tu alma. Sé que me tomará un tiempo recuperarme de la increíble vida que corre por estas páginas. Un libro importante, que estoy feliz de haber leído por fin.

[Dagio_maya · Rating 5 out of 5]

«Soffriamo tutti.
Tutti allo stesso modo e ognuno in modo diverso».


Uno scritto che trasuda sofferenza, dolore, delusione.
Alterna capitoli che filmano le grandi manovre della Storia con altri in cui si zooma sui piccoli eventi domestici.
E capitolo dopo capitolo ho la certezza di quello che già sapevo:
sono proprio queste “piccole” esistenze, ignorate dalla roboante storiografia ufficiale, a raccontarci la verità del sentire umano.
Commuovente e ricco d’innegabili verità.

E’ il dolore di una madre il contenitore di tutte le angosce umane.
E’ un dolore ancestrale. Un sedimento della storia.
E’ un dolore che sbatte le ali, incastrate in un angolo buio e senza via d’uscita.
Niente sarà come prima e non c’è modo di svincolare dalla cecità dell’Uomo che s’inventa sempre nuovi paradigmi che incastrano la libertà altrui.
L’uomo è cieco sotto ogni bandiera che sventola in nome di artificiosi paradigmi
Le madri hanno pianto
Le madri piangono
Le madri piangeranno

” Quando la giornata è fatta solamente di frastuono e sei immerso fino alle orecchie nel calderone della guerra, non la vedi, la tua vita, non la capisci: serve almeno un passo indietro. Solo dalla riva lo sguardo coglie tutta l’imponenza del fiume. Eri davvero tu, qualche minuto prima, in quella furia di acqua e schiuma?”


Ho cominciato a leggere questo romanzo facendo una certa fatica per i tanti nomi e luoghi. Poi ho capito che dovevo lasciarmi andare e mi sono lasciata trasportare da questo fiume in piena dove ho trovato un’acqua in continuo movimento.
Parole che ribollono.
Leggo e mi specchio in queste acque:
mi ritrovo a Stalingrado…
a Kiev…
a Kazan…
nei lager (tedesco o sovietico non cambia)…
nuda di fianco al piccolo David entro in grande stanza per farmi una “doccia” e mi sento schiacciata da altri corpi che all’improvviso non sono più sconosciuti ma diventano un unico corpo…
sono a Lubjanka accusata di aver detto una parola proibita…
sono a Kujbyšev a subire il malumore dei burocrati…
sono nella casa 6/1 ad aspettare la morte…
sono fra soldati e ufficiali dell’Armata Rossa o dell’esercito nazista…………………………….

Ogni pagina rivendica il diritto di avere un esistenza dignitosa.

Leggo e vedo Grossman far coincidere le immagini riflesse dei totalitarismi:
gli stessi ingredienti formano impasti apparentemente differenti.
Il sapore, però, è lo stesso.

Leggo e scorgo lo specchio in cui affiorano delusioni di chi ci ha veramente creduto per poi scoprire come fosse tutto un bluff dove la prima ad essere tradita è la Libertà ed è come se ti risucchiassero la vita questi vampiri della storia.

Leggo e vedo riflesse le mie stesse delusioni…



”Scosse la testa. E poi fu di nuovo un flusso di parole sbalorditive, inaudite, spaventose e assurde:
«Quando io e lei ci guardiamo in faccia, non vediamo solo un viso che odiamo. È come se ci guardassimo allo specchio. È questa la tragedia della nostra epoca. Come potete non riconoscervi in noi, non vedere in noi la vostra stessa volontà? Il mondo non è forse pura volontà anche per voi? Vi si può forse indurre a esitare? Vi si può fermare?»

[Adam Dalva · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolute masterpiece, the intense scenework of Chekov mingled with the epic scope of Tolstoy, and a genuine act of bravery. The novel, centered on Stalingrad during World War II, thrums with anti-Soviet sentiment and anger over the holocaust (Grossman's mother was murdered by Germans) - it's little wonder that it was suppressed during Grossman's lifetime, and something of a miracle that it survived 28 years to finally be released. Its ambitions are huge - it takes on nuclear physics, fascism, communism, conspiracy, Stalin and Hitler's perspectives, good and evil, religion and freedom - but the book's Tolstoyan focus on a single family always grounds the action in the personal. There are grand moments of rhetorical thinking (https://www.instagram.com/p/BACzTd_CcHn/), but the small moments of human kindness (a Russian and German soldier holding hands during a bombing; a woman clutching a boy she barely knows in a gas chamber; a commanding officer in love with his radio operator acting magnanimously; an unexpected parcel being opened in a prison camp) are just as remarkable. This is the rarest kind of novel, and the best: An everything book. You feel smarter after you read it, and more empathatic, and more understanding of humanity. There's really nothing quite like it.

[Maru Kun · Rating 5 out of 5]

The past, as they say, is a foreign country and also a more literate one.

The USSR in the first half of the twentieth century was a place where a father would worry about which poets were read by his daughter’s boyfriend, a place where you might still love someone despite their inability to distinguish Balzac from Flaubert and where a soldier on the front line of one of the most dreadful military conflicts in history would complain that their comrade-in-arms did not properly understand Chekov.

The USSR at that time was also a place where the individual’s relation to the State was at its most complex and paradoxical. At the same time that the State was organizing one of the greatest collective endeavors in history - the defeat of Fascism - it was also interrogating the history, family life and motivations of each and every individual engaged in that endeavor. Every relationship - officer to commissar, husband to wife, parent to child, between friends, between colleagues, between lovers - was colored by fear of informers, fear of compromise, fear of arrest.

Grossman expertly describes life in the USSR at that time and incorporates its paradoxes into this novel of the Russian victory at Stalingrad. His is a voice of real authenticity. The events depicted and internal hopes and fears of the characters are entirely consistent with descriptions of life in the USSR from “The Gulag Archipelago” or from histories of the Eastern Front in WW2. You can only believe that Grossman himself experienced many of the things he describes.

“Life and Fate” is about two types of human freedom. I was expecting to read about the battle between Russian and German armies over the physical freedom from occupation of Stalingrad. Until I read the work I had not appreciated it was equally about the struggle for psychological freedom under an oppressive, totalitarian State. The battle for this freedom of the self, illustrated by the story of a Russian professor of physics who is fearful of arrest, is more gripping than the military battle having more twists and turns and a far less certain outcome. I don’t want to give too much of the story away, so would only say that this psychological battle is swayed by an extraordinarily powerful weapon whose intervention on the front line I never expected.

Undoubtedly a long book, but fascinating and easy to read. Essential for anyone with an interest in the Russian history of the twentieth century.

