Amazon Book Description
- Life and Fate is an epic tale of twentieth-century Russia told through the fate of a single family, the Shaposhnikovs, from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Stalingrad.
- As the battle of Stalingrad looms, Grossman's characters must work out their destinies in a world torn by ideological tyranny and war.
- Completed in 1960 and then confiscated by the KGB, this sweeping panorama of Soviet Society remained unpublished until it was smuggled into the West in 1980, where it was hailed as a masterpiece.
- 'One of the finest Russian novels of the 20th century'
→ Daily Telegraph
- 'Compelling... Grossman's portrait is timelessly relevant... Life and Fate is worth all the audience it can find'
→ The Times
The War and Peace of the 20th century
→ Antony Beevor
- One of the greatest masterpieces of the twentieth century
→ Times Literary Supplement
- It is only a matter of time before Grossman is acknowledged as one of the great writers of the 20th century... Life and Fate is a book that demands to be talked about
→ Guardian
- What better time to read Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman's epic novel about the second world war, to put our current troubles into perspective? Grossman's book, which traces the fate of the family of the brilliant physicist Viktor Shtrum at the time of the Battle of Stalingrad, records how humanity endured the monstrous evils of Nazism and Stalinism, surviving like weeds in the cracks of concrete slabs
→ Financial Times
- Vasily Grossman is the Tolstoy of the USSR
→ Martin Amis
- Among the most damning indictments of the Soviet system ever written
→ Wall Street Journal
- [An] extraordinarily dark portrait of Soviet society
→ David Remnick
- Vasily Grossman was born in 1905. In 1941, he became a war reporter for the Red Army newspaper Red Star and came to be regarded as a legendary war hero. Life and Fate, his masterpiece, was considered a threat to the totalitarian regime, and Grossman was told that there was no chance of the novel being published for another 200 years. Grossman died in 1964.
Amazon Customer Review (R.J.Farrer)
- Grossman's book is a stunning effort. He might lack Tolstoy's gift for character, but his magnum opus, smuggled to the west by Andrei Sakharov and other dissidents, is a brilliant novelised record of the Stalingrad conflict which shaped, and continues to shape, the modern world. He really needed an editor but as he had to write this in secret, he can be forgiven for his occasional repetitions and diversions. When Grossman asked for his novel to be published in Russia in the late 1950's the censor replied that he should be prepared to wait "for 200 to 300 years". It is an accessible and devastating attack on Stalinism and the way in which all authoritarian regimes, of both left and right, erode humanity and moral courage.
- BBC Radio 4 recently adapted this novel using an all-star cast. (Kenneth Branagh, Greta Scacchi and Ellie Kendrick). It was a good and honourable effort but necessarily so abbreviated it was never likely to be a substitute for the book itself. For example, the Radio 4 version began on page 134 of the book, leaving out some key scenes describing the political debates between Russian PoW's in the German concentration camp. The radio adaptation concentrates on relationships, whereas the book blends relationships, political ideas and military strategy.
- 'Life and Fate' has sometimes been described as the `War and Peace' of the 20th century. It invokes the experience of a vast cast of 162 characters, Russians, Germans and Ukrainians in the main, who come together in the Second World War, between late 1941 and the spring of 1943, when the Russians first resisted, then drove back, the might of Germany's sixth army. This key battle was the fulcrum of the Second World War. The conflict is always present and is described graphically, often with visceral realism, as any authentic account of war demands.
- Grossman focuses our interest on a few key `players' who represent four broad groups:
- The comfortable Russian middle-class scientific intelligentsia, (Vicktor Shtrum, his wife Lyudmila and their daughter Nadya. Viktor's colleagues).
- The favoured, yet precarious, Russian political class, here represented by the Commissars, their families and their lovers. (Krymov, Getmanov).
- The Russian military (Novikov, tank corps; Viktorov, airforce)
- Perhaps the most poignant group comprises the defeated and despairing Russians. Some are held in Nazi concentration camps (Sofya Levinton, Mikhail Mostovskoy, the "Old Bolshevik", and Ikkonikov, the "Tolstoyan"). Others have been sent to the Lubyanka, as prisoners of Stalin, repeatedly enduring brutal three-day interrogations which eventually end in false confessions.
