LIFE AND FATE (Zhizn' i sud'ba)

Novel by Vasily Grossman, 1980

Vasily Grossman was no mere passive observer of the horrific events that befell his country; at one and the same time he was both the witness and the victim of the Holocaust, of the atrocities of both the German and the Russian versions of totalitarianism, and of both Nazi and Soviet anti-Semitism. In his work Life and Fate (1985; Zhizn' i sud'ba, 1980) a novel that may be compared in scope to Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, he sets out to examine, among other things, what has been aptly described as the "diabolical pact" between Adolf Hitler's Germany and Joseph Stalin's Russia. After his father's death in 1956, Grossman, virtually ignored at this time by the Soviet writing establishment, decided to dedicate all his remaining energies to the completion of a work in which he would attempt to portray the truth about both Stalingrad and Berdichev, truths that had already been clouded and obscured by the officially approved postwar Soviet versions.

Grossman employs the device of the omniscient narrator to tell his tale. The work presents both historical and imaginary characters, and it additionally invites comparisons between Napoleon's invasion of Russia and that of Hitler. In many of the digressions the various degrees of anti-Semitism are discussed, the conclusion being that there are three, the last one the most dangerous and one that can arise only in a totalitarian state. The action of Life and Fate begins in 1942, at the point when the Germans are pushing the Russians defending Stalingrad back toward the Volga. It is autumn. The novel ends in the spring of the following year, some months after the final surrender of the German 6th Army at Stalingrad in February. The novel, however, also contains various flash-forwards—to the Hungarian uprising of 1956, for example—and the various philosophical digressions by the narrator help to create a sense of timelessness for the work, thus underlining the important moral issues that lie at its deepest level. It is a work that deals with, among other things, the problems of individual freedom, of making moral choices, and it faces too the quest for life's meaning in the midst of chaos and horror (a theme that is also central to the much earlier work Red Cavalry by the Russian Jewish writer Isaac Babel).

It has been noted many times that the Russian victory at Stalingrad "prolonged the agony of the Russian people"; many of the characters in Life and Fate express their hopes for greater personal freedoms in postwar Russia while, on the other hand, Party officials prepare to curtail all such freedoms once the German danger has been routed. In Life and Fate Grossman, in his search for the truth about the Holocaust and Hitler's invasion, stirs up and challenges many of the myths that the Soviet government had used to conceal the reality of the indifference and incompetence of the leadership. Grossman shows, for example, how the ordinary Soviet soldier becomes the victim not only of the German enemy but also of Soviet Party officials. It still is possible that Grossman's novel might not have been "arrested" if its criticisms of Soviet society had gone no further. As noted above, however, the greatest "danger" contained in Life and Fate was to be found in the author's investigation of totalitarianism. From the official Soviet point of view, the Nazi state had nothing at all in common with the Soviet regime. Grossman in Life and Fate argues persuasively that they are but two sides of the same coin. Seen from this perspective it is not then surprising that the manuscript was seized and publication of the novel was denied in Grossman's lifetime. This is a work that appeared late on the Soviet literary scene and one that caused the same powerful impact as Mikhail Bulgakov's Master and Margarita had done some 20 years before. Like the latter, it is a work that testifies to the greatness of the human spirit, and it bears a message that is relevant to all readers.

—Margaret Tejerizo