Life and Fate
Life and Fate is a novel by Vasily Grossman. Written in the Soviet Union in 1959, it narrates the story of the family of a Soviet physicist, Viktor Shtrum, during the Great Patriotic War, which is depicted as the struggle between two comparable totalitarian states. A multi-faceted novel, one of its main themes is the tragedy of the common people, who have to fight both the invaders and the totalitarianism of their own state. In 2021, the critic and editor Robert Gottlieb, writing in The New York Times, referred to Life and Fate as "the most impressive novel written since World War II."
Vasily Grossman, a Ukrainian Jew, was rejected for military service in 1941 and became a correspondent for the Soviet military paper Krasnaya Zvezda. He spent approximately 1,000 days on the front lines, roughly three of the four years of the conflict between the Germans and Soviets. He was one of the first journalists to write about the genocide of the Jewish people in Eastern Europe and was present at many famous battles. Life and Fate was his defining achievement, its writing in part motivated by guilt over the death of his mother in the Berdychiv massacre at Berdychiv in September 1941.
Life and Fate is technically the second half of the author's conceived two-part book under the same title, with the first half published in 1952 under the title For A Just Cause. Although the first half, written by Grossman during the rule of Joseph Stalin, expresses loyalty to the regime, Life and Fate shows the political disillusion of the protagonist and sharply criticises Stalinism. For that reason, the manuscript was censored in the Soviet Union at the time and was only published in the 1980s, nearly two decades after Grossman's death, first in the West and then on Russian soil under glasnost.
Plot summary
Life and Fate is a sprawling account of life on the Eastern Front, with countless plotlines taking place simultaneously all across Russia and Eastern Europe. Although each story has a linear progression, the events are not necessarily presented in chronological order. Grossman will, for example, introduce a character, then ignore that character for hundreds of pages, and then return to recount events that took place the very next day. It is difficult to summarize the novel, but the plot can be boiled down to three basic plotlines: the Shtrum/Shaposhnikov family, the Stalingrad battle, and life in the prison camps of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. Although Life and Fate is divided into three parts, each of these plotlines is featured in each section.Viktor Shtrum is a brilliant physicist who, with his wife, Lyudmila, and daughter, Nadya, has been evacuated from Moscow to Kazan. He is experiencing great difficulty with his work, as well as with his family. He receives a letter from his mother from inside a Nazi Jewish ghetto informing him that she is soon to be killed by the Germans. Lyudmila, meanwhile, goes to visit her son from her first marriage, Tolya, in an army hospital, but he dies before her arrival. When she returns to Kazan, she is extremely detached and seems still to be expecting Tolya's return. Viktor finds himself engaging in anti-Soviet conversations at the home of his colleague, Sokolov, partly to impress Sokolov's wife, Marya. He consistently compares political situations to physics, and remarks that fascism and Stalinism are not so different. He later regrets these discussions out of fear that he will be denounced, an indiscretion that plagues his decision-making throughout the novel.
Suddenly, Viktor makes a huge mathematical breakthrough, solving the issues that had hindered his experiments. Viktor's colleagues are slow to respond, but eventually come to accept the genius of his discovery. After moving back to Moscow, however, the higher-ups begin to criticize his discoveries as being anti-Leninist and attacking his Jewish identity. Viktor, however, refuses to publicly repent and is forced to resign. He fears that he will be arrested, but then receives a call from Stalin himself that completely and immediately reverses his fortune. Later, he signs a letter denouncing two innocent men and is subsequently racked by guilt. The last details about Viktor regard his unconsummated affair with Marya.
The events recounted at Stalingrad center on Yevghenia Shaposhnikova, Krymov, and Novikov. After reconnecting with Novikov, Yevghenia evacuates to Kuibyshev. Novikov, the commander of a Soviet tank corps, meets General Nyeudobnov and Political Commissar Getmanov, both of whom are Party hacks. Together they begin planning the counter-assault on Stalingrad. Novikov delays the start of the assault for fear of unnecessarily sacrificing his men. Getmanov later denounces Novikov and he is summoned for trial, even though the tank attack was a complete success.