[Ted · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 1/2

Grossman stands in the tradition of the Russian novelists of the nineteenth century. His characters, like Dostoevsky's, engage in great philosophical debates; and the structure of Life and Fate is loosely based on that of Tolstoy's War and Peace. Ideologically, however, the model to which Grossman admitted to feeling closest was Chekhov… who brought into Russian literature a new kind of humanism based on the ideas of freedom and loving kindness.
Tzvetan Todorov



Grossman during the Second Word War, a war correspondent for Krasnaya Zvezda


The translator, Robert Chandler, has contributed a useful Introduction, going through biographical info on Grossman (1905-1964), critical judgements of the book and Grossman's writings in general, and the history of the writing and suppressed publication of the novel. Grossman had delivered the novel to officials in 1960, clearly believing it could be published. Apparently it was read by several higher-ups, some of whom thought it was very good – but ultimately judged by one that it could only be published "perhaps in two or three hundred years". It was considered subversive enough that everything the authorities could get their hands one was confiscated, right down to the writer's typewriter ribbon. It was not published at all until 1980, in the West, using microfilm of the entire novel that had been smuggled out of the Soviet Union; and was finally published in Russia in 1988.

It's sometimes called Stalingrad #2, but that's certainly not any indication that "#1" needs to be read first. I'd never heard of #1 (For a Just Cause) until reading about it in Chandler's introduction, where he writes that Life and Fate

is better seen as a separate novel that includes many of the same characters. It is important not only as literature but also as history; we have no more complete picture of Stalinist Russia. The power of other dissident writers – Shalamov, Solzhenitsyn, Nadezhda Mandelstam – derives from their position as outsiders; Grossman's power derives at least in part from his intimate knowledge of every level of Soviet society. In Life and Fate, Grossman achieves what many other Soviet writers struggled but failed to achieve: a portrait of an entire age.

The novel consists of three parts, each composed of 60-70 fairly shorts chapters. One or more chapters comprise what might be termed a single "scene" – though some scenes can be found which run in non-consecutive chapters. Scenes (defined in this way) are set in a German concentration camp, a Russian labor camp, a "journey to the gas chamber", the Lubyanka prison, a German fighter squadron, a Russian tank corps, and several locations in Stalingrad.

The story is built around the Shaposhnikov family and their acquaintances, and takes place mostly during the Second World War conflagration between Germany and Russia. There are some historical figures in the novel, but aside from Stalin and Hitler, they are all officers in one army or the other. When these appear Grossman is obviously presenting a historical scene meant to be reasonably accurate – when fictional characters touch the outskirts of these scenes we move into obviously historical fiction, much as Tolstoy's War and Peace is constructed. Like Tolstoy, Grossman fashions scenes in Life and Fate which carry the narrative along from the perspective of the "enemy" (German) point of view.

A very long book, but I found it a comparatively fast read. The third person narrative, which I found a bit dry in places, uses quite a bit of dialogue, both normal and "inner" dialogue (thoughts of the characters).

If you have any interest in the Eastern Front, particularly in the Battle of Stalingrad, or a story of the Stalin era, this is a Russian novel you might like.



. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Previous review: Ancestral Passions The Leakey Family and the Quest for Humankind's Beginnings
Random review: The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony
Next review: The Open Society and Its Enemies

Previous library review: Complete Poems Anna Akhmatova
Next library review: August 1914

[Fionnuala]

Having read War and Peace a couple of months ago in which Tolstoy pointed out already in the mid nineteenth century the role of accident and fate in the success of military campaigns, thus underlining their futility, I wondered how any European leader could ever have embarked on another takeover knowing the outcome of Napoleon's campaigns. But of course there was WWI and WWII as if nothing had been learned about trusting Emperor style dictators driven by monstrous personal ambition; after Napoleon, Europe nevertheless allowed Stalin and then Hitler to rise to power almost unchallenged.
Life And Fate deals mostly with the confrontation between the German and the Russian regimes lead by these two monomaniacs during WWII and again we see how blindly their personal vision was subscribed to by huge numbers of both populations without question.
And Grossman points out just as Tolstoy did, how large a role is played by accident and fate in the final outcome.

[piperitapitta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Se dovessi raccontare a qualcuno in poche parole cos'è «Vita e Destino», per spiegargli la struttura di quello che è, prima di tutto, un romanzo immenso per mole e quantità di storie e personaggi che si intrecciano, gli direi di guardare questa foto e di pensare a cosa succede quando un vetro è attraversato da una pallottola; al foro provocato dall'esplosione e a tutta quella ragnatela che immediatamente si propaga da una parte all'altra dello stesso vetro, pronta a frantumarsi e a crollare all'improvviso.



Ecco, gli direi a questo punto, quel foro è Stalingrado, la Battaglia di Stalingrado, il focus del romanzo di Vassilij Grossman, il centro di tutto, l'unico posto al mondo dove mai, dopo aver letto «Le Benevole» di Jonathan Littell, avrei pensato e desiderato tornare: allora nelle trincee e tra le linee tedesche, nella mente folle e gelida di Max Aue, oggi dall'altra parte del campo di battaglia, in mezzo ai carristi e gli ufficiali russi, e alle donne, e ai bambini.
Poi, da lì, da quel buco nero, gli direi di iniziare a seguire i segni sul vetro, ad allontanarsi, a cercare altri piccoli nodi, o forellini, a trovare il punto dove più linee si intersecano, per trovare i campi di concentramento, i lager sovietici, il laboratorio di Fisica di Mosca, i treni che marciano verso la camera a gas, la Lubjanka, la stazione elettrica, la Casa 6/1, la steppa calmucca…
Poi gli direi, ancora, di riavvicinarsi a quel foro, e di iniziare a guardare più da vicino quelle linee, quei nodi, perché c'è vita là dentro, ci sono Strum, i suoi dubbi e la sua umana pavidità, e la sua famiglia, Sof'ja e il suo tragico amore materno per David, Ženja e il suo cuore diviso in due, tra Krymov e Novikov, Anna Semënova e la sua dolorosa lettera di addio, Darenskij e l'immensità della steppa, Grekov e la sua umanità disarmante, Abarcuk e la sua integrità morale, Spiridinov e la sua desolazione, e Viktorov che si libra in volo e ritratti di donne struggenti, di uomini umani e bestiali, di aberrazioni che vanno oltre ogni possibile conoscenza, di abiezioni inenarrabili… ma è mai possibile raccontare qualcosa che può solo essere letto e forse riletto per essere compreso in tutte le sue sfumature e in tutto il suo dramma, che appare sì, molto spesso, ottocentesco nella struttura, ma che poi si rivela drammaticamente novecentesco per la vicinanza degli eventi e per la modernità di pensiero che a volte è devastante, è mai possibile raccontarlo?
Ho decine e decine di post it elettronici, frasi sottolineate, periodi interi che vorrei riportare, parole che unite tutte insieme, trascritte una dietro l'altra forse darebbero vita a loro volta ad una storia altrettanto bella, talmente tante frasi che se dovessi sceglierne solo una non sarei in grado di farlo; ed è proprio per questo motivo, allora, che senza voltarmi indietro, senza pensare a quello che c'è, e che c'era, senza ripercorrere in un soffio, attraverso lo scorrere rapido delle pagine, tutte quelle vite che spesso senza averne sentore né indizio alcuno correvano inarrestabili ciascuna verso il proprio destino, decido di scegliere l'ultima. E di tornare a Stalingrado, in quel buco nero dove tutto inizia e tutto finisce.

