Not a saga, not a tale, this is just a really long book. I suppose historical novel would be appropriate: it dwells at length on politics, tactical war operations, enumerations of humans as examples of misery. What ruined this book for me was the lack of structure: characters come in and out, events happen, points of view are examined but there is no common thread to carefully pull all these elements together. Ultimately, I became very disinterested in the characters' fate, could not identify with any and was bored with the long descriptions. It's a shame because certain passages are brilliantly written, full of human depth and feeling, with complex relationships reflecting the intricacies of human nature. In my opinion, a good editing job is needed - it would certainly make this novel more accessible to me! ( )

Any long, Russian novel covering a foreign invasion of the motherland is going to tagged with description“Tolstoyan” and inevitably going to be compared to War and Peace. Despite their similarities of topic and scope, these are superficial comparisons. Tolstoy’s narrative drive in War and Peace, starting with Prince Andre’s journey from Vienna to Austerlitz and ending when the author starts to wax philosophical around forty pages from the end, is unmatched. Grossman’s strength is the vignette. There are several marvelous ones. A Jew in a ghetto behind German lines observes his fellows react – or not react – as mass executions approach. A divisional staff spends a night on the banks of the Volga surrounded by burning oil from the storage tanks in Stalingrad. A woman unsuccessfully attempts to get a residency permit allowing her to live in her hometown but is turned down repeatedly by the bureaucracy despite the fact a main street is named after her father. Rather than Tolstoy, Grossman reminds me of Malaparte. Less black humor than Malaparte but the same emphasis on the brief scene that illuminates a larger canvas. I don’t think it’s a mere coincidence that both were journalists.
Grossman seems indirectly to be making the point that while a German victory at Stalingrad would have been an unthinkable catastrophe, as ultimate Soviet victory became more certain the previous doubt of the outcome and the need to generate popular support for the war effort had moderated the excesses of the Stalin regime.

Life and Fate is one of the most insightful and educational books I've ever read. Set in Russia around the defense of Stalingrad in WWII and the immediate aftermath, the book is extremely complex, intense, and articulate. It pays to learn a bit about Grossman's life before beginning and to look up facts, maps, and terms while reading.

Life and Fate is engaging and thoroughly thought-provoking. The subtle intricacies and comparisons between variations on Socialism, Communism and Fascism were enlightening and could only have been properly treated by someone like Grossman, who was there and really one of them (Soviet Jew). This is not your standard WWII book that we often read in the West. This is the story of the Eastern Front, which is often overlooked in Western Literature. As a child of the Cold War, I now have a much better understanding of how that era came into existence and some insight into the Soviet mindset. It is a worthy read, if you are willing to put in the time and effort to absorb all it has to offer. I imagine I'll be digesting and mulling it over for some time to come. 5 stars ( )

Though his characters are captivating, Grossman's philosophy on the good and on freedom is, as this reviewer puts it, rather hollow. But the novel is redeemed by the tragic beauty of its lives - the lives of people at the same time extraordinarily human and relatable, and yet laden by their time with fates beyond those of typical human existence. ( )

Excelente ( )

I guess the easiest way to review Life and Fate is to start of with a few breif points of reference. Structurally, the novel is all but indistinguishable from War and Peace. Austerlitz has been replaced by Stalingrad and Tolstoy's ruminations on the philosphy of history with Grossman's thoughts on, for example, anti-semitism and 'Socialism In One Country'.

But whereas War and Peace suffers considerably from Tolstoy's high-brow ramblings, Grossman's politico-philisophical perambulations serve well to knit the text together into a more meaningful and insightful novel. And the novel is meaningful and insightful. After so much has been published on the likes of the Holocaust and the Gulags, the sheer misery of living under Hitler or Stalin, I was skeptical that I would take anything away from reading through another novel on the same theme. Yet I was wrong. The depth of Grossman's understanding of the relationship between the individual and the totalitarian state is both authoritative and engrossing. The way in which Grossman deals with state collaboration and persecution is non-judgemental in a sense reminiscent of Chekhov's, capturing the experience; putting the individual first rather than some pre-concieved moralistic ideal. The character arcs of the protagonists intersect as they fall in and out of favour with the Soviet regime in a way not dissimilar from Chekhov's Ward No. 6. Talking of Cekhov, Grossman chooses to end the novel instead with a moving and beautiful allegory, and leaves the fate of the vast majority of the central characters unresolved.

As is mentioned in many of the other reviewson this web site, Life and Fate is highly autobiographical. From the point of view of detail, the novel benefits greatly from Grossman's experiences as a frontline reporter with Red Star from 1941 - 1945. Although the actual combat scenes are rather rare, Grossman's account of the front around Stalingrad is vivid. More important perhaps, are Grossman's more personal experiences. Both the death of his mother in the Ukraine and his tense and somewhat ambivelant relationship with the Soviet security services are fictionalised in the form of the main protagonist - Victor Struam's struggle with his Jewishness and his eventual submisiveness towards the state.