Meanwhile, Krymov, a Political Commissar, is sent to investigate House 6/1, where a tiny group of soldiers have held back the Germans for weeks, even though they are completely surrounded and cut off from all supplies. Grekov, the commanding officer, refuses to send reports to HQ, and is disdainful of Krymov's rhetoric. He later wounds Krymov in his sleep, causing him to be evacuated from the house. Soon after, House 6/1 is completely leveled by German bombs. Krymov, a staunch Communist, is then accused of being a traitor and is sent to Lubyanka Prison in Moscow, where he is beaten and forced to confess. Yevghenia decides not to marry Novikov and goes to Moscow to try and visit Krymov. He receives a package from her and realizes that he still loves her but may never be released from prison.
The sections that take place in the camps have few recurring characters, with the exception of Mostovskoy, an old Bolshevik who takes part in a plot to rebel against the Germans, but is dismayed by the prevailing lack of faith in communism. His interrogator, Sturmbannführer Liss, asserts that fascism and communism are two sides of the same coin, which upsets Mostovskoy greatly. He is later killed by the Germans for his part in the uprising. In one scene, Liss tells Mostovskoy that both Stalin and Hitler are the leaders of qualitatively new formation: "When we look at each other's faces, we see not only a hated face; we see the mirror reflection.... Don't you recognize yourself, your will in us?" Grossman also focuses on Sofya Levinton, a Jewish woman on her way to a Nazi concentration camp.
The final chapter introduces a set of characters who remain anonymous: an elderly widow observing her tenants, a wounded army officer recently discharged from hospital, his wife and their young daughter. It is implied, however, that the officer returning to his family is Major Byerozkin, a recurring character from Stalingrad who is shown to be a kind man struggling to retain his humanity.
Main characters
;Viktor Pavlovich Shtrum:;Lyudmila Nikolaevna Shaposhnikova:
;Yevgenia Nikolaevna Shaposhnikova:
;Alexandra Vladimirovna
;Dementiy Trifonovich Getmanov
;Abarchuk:
;Pyotr Lavrentyevich Sokolov:
;Mikhail Sidorovich Mostovskoy:
;Sofya Osipovna Levinton:
;Captain Grekov:
;Nikolay Grigorevich Krymov:
;Colonel Pyotr Pavlovich Novikov:
Historical context
Most of the events of Life and Fate take place in the Soviet Union during the late autumn and winter of 1942–43. It was the time of Operation Blue and Operation Fischreiher, the continuation into a second year of Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union that had started with Operation Barbarossa; it was the time of the Battle of Stalingrad. But, just as much as it takes place as a part of the Second World War, it takes place as part of the history of Stalinist Russia.The book begins when Axis forces lay siege to the city. Throughout the book there are references to the decaying city and the damage from aerial bombardments and artillery based around the city. There are also occasions in the novel in which the Axis blockade is quite noticeable. The characters suffer from starvation and thirst. The book ends with the surrender of German field-marshal Friedrich Paulus' 6th Army remnants and the return of civilians to the city.
The novel's characters are a combination of fictional and historical figures. The historical figures include Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. Many of the characters are more loosely based on a historical figure, or a representative Soviet citizen. The main character, Viktor Shtrum, is a “self portrait” of Grossman himself, though Shtrum also had a real-life prototype - the Soviet nuclear physicist , who was a family friend of Grossmans in Kyiv. One of the most promising Soviet physicists of his time, Lev Shtrum was arrested and executed during Stalin's Great Purge. Vasily Grossman took an enormous risk and immortalized his friend, first in the novel "Stalingrad", which was first published under the title "For a Just Cause" in 1952, i.e. still in Stalin's lifetime, and then - in the novel "Life and Fate".
In Life and Fate there are different times when the Nazi concentration camps are mentioned. A long section of Life and Fate is about a German prison camp, where many characters are on their way to the gas chamber to be gassed; then follows a dialogue of ranked Nazi officers inside a new gas chamber who toast its opening. The characters shipped off to Germany had been caught leaving one of the countries under Nazi rule. Grossman's inclusion is historically accurate, since there are records of many Russians in Nazi labor and death camps. Grossman also includes another German concentration camp where one of his main arguments takes place concerning communism and fascism. Grossman devotes large sections of the book to the prisoners held at Soviet and German labor and concentration camps, which is necessary for a holistic understanding of the time and events.