«Ed eccola, una vecchia ormai, che vive in perpetua attesa del meglio, e crede, e teme il male, è piena di ansia per la vita degli uomini, enon distingue chi vive da chi è morto, sta qui e guarda le rovine della sua casa, ammira il cielo primaverile senza neanche accorgersi di ammirarlo, sta qui e si chiede perché il futuro di coloro che ama è così intricato, perché la loro vita è costellata di tanti errori, e non si accorge che in questa confusione, in questa nebbia, dolore e groviglio, c'è già la risposta, e chiarezza, e speranza […]»

1 dicembre 2012

Il capitolo 49 del secondo libro mi ha uccisa, devastata, straziata.
Non so se potrà mai esistere amore tanto grande, nel mondo, per riuscire a perdonare. Come si può perdonare tanto orrore?

Nelle miniere, in caso di avvelenamento, gli indicatori di gas, uccellini e topi, muoiono subito.
I loro corpi sono piccoli come era piccolo il corpo di David, che se n'era andato prima di lei.
«Sono madre» - pensò.
Questo fu il suo ultimo pensiero.
Ma nel suo cuore c'era ancora vita: si stringeva, duoleva, aveva pietà di voi, uomini vivi e morti.
La nausea l'invase.
Strinse a sé David, la crisalide, e divenne lei stessa morte crisalide.

9 novembre 2012

[Maria Clara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sin duda, es un libro duro pero también, o sobretodo, retrata la humanidad de las personas. Se puede decir que es una crónica de la segunda guerra mundial vista desde la batalla de Stalingrado; pasando por campos de concentración alemanes, los Gulag rusos y el día a día de la guerra, con todos sus horrores.

PD: Como anécdota, cuando Grossman terminó de escribir el libro, la KGB irrumpió en su piso y confiscó todos sus apuntes y documentos...

"Le pido que devuelva la libertad a mi libro, pido que mi libro se discuta con editores, no con los agentes de la KGB. ¿Qué sentido tiene que yo sea físicamente libre cuando el libro al que he dedicado mi vida es arrestado?... No renuncio a él... Pido libertad para mi libro".

[Szplug · Rating 5 out of 5]

When you consider the steps that had to be taken to smuggle this novel out of the Soviet Union, painstakingly photographed page by page on microfilm, you cannot but marvel at the determination and effort made by believers in the power of the written word to bring such important stories to light. This epic novel is, along with Victor Serge's stunning masterwork Unforgiving Years , the best fictional depiction I've read of the barbaric inhumanity of the Soviet experience in the Second World War and the tests of faith suffered by ardent communists as the horrifying truth that their fatherland was become a despotic police state became more and more unavoidable. What inner agonies must Grossman and Serge have endured, going to their graves believing that these works of art - which they had sweated blood in wringing forth from the shopworn and suppurating experiences inflicted upon them by endless violence, strife, and war in relatively brief lives - were destined to have an audience of but a handful of loyal friends; or, in Grossman's case, of arrogantly presumptive party apparatchiks and a cultural minister who inflicted further wounds upon the author's sorely tried soul by announcing that it would never see the light of publication ere two hundred years had passed, and it could no longer be deemed harmful to the cause of the glorious state.

Life and Fate is a vast, sprawling and impassioned novel that is centered around the final months of the Battle of Stalingrad, the pivotal turning point for Communist Russia in the Second World War. This is a kaleidoscopic novel, focusing on the lives of a number of interrelated families and individuals scattered from Moscow to the cold, empty deserts of the Kalmyk steppes. Grossman, who was a war reporter at the Stalingrad front during the war, brings a piercing realism to his depictions of the courage, tenacity and camaraderie of the Russian soldiers defending the burnt-out husk of a city, and the despair and suffering of those under both the Nazi and Bolshevik lash. Indeed, the book's principal goal is to show how individuals are broken, and life made unbearable, under the crushing weight of the totalitarian state. Grossman masterfully depicts the treacheries and petty competitions amongst the nomenklatura in an effort to show their devotion to Stalin, and their eagerness to denounce others to win an ephemeral favor. We are given glimpses inside the articulated hell of concentration camps and gulags; made melancholy observers of the final, bestial march of a band of doomed Jews from cattle-cars to charnel house showers; and we make the long and heartrending journey down the bitterly cold, indifferent Volga with a grieving mother, enduring all manner of discomfort and danger to find her severely wounded son.

There are flaws in this sprawling story: interesting storylines and characters introduced early on are abandoned; there is a flatness, almost a journalistic feel (perhaps intentional), to certain episodes and personalities; and sidebars with some of the Russian soldiers feel tacked on. Nevertheless, these are minor quibbles, and the central pivot of the novel - the travails and Jewish-based ostracism of the nuclear physicist Viktor Shtrum - is a brilliantly delineated narrative of the soul-crushing effects of a Soviet purge. We squirm as Viktor oscillates between a desire to vigorously defend himself from a baseless hostility, and a resignation to meekly beg for forgiveness for his manufactured crime. A vital novel for fans of Soviet literature and those who seek a clearer understanding of the brutality of life in wartime Russia.

[Elena · Rating 4 out of 5]

Leer este libro ha sido toda una experiencia.
Al principio es difícil y denso (Vasili Grossman fue corresponsal de guerra y eso se nota) y hay que perseverar y no ofuscarse ante tanto personaje y dato histórico, pero una vez ubicada el resultado fue 1104 páginas devoradas en dos semanas.
Lo mejor es cómo Vasili Grossman consigue desgranar el alma humana en tiempos de guerra (Segunda Guerra Mundial, en el frente Oriental- Soviético) desde muchos puntos de vista diferentes. Las madres, la ciencia, la literatura los soldados rasos, los soldados de altos cargos, los soviéticos, los alemanes, los judíos, las mujeres, los ancianos, los niños. Todos tienen su voz en este libro. Todos estos distintos puntos de vista hacen que sea necesario sacrificar explotar al máximo sus personajes, pero en este caso, compensa, porque lo importante es conocer la situación global.
Dicen que Vida y Destino es el Guerra y Paz del Siglo XX, y puedo ver perfectamente por qué, y después de una experiencia lectora intensa sé que es una historia que va a permanecer conmigo.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Both epic in scope and intimate in detail, this powerhouse novel had me riveted from the very beginning. The prose style is spare yet luminous. Many have mentioned Chekhov as model for the writing style, and that feels right to me. There are some truly haunting scenes in this book. But it's the constant juxtaposition of the tragic and the comic, the grand and the banal, that gives this novel its true heft.

