Life and Fate

Military Review,  May-June, 2007  by Jeff Wilson

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LIFE AND FATE, Vasily Grossman, New York Review of Books, NY, 2006, 871 pages, $22.95.

Editor's note: Called by many critics "one of the greatest novels of the Soviet era and certainly the best Russian novel on Worm War II, "Life and Fate was recently republished, with fanfare, after a long hiatus from print.

In her personal and poignant memoir Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia (Penguin, New York, reissue edition 2002), Catherine Merridale observes that the "social effects of catastrophes like war and genocide are not exclusively subjects for historians." In the exhaustive--and exhausting--novel Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman reveals a Russian identity that is so far beyond the reach of fact-finders and trend seekers as to be virtually unknown, except to those brave enough to look past the what, where, and most of the how of Russian history to see the naked Russian soul through the all-too-human lenses of pride, guilt, love, selfish ambition, and the desire to survive.

Western military analysts tend to view the Russian experience in World War II through a God's-eye lens, seeing the June 1941 German invasion, the Russian defeats at Kiev, Smolensk, and Minsk, the encirclement of Leningrad, the defense of Moscow, the bitter street-by-street struggle for Stalingrad, and the great early-1943 Russian counteroffensive as points on a continuum from German hegemony in Europe in 1940 to German defeat in 1945. As such, the battles and campaigns are military means to military ends. Analyzed extrinsically, they are no more or less valuable as subjects of study than the Normandy invasion or the battle of El Alamein. In Life and Fate, Grossman, a Russian correspondent whose inspirational musings in the Soviet Army newspapers kept hope (and, sometimes, even humor) alive for countless thousands of Russians in the darkest days of the war, affords us a rare opportunity to think about great historical events in terms of their intrinsic value to the understanding of the human condition--especially the relationship of the individual to the collective.

The novel reveals from multiple points of view that, for Joseph Stalin, World War II both interrupted and enhanced the systematic government-sponsored terrorism of the Russian people--begun some 20 years before the German invasion--that made the individual Russian, in Merridale's words, "not only victim but collaborator" in the never-ending assault on human dignity that was the Soviet Union. If, as Benedict Anderson argues, nations are (merely?) imagined communities, then national identity is somehow extrinsically imposed through a complex process of coupling individual identity with group identity that begins at birth and continues until death in a way that diminishes (and can erase) the influence of any inherited predispositions.

Stalin, perhaps even more than Adolf Hitler, Mao Tse-Tung, or any other exemplar of modern inhumanity, understood that the way to forge a national identity that consumed someone was to remove any vestige of the other kinds of community that people consider essential for a meaningful human life. Stalin made it nearly impossible to value membership in family, church, marriage, friendship, or any other type of personal association, except in relation to one's association with the state. What is remarkable is not that Stalin destroyed so many marriages, villages, societies, political parties, religious groups, friendships, or intellectual forums; the remarkable fact, and perhaps the best testimonial to the notion that human persons are indeed unique entities in the cosmos, fate or no fate, God or no God, is that any community outside the state survived at all. Grossman's characters show how--and at what cost.

Grossman, a Russian Jew, finished the novel in 1960, but it was not published anywhere until 1980 (in France), 14 years after he died. Already renowned for his World War II journalism and such novels as The People Immortal (Hutchinson & Co., 1943), and For a Just Cause (1952), Grossman hoped--in the relative freedom of the Khrushchev-era "thaw"--to publish a definitive Russian epic, of a scale not seen since Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (Modern Library, New York, 2002). Unfortunately, his novel was far too honest. It had the distinction of being the only book formally arrested during the Communist reign. (Grossman himself remained unmolested by the authorities, although the government confiscated the manuscript, the typewriter ribbons, and the carbons in February 1961).

Following a dozen characters essential to the narrative arc of the story and some 25 others central to the main characters' lives, Grossman draws on his own experiences to paint a panoramic portrait of Russia in 1942, from the rampant anti-Semitism that still exists there today, to the randomness of the state-sponsored terror, to the frozen hell of Stalingrad. This New York Review of Books edition contains an informative introductory essay and a cast of characters, grouped by physical location (Russians inside a German concentration camp, Russians inside a Russian gulag, Russian soldiers in Stalingrad, German soldiers in Stalingrad, Russian scientists at a government research center, etc.), which becomes helpful the further one wades into the 871-page text.