Life and Fate

Vasily Semyonovich Grossman was born on December 12, 1905, in Berdichev, a Ukrainian town that was home to one of Europe's largest Jewish communities. In 1934 he published both "In the Town of Berdichev"—a short story that won the admiration of such diverse writers as Maksim Gorky, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Isaak Babel—and a novel, Glyukauf, about the life of the Donbass miners. During the Second World War, Grossman worked as a reporter for the army newspaper Red Star, covering nearly all of the most important battles from the defense of Moscow to the fall of Berlin. His vivid yet sober "The Hell of Treblinka" (late 1944), one of the first articles in any language about a Nazi death camp, was translated and used as testimony in the Nuremberg trials. His novel For a Just Cause (originally titled Stalingrad) was published in 1952 and then fiercely attacked. A new wave of purges—directed against the Jews—was about to begin; but for Stalin's death in March 1953, Grossman would almost certainly have been arrested. During the next few years Grossman, while enjoying public success, worked on his two masterpieces, neither of which was to be published in Russia until the late 1980s: Life and Fate and Everything Flows. The KGB confiscated the manuscript of Life and Fate in February 1961. Grossman was able, however, to continue working on Everything Flows, a work even more critical of Soviet society than Life and Fate, until his last days in the hospital. He died on September 14, 1964, on the eve of the twenty-third anniversary of the massacre of the Jews of Berdichev, in which his mother had died. »

Robert Chandler's translations of Sappho and Guillaume Apollinaire are published in the series "Everyman's Poetry." His translations from Russian include Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, Leskov's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and Aleksander Pushkin's Dubrovsky and The Captain's Daughter. Together with his wife, Elizabeth, and other colleagues he has co-translated numerous works by Andrey Platonov. One of these, Soul, was chosen in 2004 as "best translation of the year from a Slavonic language" by the AATSEEL (the American Association of Teachers of Slavonic and East European Languages); it was also shortlisted for the 2005 Rossica Translation Prize and the Weidenfeld European Translation Prize. Robert Chandler's translation of Hamid Ismailov's The Railway won the AATSEEL prize for 2007 and received a special commendation from the judges of the 2007 Rossica Translation Prize. Robert Chandler is the editor of Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida and the author of a biography of Alexander Pushkin. »

By Vasily Grossman
Translated from the Russian and with an introduction by Robert Chandler

A book judged so dangerous in the Soviet Union that not only the manuscript but the ribbons on which it had been typed were confiscated by the state, Life and Fate is an epic tale of World War II and a profound reckoning with the dark forces that dominated the twentieth century. Interweaving a transfixing account of the battle of Stalingrad with the story of a single middle-class family, the Shaposhnikovs, scattered by fortune from Germany to Siberia, Vasily Grossman fashions an immense, intricately detailed tapestry depicting a time of almost unimaginable horror and even stranger hope. Life and Fate juxtaposes bedrooms and snipers' nests, scientific laboratories and the Gulag, taking us deep into the hearts and minds of characters ranging from a boy on his way to the gas chambers to Hitler and Stalin themselves. This novel of unsparing realism and visionary moral intensity is one of the supreme achievements of modern Russian literature.

Read the introduction (PDF)

Reviews

Grossman stands in the tradition of the Russian novelists of the nineteenth century. His characters, like Dostoyevsky's, engage in great philosophical debates; and the structure of Life and Fate is loosely based on that of Tolstoy's War and Peace. Ideologically, however, the model to which Grossman admitted to feeling closest was Chekhov...who brought into Russian literature a new kind of humanism based on the ideas of freedom and loving kindness.
— Tzvetan Todorov

[A book of] powerful human warmth.... The depiction of the Shtrum family...feels like Chekhov, or even Bellow.
— Keith Gessen, The New Yorker

Takes its place beside The First Circle and Doctor Zhivago as a masterful evocation of the fate of Russia as it is expressed through the lives of its people.
— USA Today

Not just a great WWII novel: a masterpiece by any yardstick.
— New Statesman & Society

…portraying a society that knows neither physical nor spiritual peace….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…novel is wrenching and compelling in its portrait of loyal citizens who repel the Nazi invaders only to face renewed repression at home.
— Mary F. Zirin, Library Journal

[A] sweeping account of the siege of Stalingrad…. Grossman offers a bitter, compelling vision of a totalitarian regime where the spirit of freedom that arose among those under fire was feared by the state at least as much as were the Nazis….Yet, Grossman suggests that the spirit of freedom can never be completely crushed. His lengthy, absorbing novel which rejected the compromises of a lifetime and earned its author denunciation and disgrace testifies eloquently to that spirit.
— Publishers Weekly

[An] extraordinarily dark portrait of Soviet society.
— David Remnick, The Washington Post

Grossman's epic novel…draws uncomfortable parallels between Nazi and Soviet power, a politically potent theme.
— Bill Keller, The New York Times

Novels like [Solzhenitsyn's cycle] and Life and Fate eclipse almost all that passes for serious fiction in the West today.
— George Steiner

Also see:

Soul
By Andrey Platonov
Translated from the Russian by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler with Katia Grigoruk, Angela Livingstone, Olga Meerson and Eric Naiman
Introduction by Robert Chandler
Afterword by John Berger

Andrey Platonov is one of Russia's finest post-revolution novelists, and this definitive and newly translated collection of his works positions him amongst the greatest of twentieth-century writers. On Robert Chandler's translation, The Observer wrote, "Rarely does literature come this close to being music."

Novels of War Collection

Life and Fate, The Stalin Front, and Kaputt

Everything Flows
By Vasily Grossman
Translated from the Russian by Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, and Anna Aslanyan
Introduction by Robert Chandler

The final novel from the author of Life and Fate centers a former political prisoner adjusting to freedom after decades spent in a Soviet camps. It is a story of love, survival, honor, and an indictment of the totalitarian state.

Format: Paperback
Retail Price: $22.95
Price: $17.21 (25% off)

May 16, 2006
904 pages
ISBN: 1590172019
9781590172018
All Literature in Translation
NYRB Classics
Literature in Russian

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Life and Fate

By Vasily Grossman Translated from the Russian and with an introduction by Robert Chandler

Reviews

Also see:

By Vasily Grossman
Translated from the Russian and with an introduction by Robert Chandler