Life and Fate (novel)
| Author | Vasily Grossman |
|---|---|
| Original title | Жизнь и судьба |
| Country | U.S.S.R. |
| Language | Russian |
| Genre | Historical novel, war, philosophical, political fiction |
Life and Fate (Russian: Жизнь и судьба) is a 1959 novel by Vasily Grossman and the author's magnum opus. Technically, it is the second half of the author's conceived two-part book under the same title. Although the first half, the novel For the Right Cause, written during the reign of Joseph Stalin and first published in 1952, expresses loyalty to the regime, Life and Fate sharply criticises Stalinism.
Vasily Grossman, a Ukrainian Jew, was a correspondent for the Soviet military paper Krasnaya Zvezda throughout World War II. He spent approximately 1,000 days on the frontlines, roughly three of the four years of the conflict between the Germans and Soviets. He was also author of the novel The People Immortal. He was one of the first journalists to write about the ethnic cleansing of people in Eastern Europe and he was present at many famous battles. Life and Fate was his defining achievement.
Life and Fate, the sequel to For a Just Cause, was written in the aftermath of Stalin's death. Grossman submitted it around October 1960 for potential publication to the Znamya magazine. At this point, the KGB raided his apartment. The manuscripts, carbon copies and notebooks, as well as the typists' copies and even the typewriter ribbons were seized.
On 23 July 1962, the Politburo ideology chief Mikhail Suslov told the author that, if published, his book could inflict even greater harm to the Soviet Union than Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. Suslov told Grossman that his novel could not be published for two or three hundred years. Suslov's comment reveals both the presumption of the censor and recognition of the work's lasting literary value. Grossman tried to appeal against this verdict to Khrushchev personally:
"I ask you to return freedom for my book, I ask that my book be discussed with editors, not the agents of the KGB. What is the point of me being physically free when the book I dedicated my life to is arrested... I am not renouncing it... I am requesting freedom for my book."
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