Life and Fate

Synopsis

Life and Fate is Vasily Grossman’s vast, morally searching novel of the Second World War, centred on the Battle of Stalingrad and the Shaposhnikov family, whose members are scattered across the Soviet Union by the upheavals of war and political repression.

The novel moves between the domestic and the historical, following scientists, soldiers, prisoners, civilians, political officials, and members of the Shaposhnikov family as they navigate a world shaped by both Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Viktor Shtrum, a brilliant physicist, finds himself caught between scientific discovery, political pressure, and the fate of his Jewish mother. His relatives and friends confront imprisonment, evacuation, military service, persecution, and the constant uncertainty of life under totalitarian rule.

Grossman places intimate human experiences alongside the machinery of history. Family arguments, marriages, friendships, scientific work, acts of courage, and moments of ordinary kindness exist alongside concentration camps, the Gulag, mass executions, and the destruction of cities. The result is not simply a novel about war, but an examination of what happens to individual freedom and moral responsibility when political systems attempt to control every aspect of human life.

Written in the late 1950s and suppressed by Soviet authorities, Life and Fate was eventually published abroad decades later. Grossman’s expansive narrative has often been compared with Tolstoy’s War and Peace, but its vision is distinctly twentieth-century, confronting the parallel horrors of Nazism and Stalinism while insisting on the enduring importance of individual human dignity.

Translated from the Russian by Robert Chandler, this NYRB Classics edition presents one of the major works of twentieth-century Russian literature.

About the Author

Vasily Grossman (1905–1964) was a Russian novelist, journalist, and war correspondent. During the Second World War he reported from the front for Red Star, witnessing some of the most significant events of the Eastern Front, including the Battle of Stalingrad and the liberation of Nazi extermination camps.

His experiences during the war profoundly shaped his fiction. Life and Fate was completed in 1960, but Soviet authorities seized the manuscript and related materials, preventing publication during his lifetime. The novel was eventually published in the West in the 1980s and became recognized as one of the great literary accounts of totalitarianism and the Second World War.

Robert Chandler is a translator of Russian literature whose work includes translations of Grossman, Andrey Platonov, and other major Russian writers. His translation of Life and Fate has helped establish the novel as an important work of English-language world literature.

Publisher

New York Review Books Classics

Publication Date

May 16, 2006

Format

Paperback

Pages

896

Subjects

Literary Fiction; Russian Literature; World War II; Battle of Stalingrad; Soviet Union; Stalinism; Nazism; Totalitarianism; Historical Fiction; War Fiction; Family; Political Repression; Fiction in Translation

ISBN

9781590172018