Indeed, the author deals with the theme of the individual and the police state in a compassionate, mature, understanding and humane way that, to be candid, is vastly superior to the efforts of some of Grossman's comtemporaries (i.e. Solzhenitsyn).

It's rare for one to come across an account of such an epoch by a writer who has both personal experience of the events involved and the requisite literary ability to pen these events convincingly and with the gravitas that such events demand. But in Life and Fate evidence of both the former and the latter are present in abundance. ( )

Zie: http://sn.im/rec-grossm (dutch) ( )

Life and Fate is a literary classic. Picture War and Peace set in the 20th century. Replace Napolean with Hitler and substitute the Shaposhnikov family for the Rostofs. I've read scores of works with a World War II backdrop, but never from this perspective.

Never have I seen the war from the viewpoint of the average Russian, at Stalingrad, in the Ukraine, in Moscow and in the death camps. Most jarring is the repressive shadow of Communism and the fear constantly felt by even the most patriotic and loyal party member. Most heart breaking is the astonishing story of Sofya Levinton, her journey to the gas chamber and her "adoption" of the frail, young orphan.

It has been said that a death is a shame, a thousand deaths is a tragedy, but twenty million deaths is a statistic (or something to that effect) and it is true. Until we see an event from the perspective of an individual, we cannot grasp the horror and the emotions involved in an historical event with the scale of a Stalingrad or Treblinka. We cannot grasp the fear and trepidation created by a party apparatus such as the 20th century Communist Party.

This classic work brings all those emotions and human reactions to bear through the eyes of a typical Russian extended family. Though it is a translation, it flows smoothly and seamlessly. While the plethora of Russian names and nicknames is sometimes confusing, an index of characters in the back of the book assists immeasurably. I cannot recommend this novel highly enough. ( )

In 1941, the Russian Army stopped the German advance on the west bank of the Volga at Stalingrad. In ferocious fighting, the Russians held the city against an unrelenting assault. Vasily Grossman worked as a reporter covering the siege, interviewing citizens, soldiers, snipers and officers. Almost twenty years later, he fashioned from those recollections this massive novel set in the bunkers of the soldiers, the homes of the noncombatants, and the German death camps. But rather than just offering a patriotic homage to the Russian resistance and eventual victory at Stalingrad, Grossman has constructed a bitter, scathing assessment of the Stalinist state, drawing parallels between the fervor of the Nazi Party members and the Communist Party under Stalin.

Vasily Grossman was a Ukranian Jew who studied to be a chemical engineer but turned to writing as a professional career. As he traveled with the Red Army from Stalingrad to Berlin, he was present as the Russians over ran Treblinka. He was one of the first outsiders to investigate the extermination camps of the Germans, gathering stories from the survivors and documenting the attrocities. Horrified by what he learned, and trying to deal with the execution of his own mother by the Germans, he and his fellow Jewish writers worked to document the extermination of the Russian Jewry by the Nazis during the war only to have the publication of their work blocked by the Soviet regime.

Life and Fate is a sprawling novel documenting the the lives of Russian citizens at the turning point of Word War II. The novel is filled with sketches of heroic soldiers fighting desperately to hold off the Germans at Stalingrad while the army rebuilds behind them for a counter attack. But heroism and military competence isn't necessarily rewarded in a totalitarian state. The soldiers and officers have as much to fear from the political wing of the military as they do from the Germans. Ideological purity is more important than mere competence. The petty ambitions of political bureaucrats have more influence on the execution of the war than the military judgment of a seasoned tank commander on the scene. Whether he is delaying the start of an offensive to deal with an artillery unit which threatens his tanks or attempting to give his exhausted soldiers a ten hour rest after days of nonstop fighting, he must first fight (and often lose) a political battle with the Party's Commissar.

Meanwhile, behind the lines, a nuclear physicist, Victor Schrum, fights his own political battles against the Communist Party when his new theoretical model of nuclear reactions and fission is deemed to be contrary to socialist principles. His situation is made worse by his own arrogance, but the absurdity of his dilemma is all too apparent. The idea that physical science must be ideologically pure is a surrealist nightmare worthy of Kafka. Of course his real problem is that he is Jewish with a German surname at the height of the war. Grossman paints a vivid picture of a man and his family trapped in a tightening net of political persecution and social isolation as friends abandon them for fear of being labeled as enemies of the state. Schrum and his family wait nervously for his inevitable arrest.

Perhaps the most gripping parts of the novel deal with the fate of those caught behind the German lines. The wholesale slaughter of Russian Jews at the hands of the Nazis is portrayed in a stark and frank fashion. He follows the work of Jewish prisoners digging up bodies from mass graves to destroy the evidence of genocide by the Nazis. But the most moving portion of the novel is a sequence of chapters following the fate of a train load of Jewish prisoners across the Ukraine to a concentration camp and into the gas chamber itself.