[merixien · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ben genellikle kitapların arka kapak ya da tanıtım yazılarını çok fazla dikkate almamaya çalışırım zira çoğunlukla beklentiyi yükseltip hayal kırıklığına sebep olurlar. Ancak bu sefer hakkında övgülerin az bile kaldığı, gerçekten de “2. Dünya Savaşı’nın Savaş ve Barış”ını okudum. Kitabın güzelliği karşısında nutkum tutuldu adeta.

Yaşam ve Yazgı aslında Stalingrad Kuşatması’nı merkeze alarak bir aile ve onların ilişkileri üzerinden- ki burada hem hayatların ne kadar iç içe olduğunu göstermek için en başında oldukça kopuk gelen kişilerle- savaşın ve yakın dünya tarihinin kilit döneminin belgeselini gösteriyor. Belgeseli diyorum çünkü kitap boyunca bir kurguyu takip etmekten ziyade kitabın gerçekliğine dahil oluyorsunuz. Bunda Grossman’ın Stalingrad Kuşatması’nda savaş muhabirliği yapmış olması, anlattığının aslında yaşadığı savaş olması çok etkili. Stalingrad Kuşatması’na dair okuyacağınız herhangi bir kurgu dışı eser kadar bilgiyi size veriyor. Daha da ötesi bütün gerçekliğiyle savaşı, insan olmayı, iyi ile kötünün ne kadar iç içe geçebilen kavramlar olduğunu yaşatıyor. Kitap boyunca aynı insanlarla empati kurmakla nefret etmek arasında gidip geliyorsunuz mesela. Asla salt iyi ya da kötü ayrımı yok.

Beni çok etkileyen diğer bir konu ise; -kitap her ne kadar bir İkinci Dünya Savaşı destanı olarak anılsa da- aslında muazzam bir totaliter rejim eleştirisi. Teoride her ne kadar iki karşıt ideoloji olan faşizm ve sosyalizmin savaşı olarak görünse de aslında her iki rejimin geldiği noktanın aynı potada eridiğini ve toplumun her alandaki yazgısını tek gücün elinde toplamanın sonuçlarının - isimleri değişse de- ne kadar bir olduğunu gösteriyor. Nasyonal sosyalistlerin akıl almaz savaş suçları ve imha yöntemlerini okurken bu katliamı durduracak umut ışığı olarak karşınıza Stalin’in ihbar ve korku üzerine kurduğu, insanların kendilerini korumak adına başkalarının adını verdiği kurbanın faile dönüştüğü despotizmi çıkıyor. Her açıdan insanı içine düşürdüğü çaresizlik ve yaşananların gerçekliği ile ruhunuzu yaralayan bir kitap. Özellikle de kitapta sürgüne giden Yahudi bir annenin öldürülmeden önce oğluna yolladığı ve aslında Grossman’ın annesinden hiç alamadığı mektubu - belki de kendisiyle yüzleşme için- yazdığı bölümü gözleriniz dolmadan okuyabilmeniz pek mümkün değil.

Savaş ve Barış ile birlikte - ikisini birbirleriyle karşılaştırmaktan ziyade önemlerine göre ayırarak aynı tarafta tutmayı tercih ediyorum- okuduğum en iyi savaş kitabını okudum. Evet 1200 sayfalık, özellikle de başlarda karakterleri ile bir miktar başınızı döndürüp bir yandan da ağırlığıyla bileğinizi ağrıtacak ama bitirdiğinizde hepsine değdinini görüp etkisinden kolay kolay çıkamayacağınız muazzam bir kitap. Benim için sadece bu yılın değil tüm zamanların favorisi olacak bir kitap. Mutlaka okuyun, ısrarlı tavsiyedir.

[Anastasia Fitzgerald-Beaumont · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an astonishing book Life and Fate is; what an astonishing man Vasily Grossman must have been. I’ve already written a partial assessment of this literary masterpiece on my Ana the Imp blog, a post I headed The Grand Inquisitor, which focused on the contents of a single chapter, one I had just finished, one that literally winded me, both intellectually and emotionally. Well, now I’ve finished the whole novel and it captivated me from beginning to end; captivated me with its intensity, its range, its breadth and depth of vision; captivated me with it’s simple humanity.

I’ve heard other novels likened to Tolstoy’s War and Peace, most recently The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell, a grossly overrated and at points unbelievably dull book. But Life and Fate, with no exaggeration at all, can truly be said to stand in the same literary pantheon as Tolstoy’s panorama; that Grossman found the voice of the Great Patriotic War as Tolstoy found that of the Patriotic War. It’s the kind of novel that I believe only comes once in a generation, perhaps once in a century.

I’m not surprised that it was ‘arrested’ because I do not thank I’ve ever read a more damning expose of the moral corruption at the core of the Stalinist state, at the core of all totalitarianism. Grossman was right- absolute truth is the most beautiful thing of all. And absolute truth was the one thing the whole Soviet system, even after Stalin, could never allow, never admit. I’m truly grateful that the attempt to suppress this wonderful book was a failure.

I love Russian literature and this is a uniquely Russian book. But Life and Fate is more; it’s a work of insight, empathy and understanding, one that transcends all limits, all boundaries and all nationalities.

[Sandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

In questo romanzo fiume sono narrati il destino della grande madre Russia e le vite di tanti suoi cittadini, tutti segnati dai combattimenti durissimi che si svolsero a Stalingrado, lungo le rive del Volga, dall’estate del 1942 al febbraio del 1943, tra i soldati dell’Armata Rossa e l’esercito nazista, passati alla storia come “la battaglia di Stalingrado”. Da quel momento, con la vittoria sofferta dell’esercito sovietico, non solo il destino della seconda guerra mondiale ebbe una svolta, iniziando da lì la decadenza delle armate naziste, ma il destino dell’intera Europa cominciò a definirsi, ponendo le basi della futura potenza sovietica che eserciterà il controllo sulla metà orientale del continente europeo fino alla fine del XX secolo.