- Grossman's characters are made to face the awful moral quandaries he confronted in his own life as a writer and journalist. So the dilemma faced by his central character, Viktor Shtrum, who is urged to make false denunciations of innocent colleagues, is probably autobiographical. Both Grossman's and Shtrum's mothers were murdered early in the war. Both Shtrum and Grossman felt guilty that they could have done more to save them.
- The author, who had been a mining engineer and a chemist, volunteered for the Army but failed the medical. Having already published some articles and a novel, he was invited to work for Krasnya Zvezda (Red Star), the Army newspaper. He was attached to a branch of the journalist corps which stayed in Stalingrad throughout several months of constant battle, on a vast scale. Although he was not a communist, Grossman's reporting was soon popular and trusted both by the ordinary soldiers and by Stalin and the elite. He was favoured and allowed long interviews with top Russian generals and front-line soldiers, alike. Many incidents described in the novel are near-verbatim accounts of real events committed to his war journals. (See Antony Beevor,2006, "A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941-1945". Pimlico).
- As a Jew, Grossman was acutely aware of Stalin's growing paranoia about Jewish intellectual influence in the USSR. Our central character Viktor Pavlovich Shtrum, a theoretical physicist, declares that he had never even 'felt Jewish' until he realised that many of his colleagues, who were no longer being promoted or recognised, were also Jews.
- Grossman shares Tolstoy's faith in the natural decency of the Russian peasant. There are touching scenes when an old Russian widow shares her meagre food with an escaped Russian prisoner who immediately vomits it up, because of weeks of starvation. Hunger, and its psychological effects, especially on soldiers and prisoners of both sides, is dealt with powerfully and at length.
- Grossman is not particularly convincing when writing about women. Too often his female characters are simple, slightly sentimentalised 'saints' (Sofya, Marya Ivanova), although Shtrum's teenage daughter Nadya is a notable and delightfully 'sassy' exception. When Shtrum is trying to work out his place in the hierarchy of Soviet science, he discovers that his rival, Sokolov, is getting 25 eggs per week, when he is only getting 24 (the average Russian saw none, of course). It takes his daughter to explain why. School gossip ensures that Nadya's classmates all know exactly who is 'up' and who 'down' in the Institute's rankings.
- Some of the most interesting and believable dialogue, full-blown political debate, occurs between the Old Bolshevik, Mikhail Mostovskoy, and his fellow prisoners in the German concentration camp. Later, when Mostovskoy is interrogated by the sinister, yet plausible, Obersturmbannfuhrer Liss, there is a sense that each knows his imminent fate, as Liss attempts to explain to the old Communist that Hitlerism and Stalinism share a similarly cynical view of man.
- The best writing is left to last, in chapter 60 of part three. Here, a few months after the German retreat, Stepan Spiridonov, the Stalingrad power station manager, is seen leaving the vast works, the power plant he has managed throughout the city's violent siege of daily aerial bombardment. He leaves demoted, because of a brief period of unofficial absence. When he takes leave of his old colleagues, who have suffered so much hardship and danger with him, there is great warmth. Before he is sent to the East, he presses his cheek against the huge flywheel of the electric turbine he had kept running throughout the worst of the war. We can all empathise with his outrage at the injustice of his exile.
- Such a long book with so many characters requires concentration. The writer assumes that the reader knows something of post-revolution Russian history and the basic distinctions between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. It will help if you know the reasons for Trotsky's murder in exile and why the Soviet 'terror trials' of 1937 took place. If these events are unfamiliar, the following books might help:
→ Simon Sebag Montefiore (2007) "The Young Stalin". Orion (final chapters)
→ Martin Sixsmith (2011) "Russia, a 1000 year chronicle of the Wild East". Pages 119-211. BBC Books
- So, all in all, a major work demanding considerable attention. Was it worth it? You bet.
Book Comment
Vintage Classics, 5 Oct. 2006. Paperback
Text Colour Conventions (see disclaimer)- Blue: Text by me; © Theo Todman, 2026
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