Life and Fate is a relentlessly grim, but mesmerizing, portrait of ordinary people ground between the machinery of two totalitarian states at war. It is easy to see why Grossman's novel was "arrested" by the Soviet government (to use his own description). Grossman uses the war to hold up a mirror to Stalinist Russia and shows us a red star reflected back as a swastika. ( )

Suppressed by the KGB, Life and Fate is a rich and vivid account of what the Second World War meant to the Soviet Union.

On its completion in 1960, Life and Fate was suppressed by the KGB. Twenty years later, the novel was smuggled out of the Soviet Union on microfilm. At the centre of this epic novel looms the battle of Stalingrad. Within a world torn apart by ideological tyranny and war, Grossman's characters must work out their destinies. Chief among these are the members of the Shaposhnikov family, Lyudmila, a mother destroyed by grief for her dead son; Viktor, her scientist-husband who falls victim to anti-semitism; and Yevgenia, forced to choose between her love for the courageous tank-commander Novikov and her duty to her former husband. Life and Fate is one of the great Russian novels of the 20th century, and the richest and most vivid account there is of what the Second World War meant to the Soviet Union.

Grossman (1905-64) hoped that Life and Fate (1960), the sequel to his World War II novel In a Just Cause (Za Pra voe delo, 1954; no English translation), would appear in the USSR. Even dur ing the 1960s thaw, that proved impossible. The translator compares the book to War and Peace , but it is closer to Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle in portraying a society that knows neither physical nor spiritual peace. Grossman uses one family's experiences of the months of the Stalingrad campaign to show the entire mad tapestry woven by Stalin and Hitler. Like Solzhenitsyn, he depicts laboratories, prisons, and the Soviet elite's uneasy privilege, but he also covers both sides of the front and follows Jews to the gas chambers. This sprawling, uneven novel is wrenching, and compelling in its portrait of loyal citizens who repel the Nazi invaders only to face renewed repression at home.

This is a monumental novel, worthy of the description that has sometimes been applied to it of being the twentieth century's War and Peace. It details a range of suffering and cruelties, both large and petty, on all sides. Many of the day to day details of Stalinism are here: the constant presence of denunciations and the way small events can make or break someone's life, such as the central character of Viktor Shtrum falling due to his contacts with non-Russian scientists and then rising after a telephone call from Stalin praising his work, or Krymov being arrested and beaten up despite his years of loyal service and belief in the cause. Other particularly memorable sequences include the gas chamber scenes and the dialogue between a Nazi officer and Soviet prisoner Mostovskoy as the former tries and nearly succeeds in convincing his captive that Nazism and Communism are marching in the same direction.

I generally find descriptions of actual battle scenes fairly tedious to read, but they are there as they should be and due attention is paid to the significance of Stalingrad as the turning point in leading to the defeat of Nazism.

From the Soviet regime's point of view it is hardly surprising Suslov told Grossman it could not be published for 200 years as it goes well beyond criticism of Stalin and destroys the whole raison d'etre of the Soviet regime. In this respect it goes beyond the much better known Doktor Zhivago, an excellent novel but probably more famous in the West very largely because of the superb David Lean film. For me, Life and Fate tops Pasternak's novel as the best Russian novel of the Soviet era. ( )

Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, the classic epic novel of WWII Russia, centers on the Shaposhnikova family and their life in totalitarian Stalinist Soviet Russia, and in particular on the Battle of Stalingrad, but there are literally dozens of characters in a multitude of settings.

The tale is unrelentingly grim. Nearly every character dies, is betrayed to the Soviet authorities, or simply suffers - and no ordinary suffering, but genuine Slavic deprivation. With a few temporary exceptions, universal hunger and material deprivation prevail. Hunger ranges from ever-present to starvation. Political betrayal runs rampant across every class of Stalinist Soviet society with mind-boggling inefficiency. Grossman also describes the very beginnings of the Nazi Holocaust at Treblinka and other extermination camps, including a blood-chilling scene with Eichmann having dinner at the camp to celebrate its opening.

Life and Fate is not an easy book to read on several levels. It is long - some 871 pages. It is ceaselessly grim and gritty. Keeping track of the characters and various plot lines is a challenge (The book contains a handy listing of the main characters in an 8-page appendix. For the Western reader, the Russian surnames are hard to keep straight. I recommend keeping an extra bookmark in place at the Appendix). Grossman's characters engage in lengthy intellectual dialogue.

For some of these same reasons, the book is also vastly rewarding. As the excellent introduction to the New York Review of Books edition puts it, Life and Fate is "almost an encyclopedia of the complexities of life under totalitarianism" and the pressures brought to bear on the individual. Absolutely the highest recommendation. Five stars don't do it justice. ( )