Non è facile parlare in poche righe di questo romanzo mondo, composto da un mosaico di episodi in cui ci si sposta dal fronte russo, tra tenenti colonnelli, colonnelli, generali, in cui leggiamo i loro dialoghi e conosciamo i loro caratteri, dove spicca l’amore immenso per la patria russa, passando al fronte nazista, dove incontriamo il generale Paulus al comando della sesta armata, costretto alla resa finale, oppure entriamo in un palazzo di Stalingrado dove soldati russi affrontano l’assedio di soldati tedeschi, o nelle case di famiglie qualsiasi, colpite negli affetti dalla guerra o dagli eventi accaduti prima che essa scoppiasse (le grandi purghe staliniane), come quella del fisico nucleare Strum, che si dibatte nelle crisi di coscienza che lo colpiscono come scienziato, come marito e padre e come cittadino dello stato comunista, che riflette sui rapporti tra scienza e potere fino al momento della telefonata di Stalin, che segnerà un “prima” e un “dopo”per la sua vita, senza sciogliere i dilemmi che lo assillano. E poi ci sono le pagine strazianti, che urlano dentro il dolore e la sofferenza, del cammino degli ebrei verso la camera a gas, del cammino del piccolo David per mano con Sof'ja Osipovna.

Ciò che rende il romanzo di Grossman un unicum nel panorama letterario novecentesco è il respiro epico che attraversa le sue più di ottocento pagine, grazie al quale la storia tragica dei regimi totalitari del secolo scorso che hanno lasciato tremendi spargimenti di sangue e di morte sulla loro strada, quello nazista e quello comunista, viene accomunata da un denominatore comune, l’oppressione dell’essere umano e della sua libertà tanto da ridurre l’uomo in una condizione di remissività totale. E’ quanto accade nei lager tedeschi in Russia, dove sono detenuti prigionieri politici russi insieme a criminali comuni; ma è quanto accade anche nei lager russi, dove sono rinchiusi i nemici del potere stalinista, e nel terrificante palazzo della Lubjanka a Mosca, sede dei servizi segreti. Ma all’interno dello stato che tutti sottomette al suo controllo e subordina alla sua collera, dove le atrocità e le violenze sono all’ordine del giorno, si svolgono le vite dei tanti e tanti personaggi cui accennavo sopra, uomini e donne che si sforzano di rimanere “umani”, fratelli e sorelle nel dolore, rafforzati dalla sofferenza, dalla miseria, dalla fame, per risorgere dalle macerie di un mondo, rappresentato dalla città di Stalingrado appena uscita dalla guerra, in cui, secondo la concezione compassionevole di Grossman, il male sarà sempre vinto dalla bontà spicciola, la bontà senza tanti discorsi, “il semplice gesto di un uomo a favore di un altro uomo”.

Un romanzo immenso, stupendo, che commuove, strazia, da cui non riesci a staccarti perché parla dritto al cuore.

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

The worst reviews, in my humble opinion, are those that begin with this sentence: I really wanted to like this book? Oh? This confounds me? Who starts to read a book that they hope they will not like? Do people really open books they hope will appall them, torture them with typos and improbable plots, confuse them with experimental mazes of style and drown them in gibberish? Isn't every book we start one we hope will be the greatest ever? What kind of twisted reader DOESN'T WANT TO LIKE A BOOK?

I really wanted to like this book.

Sorry. Was the stinker in me coming out. My point, I think, is that this book comes with a lot of hype. And it sat on my Mt. TBR for a long time (thank you, Karen). I finally stared it down and invested the requisite 3 to 4 weeks. (Did anybody miss me?). I hoped it would be the greatest book ever. It's good. It's real good. But not the greatest ever.

The first thing you have to figure out is that there are eight pages of characters listed in the back of the book. This is an essential find. Without this cast of characters you have no hope. Alexandra Vladimirovna Shaposhnikova has three daughters but one of them is already dead. Her daughter Lyudmila Nikolaevna has two husbands but only one is in prison. Lyudmila's husband Viktor Pavlovich Shtrum has discovered nuclear fission but he really just wants to hold hands with Marya Ivanovna Sokolova, his best friend's wife and his wife's best friend. Lyudmila's sister, Yevgenia Nikolaevna (aka Zhenya, Zhenechka and Zhenevyeva) is married to Krymov but is soon to marry Pyotr Pavlovich Novikov.

Got it?

But while I read, and wished away the patronymics, Grossman would take me onto a cattle car, or a concentration camp, or an oven; and I'd hear the music being played, see the hands being held. I'd feel the cold and the hunger. All in new, shattered light.

When Eisenhower got to the first Nazi concentration camp (not even the death camps yet), he stopped and brought the reporters and the cameras in. So the world could see what we were fighting. He could have given the world this book instead and it would have been as real.

Come with me, where Grossman took me, inside a cattle car, with the stench and the death. There are so many of us and so few of them. Why can't we take them?

Now and again the SS guards glanced at each other and exchanged a few words. Their passage along the platform was like the sun's through the sky. The sun doesn't need to watch over the wind and the clouds, to listen to the sound of the leaves or of a storm at sea; it knows as it follows its smooth path that everything in the world depends on it.

And we'd hope anyhow, wouldn't we, that this simply couldn't be true.

What saves people when their bovine melancholy, their mute fatalism yields to a piercing sense of horror - what saves people then is the opium of optimism.

Grossman answers, too, how Communist party members confessed, informed. You will feel the paranoia of the Soviet State. Stalin at one point asked Yezhov why he carried punitive measures to such an extreme. Yezhov answered that he was simply following Stalin's orders. Wrong answer, Yezhov.

There probably is not a more important novel about the experience of the Russian Jew in World War II. At times, the writing soars to glorious heights. Yet, the book seemed more essential than wonderful. I really wanted to like it.

[Ray · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really liked this book

It is softer and less ideological than other Soviet literature I have read from this time - I can certainly see why it was banned

It uses the backdrop of the battle of Stalingrad to explore the interlinked lives of an extended family and the people they come into contact with

There are parallels with War and Peace which I am sure was the authors intention

Warning - a bit of a brick at 850+ pages - not a quick read

[Paolo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chiedo il permesso a Piperitapitta di utilizzare la sua immagine - efficacissima - del foro nel vetro e della ramificazione delle fratture.

Quanto lontano arrivano quelle crepe e quanto grande è il vetro del "foro - Stalingrado" ?

Arrivano di sicuro fino a noi e fino ad oggi, che ne siamo consapevoli o no.

Buona parte della grandezza di Vita e Destino consiste nel farci comprendere in maniera profonda e definitiva l'importanza storica della vittoria di Stalingrado per le sorti della seconda guerra, nel consolidamento del regime sovietico, e nella rifondazione dell'identità di una grande nazione.

