Novel
Life and Fate
Жизнь и судьба
Vasily Grossman · 1960
Synopsis
During the Battle of Stalingrad, from the end of 1942 to the beginning of 1943, the novel follows the family of the physicist Viktor Shtrum, his wife Lyudmila and their daughter Nadya, as well as the Shaposhnikovs, including Yevgenia; around them revolve Nikolai Krymov and Colonel Novikov. The narrative moves from the city at war to the laboratories and the camps, Soviet and Nazi, and sets the two totalitarian regimes side by side.
Context
The author wrote the novel in 1959 and 1960 and submitted it to the journal Znamia; the KGB seized all the copies. Two manuscripts, hidden with relatives, survived: a microfilm reached the West in 1974, with the help of Vladimir Voinovich and Andrei Sakharov. The book was published in 1980 in Lausanne by L'Âge d'Homme, which also published the French translation by Alexis Berelowitch and Anne Coldefy-Faucard; it was not published in the Soviet Union until 1988.
Who it is for
A great novel of several hundred pages, for those who want to understand the war and the century of totalitarianisms.
Prizes and reception
Robert Chandler's English translation appeared in 1985, five years after the book's first edition.