Product Description

At the centre of this epic novel, overshadowing the lives of its huge cast of Russian and German characters, looms the battle of Stalingrad. Within a world torn apart by ideological tyranny and war, Grossman's characters must work out their destinies. Completed in 1960 but confiscated by the KGB, this sweeping panorama of Soviet Society rejected the compromises of a lifetime and earned its author denunciation and disgrace. It remained unpublished until it was smuggled into the West in 1980, where it was hailed as a masterpiece.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16532 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 880 pages

Review
One of the finest Russian novels of the 20th century Daily Telegraph One of the great writers of the last century Observer A literary genius. His Life And Fate is rated by many as the finest Russian novel of the 20th Century Mail on Sunday One of the world's great war novels Independent on Sunday Vasily Grossman's novel is burnt in my memory, not only by its huge canvas, its meditation on tyranny, and its dazzling description of war, but also because this is the novel that made me cry - not just a few leaked tears, but a full-scale sobbing episode - in Montpellier airport... Grossman lost his mother in a concentration camp. In Life and Fate, he writes with tenderness, and pain, not only of that experience but of what it is like to survive tyranny. A classic indeed Independent 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

About the Author
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.

Customer Reviews

A masterpiece
I was always of the view that, thanks to the PhD industry, there weren’t any neglected masterpieces out there. Life and Fate has proved me wrong. What I loved about this book was its scale, its ambition, and its earnestness. Grossman has something of passionate importance to tell the world. The book could just as easily have been entitled Good and Evil, Freedom and Slavery, or War and Peace.

Despite the book’s settings - German concentration and Russian labour camps, the Lubyanka, Stalingrad - it’s not fundamentally grim. Grossman is as interested in the nature of Good as he is of Evil. A 50 year old woman doctor ‘adopts’ a small boy as the doors of the gas chamber shut. The commander of a tank battalion spares his men by holding fire for ten minutes with Stalin breathing down his neck.. A Russian woman comforts a dying German soldier.

Grossman believed in the individual and the individual’s essential humanity. This is easy to say and seems sententious when made written down but he also believes in literature with a capital L. The task he sets himself is to create characters and settings that demonstrate this humanity.

Fabulous stuff. Be warned. Clever postmodernist novels are going to look pretty trivial after this.

Exceptional - check out the last pages first
I can't really add much to the previous reviews, as this is an exceptional novel and truely gripping all the way through (no mean feat for nearly 900 pages). If you're familiar with other Grossman writings (e.g. his diaries) then you can see that many of the characters and situations are taken from real experiences and people that he encountered during his war reporting. To me that makes it an even better read, as whilst a novel, it is based soundly on real life.

One tip, check out the character index at the back of the book, before you start reading. Unless you're good with Russian names, it can be a bit hard to follow at first. The index (which I only discovered three quarters of the way though) really helps with identifying who is who.

No question that this is a five star book.

An amazingly deep and moving portrayal of Soviet society
This has to be one of the finest works of fiction I have ever had the pleasure to read. It is a collosal work depicting the struggles of a large cast of people against the backdrop of the Stalingrad conflict. The beauty of this book is how Grossman manages to include almost every aspect of Soviet society into the text. This gives his work a sense of completeness but also adds to the sense of futility; not one of the characters is left unscathed from a tragedy caused by either the war, or the state. A major attribute is Grossman's ability to make us care what happens to the individuals involved, some of whom become entrapped in Kafka-esque situations. A further help is Grossman's own philosphical insights into all the subjects he treats, including an intriguing passage in which he compares Communism to Fascism. The translation is good and the prose flows, the story is excellent and gripping. This novel is a masterpiece of human suffering and survival in a waring socilaist state.