Illuminante il capitolo 20 della terza parte ".......l'attacco di Stalingrado....., aiutò i soldati e la popolazione civile a prendere coscienza di sé. I russi, i sovietici cominciarono a guardare a se stessi e alle altre nazioni con occhi diversi. Ormai la storia era la storia della gloria russa, non quella delle sofferenze e delle umiliazioni patite da contadini e operai patri. E l'identità nazionale si era trasformata da forma in contenuto, diventando il fondamento di una nuova concezione del mondo........la consapevolezza della forza delle armi russe e dello Stato sovietico era parte di un processo lungo, ampio, colossale. Un processo iniziato molto prima della guerra, non nella coscienza, però, ma nel subcosciente.
Le pietre miliari della nuova vita e dei rapporti umani erano stati tre eventi grandiosi: la collettivizzazione delle campagne, l'industrializzazione ed il Trentasette [l'anno delle purghe] ..... Eventi voluti ed orchestrati da Stalin che segnarono il trionfo economico del nuovo Stato sovietico, del Socialismo in un solo paese. E che furono la conseguenza logica della rivoluzione d' Ottobre......Il nuovo ordine sociale si avvalse, dunque, di un lessico ed idee che risalivano ai primi passi dell'ala bolscevica del Partito socialdemocratico russo, a prima della rivoluzione. Ma il nuovo ordine ebbe fondamenta nazionaliste.
La guerra accelerò una rilettura della realtà già segretamente in atto prima del conflitto, accelerò il manifestarsi di una coscienza nazionale, e l'aggettivo "russo" riguadagnò un contenuto vivo e reale.

L'impresa di Stalingrado é la presa di coscienza di una grande nazione e di tutti coloro che a quella nazione - per quanto illusoriamente - hanno guardato come ad un ideale di socialismo realizzato.

Tramontata l'utopia - o meglio l'illusione - nel socialismo realizzato é rimasto ben più forte e radicato il sentimento nazionale che quell'evento storico ha contribuito parimenti a fondare.

Ed è qui che le conseguenze del "foro - proiettile - Stalingrado" arrivano ad oggi. Presa Stalingrado e debellati i tedeschi i reparti dell'Armata rossa, pur decimati e stremati conducono tappe forzate di giorni, senza soste per mangiare e dormire per arrivare per primi in Ucraina. E solo per ottenere il titolo di "Brigata d'Ucraina" promesso da Stalin al reparto che per primo vi sarebbe giunto.

Sul frontespizio di un altro libro Adelphi, che narra di vicende russe ben più vicine a noi Limonov di E. Carrere c'è una frase abbastanza folgorante: chi vuole restaurare il comunismo è senza cervello, Chi non lo rimpiange è senza cuore.

Invito chi non ha letto il libro di Carrere ad indovinare l'autore della frase.

Si capisce bene come oggi i Russi non rinuncino facilmente a "riprendersi" ciò che sentono spettar loro di diritto. Hanno lasciato sul terreno milioni di giovani 70 anni fa, non credo che basti ora la minaccia di non vendergli più lavatrici o SUV perché desistano dall'impresa.

Non si tratta di parteggiare o giustificare, ma di capire quanto profonde sono le radici di certi conflitti e quanto rischia di essere superficiale tranciare giudizi.

Vita e Destino non è solo Storia, ma anche storie, tante e bellissime e toccanti, che riguardano personaggi di palpitante umanità e verità, c'è tanto di tutto ma la parte "storico/ideologica" mi ha stimolato ed arricchito di nuove consapevolezze. Stalingrado come la battaglia delle Termopili: un punto di svolta in cui si decide il destino di epoche e di nazioni intere.

Sempre per restare alle schegge che dipartono dal foro - Stalingrado chi si ricorda questa canzone che una radio locale (a quei tempi si chiamavano "libere", che tenerezza...) almeno 5 volte al giorno a metà anni settanta ?

Così come è utile - secondo me - per creare una valida sinestesia con la lettura guardare questo film , chissà perché molto poco considerato dalla critica.

Vita e destino è essenzialmente il conflitto tra sacrificio per il bene collettivo in un determinato frangente storico e l' affermazione della propria libertà ed individualità. Per quanto si comprenda come questi ultimi siano i valori autentici per Grossman, in qualche pagina affiora il dubbio che ci sia anche una componente di narcisismo ed egoismo nell'affermazione di sé, e che il confine tra dissenso eroico e ribellismo infantile sia spesso labile (il personaggio di Strum ne è l'emblema).

Così come non disconosce mai la necessità storica dei processi - anche più efferati - che hanno portato alla nascita, al consolidamento sella Russia sovietica e che - in ultima analisi - hanno sconfitto in maniera decisiva il nazi-fascismo, cambiando il corso della storia, facendo del dopoguerra quello che è stato, nel bene e nel male.

Sono quindi propenso a credere che se Grossmann fosse vivo oggi e fosse testimone delle vicende post - crollo, si riconoscerebbe parecchio in quella frase riportata in premessa a Limonov di Carrere e nella sua ambigua ambivalenza.

Chi è l'autore della frase ?

Ma Wladimir Putin, naturalmente......

[María Carpio · Rating 5 out of 5]

Uno de los ochomiles de la literatura mundial, al menos del siglo veinte. Más de mil páginas y ninguna sobra. Grossman escribe esta novela como una especie de mea culpa de su silencio, al que llama en voz del narrador omnisciente de Vida y destino, un silencio cobarde. El personaje principal, Víktor Shtrum, es un trasunto de sí mismo, un físico y matemático teórico llevado al límite de lo que su conciencia puede aceptar en medio de un régimen totalitario (la Unión Soviética durante el stalinismo) que somete a las personas por un ideal colectivo. Ideal deformado y convertido en horror. Toda la novela va de la soberanía individual versus el atropellamiento del colectivo sobre el individuo. Pero también sobre cómo la humanidad, con sus luces y sombras, se abre paso por sobre las circunstancias y la propia Historia.

La trama se desarrolla durante los seis meses que duró el cerco de Stalingrado durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial y la posterior derrota del ejército alemán que marcaría la caída del nazismo. Aquí vemos tanto el un lado como el otro. Campos de concentración nazis versus prisiones políticas soviéticas. En ambos lados el horror por igual, y en ambos lados la humanidad abriéndose paso a pesar de todo. Grossman hace un análisis comparativo entre ambos regímenes totalitarios y termina concluyendo que son equivalentes: los unos persiguen a los judíos, los otros a los burgueses y los kulaks (campesinos adinerados o terratenientes). Esta es una novela de varias voces; una familia, los Sháposhnikov, como engranaje del resto de personajes que componen esta sinfonía de tragedia y humanidad. No obstante, el tono narrativo, pese a tener escenas desgarradoras, no llega a ser dramático o sensiblero, no se regodea en la miseria, muestra lo que tiene que mostrar y lo hace de la forma más digna, literariamente hablando.

