Whence the novel’s deepest political and philosophical meditations on freedom and humanity: how, it asks, could the individual, and individuality itself, survive the “tragedy of the twentieth century”? Yet more scandalously, it compares the Gulag to the Nazi camps and gas chambers, and Soviet ideology to national socialism, concluding that the two totalitarian states were each other’s mirror images, rather than polar opposites. Those not directly involved in the fighting are drawn into other, potentially lethal battles with Stalinist bureaucracy and restrictions on free speech and research, or with its police and penal system.Įarlier than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag fiction, Grossman’s novel shows the Soviet prison system, from the “sleepless” secret-police headquarters in Moscow to the remote Soviet camps. The novel travels between the battle’s several fronts, but also to Moscow and to evacuee life in Kazan and Kuibyshev (now Samara).
Most simply, it recounts the extraordinarily brutal and heroic defence of Stalingrad in late 1942 and early 1943, which the author had begun to dramatise in the novel’s “prequel” For a Just Cause (first published 1952) and earlier reported on as the longest-serving journalist at the Stalingrad front.
One of the longest and most ambitious novels of the 20th century, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate (completed 1960) is many things at once.
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