La obra en sí, a más de la historia que cuenta (la de Viktor y su familia, y la de varios militares en el frente de guerra), es en realidad un tratado filosófico y político pero narrado de una forma llana, sin artilugios intelectuales ni complicaciones formales. En la voz del narrador omnisiciente y en la de los personajes se despliegan las ideas y pensamiento -bastante adelantado a su tiempo y condición- del propio Vasili Grossman. Una enorme reflexión sobre el valor de la libertad y sobre el bien más profundo que yace en el ser humano.

Escrito durante el mandato de Nikita Krushev, Grossman no podría ver publicada en vida esta novela, debido a que fue censurada y no sería sino hasta 1988, con la Perestroika de Gorvachov, que vería la luz en Rusia.

Mucho de lo narrado es basado en la propia experiencia de Grossman como corresponsal de guerra durante la batalla de Stalingrado y como tal, fue uno de los primeros en descubrir y dar a conocer la existencia de los campos de concentración nazis. Él mismo era judio y familiares suyos fueron a parar a estos campos, pero también a prisiones soviéticas en las que fueron asesinados, tal como los de su alter ego en la novela, Víktor Shtrum. Vida y destino es también una radiografía de la conciencia de una persona, o de las personas, durante situaciones extremas como la guerra o un régimen criminal como el stalinismo. Todas las angustias, contradicciones, miedos, arrepentimientos, compasiones. Todo ello que el propio Grossman vivió está retratado magistralmente en esta novela.

Una obra magnánima, oscura y luminosa a la vez, pero efervescente de vida. No dejarse llevar por la portada. Al final es una inmensa oda a la compasión.

"Fuera lo que fuese lo que les deparara el futuro —la fama por su trabajo o la soledad, la miseria y la desesperación, la muerte y la ejecución—, ellos vivirán como seres humanos y morirán como seres humanos, y lo mismo para aquellos que ya han muerto; y sólo en eso consiste la victoria amarga y eterna del hombre sobre las fuerzas grandiosas e inhumanas que hubo y habrá en el mundo".

[Enrique · Rating 5 out of 5]

No me va a salir una buena reseña, lo tengo claro. No es un libro este que permita sintetizarlo, abarcarlo o simplificar todo lo que se propone de inicio Vasily Grossman. Máxime cuando lo ubicas temporalmente y se trata de un producto tan innovador como cuando lo escribió el autor allá por los años 40-50, cuando todavía no se tenía noción alguna de lo que tenía de trágico el régimen estalinista. Tampoco se había escrito nada sobre las cámaras de gas y el genocidio nazi. Para darle la magnitud que se merece literariamente, solo puedo compararlo con las dos distopías más grandes escritas nunca sobre el tema ruso, y casualmente ambas creadas por el gran George Orwel.
 
Complejo como digo resumir una obra tan vasta y que busca dar una idea global de tantos elementos como son: la Rusia de comienzo de siglo hasta la II GM a nivel social, familiar, militar, cultural, desde el punto de vista ruso y alemán. El terrible antisemitismo que se asentó en Europa, en Rusia incluso. Todo ello con el telón de fondo del hecho más decisivo para poner punto final al hasta entonces imparable avance nazi por toda Europa, y que lógicamente también era el comienzo del fin de la Segunda Guerra Mundial como base y núcleo principal de la novela: la decisiva batalla de Stalingrado. La más cruenta de la historia, dos millones de muertos. En torno a ella: una de esas escrituras globalizadoras que consigue abarcar todas las esferas que rodean un hecho tan traumatizante como fue esta batalla tan brutal y sangrienta.
 
Libro totalizador de la II GM vista desde todos los frentes posibles: gueto, campos de concentración, clase dirigente rusa, frente de batalla. Y narrado en todos los formatos: dialogado, epistolar, ensayo. Una novela completa. Si la comparamos con algunas que pretenden hacer una radiografía semejante, como Archipiélago Gulag, gana “Vida y destino” por goleada. Ya sé que los temas de ambas novelas no son iguales, pero me parecen novelas con una base parecida.
 
“De la niebla emergió el recinto del campo: filas de alambradas tendidas entre postes de hormigón armado. Los barracones alineados formaban calles largas y rectilíneas. Aquella uniformidad expresaba el carácter inhumano del campo.
Entre millones de isbas rusas no hay ni habrá nunca dos exactamente iguales. Todo lo que vive es irrepetible. Es inconcebible que dos seres humanos, dos arbustos de rosas silvestres sean idénticos… La vida se extingue allí donde existe el empeño de borrar las diferencias y las particularidades por la vía de la violencia.” (calidade..)
 
Apenas incluyo unas citas, pero subrayé más de 20 citas excelentes con las que no aburriré a nadie, pero que muestran lo certero y lúcido de la escritura de Grossman, lo afilado:
 
“¿qué podía hacer cuando era una parte de sí mismo la que se había vuelto extraña…? Con uno mismo no se puede romper relaciones, ni dejar de encontrarse (…) Cuando era joven, todo le resultaba próximo y comprensible en sus amigos y camaradas de Partido. Cada pensamiento y opinión de sus adversarios, en cambio, le parecían extraños, monstruos. Ahora, de improviso, reconocía en los pensamientos de un desconocido aquello que décadas antes le era querido, mientras que a veces aquello que le era ajeno tomaba forma, misteriosamente, en los pensamientos y palabras de sus amigos. «Debe de ser porque hace demasiado tiempo que estoy en el mundo», se decía M.”
 
Complicadísimo como siempre los nombres y patronímicos rusos, dentro de una obra con un número de personajes tan grande. Tuve que abandonar otras lecturas y centrarme solo en esta para no perderme. Ejemplo: las cuatro formas distintas del autor de referirse a un mismo personaje en un mismo párrafo (con el nombre, con el apellido, con el diminutivo o con el patronímico pag. 51: el padre Vittia, Viktor, Shtrum, Viktor Pavlovich).
 
Algo que me ha gustado mucho y que nunca había visto tan detallado: como se justifica de forma interna dentro de un régimen totalitario las informaciones falsas y sesgadas que se propalan para mayor gloria del régimen (solo lo había visto en Orwel, a veces de forma cómica) :
“Consideraba que el principal objetivo de su periódico era instruir al lector y no ofrecer sin análisis información caótica sobre los acontecimientos más diversos, a menudo fortuitos. Si el redactor jefe Sagaidak lo estimaba oportuno podía obviar cualquier acontecimiento: guardar silencio sobre una pésima cosecha, un poema ideológicamente poco apropiado, un cuadro formalista, una epizootia de ganado, un terremoto, el hundimiento de un acorazado, no ver la fuerza de una ola oceánica que de golpe había engullido a miles de personas, o un enorme incendio en una mina. A su modo de ver estos acontecimientos no tenían significado y, por tanto, no debían ocupar la mente del lector, el periodista o el escritor. A veces había necesitado dar explicaciones específicas sobre uno u otro acontecimiento de la vida, y resultaba que tales explicaciones eran sorprendentemente audaces, insólitas, contradictorias con el saber común. Le parecía que su fuerza, su experiencia, su competencia como redactor jefe se manifestaba en la habilidad que tenía para trasladar a la conciencia de los lectores sólo aquellas opiniones que servían al objetivo de educarlos (…) había escrito que la hambruna en el periodo de la colectivización total obedecía al hecho de que los kulaks enterraban el grano, no comían pan adrede y se hinchaban; morían incluso pueblos enteros, incluidos niños y ancianos, con el único objeto de perjudicar al Estado soviético.”
 
Tremendo el mensaje y crítica al sistema soviético anti productivo y anti social. Una crítica dura y frontal, bien en forma de conversaciones cruzadas, bien a modo de reflexión-ensayo de algún protagonista.
 
“Sus ojos, que habían leído a Homero, el Izvestia, Las aventuras de Huckleberry Finn, a Mayne Reid, la Lógica de Hegel, que habían visto gente buena y mala, que habían visto gansos en los vastos prados de Kursk, estrellas en el observatorio de Púlkovo, el brillo del acero quirúrgico, La Gioconda en el Louvre, tomates y nabos en los puestos del mercado, las aguas azules del lago Issik-Kul, ahora ya no eran necesarios. Si alguien la hubiera cegado en ese instante, no habría notado la pérdida de la visión.” ¿Que no se parece al final de Blade runer?, bueno realmente al revés, creo que esta es la inspiración de ese ya mítico final de peli (que no del libro de P.K. Dick).

[amapola · Rating 5 out of 5]

”…perché non è l’uomo che è impotente contro il male, ma perché è il male che è impotente contro l’uomo e la sua umanità più profonda: la bontà”.

Ci sono momenti nella storia, epoche tremende, in cui “l’uomo non è più artefice del proprio destino”, anzi, “è il destino del mondo ad arrogarsi il diritto di condannare o concedere la grazia, di portare gli allori o di ridurre in miseria…”. Che cosa può fare allora un uomo stretto nella morsa della Storia, vittima della collera dello Stato? Solo una cosa: cercare di difendere a tutti i costi la propria umanità, lottare strenuamente “per conquistarsi il diritto di essere uomo”.
Così, nell’inferno della battaglia di Stalingrado Grossman ci presenta una moltitudine di personaggi, uomini e donne, le cui storie particolari si intrecciano con la Storia, una polifonia di voci che scuote profondamente, commuove, indigna, strazia, lascia stupefatti e ammirati.
Un romanzo unico, grandioso. Non facciamogli il torto di leggerlo con il paraocchi dell’ideologia, Grossman questo non se lo merita. Non anche da noi.

”La neve si posava sulle spalle di Bach ed era come se il silenzio scendesse a fiocchi sul Volga ammutolito, sulla città morta, sulle carcasse dei cavalli; nevicava ovunque, non solo sulla terra, ma anche sulle stelle, l’universo era pieno di neve. E sotto la neve tutto spariva: i cadaveri dei caduti, le armi, i vestiti putridi, i sassi, il ferro ritorto”.


Aggiungo un link che con poche parole e molte immagini riesce a dare un’idea di quello che fu la Battaglia di Stalingrado:
https://youtu.be/QikJdmdYkO8

[Max · Rating 5 out of 5]

Grossman tells the stories of Russian citizens and soldiers as they face the Nazi invasion and their own oppressive government in WWII. This long complex historical novel is often compared to War and Peace. Both intricately weave history and fiction, patriotism and decadence, philosophy and practicality. But Tolstoy’s nineteenth century perspective feels very different from Grossman’s twentieth. Noble purpose and grand drama give way to the desire to just survive amid a gritty reality. Tolstoy did not live through the Napoleonic wars he describes. Grossman was on the front lines in WWII as a reporter for the Soviet paper Red Star.

We see the journalist in Grossman whose first-hand accounts detail the everyday life of the soldiers more than strategy. Showing through is Grossman’s pride in his country for winning the battle of Stalingrad and his hatred of the Nazis, but his pride is tempered by the evils of the Soviet State he serves and the second class citizenship of its Jews. With the battle for Stalingrad as a centerpiece, we bounce back and forth between German and Russian prison camps, different military units in the battle, and anxious civilians working back home. There are scores of characters and each setting is a story in itself. The many scenarios are loosely tied together through a single extended family.

Grossman is at his most poignant describing Jews as they are surrounded by the Nazis and sent to concentration camps. He was a Jew whose mother was killed by the Nazis. Part of this story is told in a fictional letter from his mother as she awaits her fate. We see how normal life gives way to despondence as hope is gradually extinguished. Grossman was there as the Russian army entered Treblinka. He interviewed local residents and pieced together how victims were led to the gas chambers. He describes this in a heartrending personal story of a young woman “adopting” an orphaned child on the train taking them to the camp. He was the first reporter to write a major news article on the death camps.

The intrusion of the Soviet State into every aspect of daily life runs throughout the book. Every military unit has its commissar to ensure party loyalty. Everyone in Russia knows someone who has been arrested. Fear of being seen as an enemy of the state runs deep. One plotline covers a commissar arrested and sent to the infamous Lubyanka prison having been denounced by a romantic rival. Another character, a scientist based on the author, wrestles constantly with the problem of political interference in his work. When he stands up he is in fear of prison, when he gives in he feels like a moral failure. Grossman’s characters share with us their constant emotional conflict, each a sliver of a pervasive spiritual dissonance running through Soviet society. They fear the Germans, their own government and the person next to them as they try to make it to another day and maintain some semblance of a life. Grossman’s fiction brings us history that is personal and heartfelt. More than knowing what happened we know what it felt like.

Like War and Peace, this novel requires some patience. But the rewards are great. Just keeping track of the characters and plotlines had me constantly paging back and forth. The many similar (to me) Russian names did not help. But at the end you have had an experience: Not just a picture of a battle or a war. Not just a picture of a draconian government. Not just a picture of deprivation and cruelty. Not just a picture of personal relationships torn asunder from the pressure and chaos. But the picture of an entire society on the brink. Grossman does a masterful job.