Book Reviews

Life and Fate is a remarkable novel despite its sometimes unremarkable prose that bears witness to Grossman's earlier socialist realism style of writing.. The book's emotional core involves the issues of man's life Grossman addresses, most particularly mans struggle for freedom in an unfree world. The book's narrative line (general descriptions of the story line appear in the editorial reviews and will not be repeated in this review) centers on the bloodiest battle of the 20th century, the Battle of Stalingrad. Josef Skvorecky put the central question of Life and Fate thusly: "Does man lose his innate yearning for freedom? The fate of both man and the totalitarian State depends on the answer to this question. If human nature does change, then the eternal and world wide triumph of the dictatorial state is assured; if his yearning for freedom remains constant, then the totalitarian state is doomed."

Grossman was born in Berdichev, Ukraine in 1905. Although Jewish by birth, Grossman was never particularly religious and his family supported the 1917 revolution. After receiving a degree in chemistry Grossman found work in the Donbass coal mines. Encouraged to write by Maxim Gorky, Grossman began writing short stories and plays. Grossman adopted to Stalin's maxim that writers were engineers of human souls and his work was firmly rooted in the rather tedious school of socialist realism. Grossman's play "If You Believe the Pythagoreans" attacked the philosophical rants of intellectuals and argued that they were garbage not "worth a good worker's boot." For all intents and purposes, Grossman was a true believer. How and why did this change?

Grossman volunteered for the front after the German invasion in 1941 and worked as a reporter for Red Star, an army newspaper known for its forthright reports from the front lines, including Stalingrad and Kursk. Grossman received national fame due to his reporting. Grossman was the first reporter to write first hand accounts of German concentration camps and his work at Treblinka understandably had a devastating impact on his world view. Grossman learned after the war that his mother, who he failed to move from Berdichev to Moscow after the invasion perished in Hitler's genocide. It was the death of his mother and the post war anti-Semitic campaigns of Stalin that may have led Grossman to challenge his own acceptance of Soviet orthodoxy and set him to work on Life and Fate and his other major work, Forever Flowing.

The scope of the story and the cast of characters are vast and in the tradition of both Tolstoy and Pasternak. The characters may be hard to keep track of but this edition contains a list of characters and their geographic location during the story. The central characters include Viktor Shtrum, a scientist, and his extended family. Other central figures include Captain Grekov, the leader of a group of soldiers doing battle with the Nazi's in a bombed out apartment building (much of the fighting in Stalingrad consisted of hand to hand fighting in factories and apartment buildings in the heart of the city). Grekov is an iconoclast doing battle with not only the Nazis but the political commissars (such as Nikolay Krymov, the first husband of Shtrum's wife). Key scenes in the book also take place in a German concentration camp, and a Russian labor camp. The relationships between the characters in Life and Fate form the connection between the disparate geographic settings in the book

A letter from Viktor's mother to Viktor became the emotional heart of the book for me. Shtrum's mother, like Grossman's, was left behind in the Ukraine and fell victim to the SS. Shtrum's mother was able to get one last letter out to Viktor. In it she sets out her vision and her hope of how she would like Viktor to act in the face of adversity, oppression, and dead. One can only imagine Grossman's own emotions as he worked on this portion of the manuscript. The fact that Viktor does not live up to her mother's hopes when asked by the party to sacrifice his honor on a matter of principle sums up the desperate choices that must sometimes be made to survive in an oppressive regime. One can also guess that Grossman sought to honor his beloved mother's memory by writing Life and Fate and submitting it for publication. One can only hope that his mother somehow looked down and smiled as Vasily took his personal leap of faith.

Life and Fate is a wonderful book. Grossman's assertion towards the end of his work that we can be slaves by fate but not slaves by nature is an important concept to keep a hold of today.

Some reviewers both here and elsewhere have taken Grossman to task for suggesting that the Soviet regime was a mirror image of the Nazi state. Both were collectivist societeis, both exalted group rights over the individual, both were run by a party apparatus, Both employed terror on their own citizens and remained in power through sheer force. Germany has had to atone for her crimes many times over but the Soviet state has yet to acknowledge the murder of up to 50 million people according to the mathematician dissident Vladimir Bukovsky.

The titantic struggle between these two forces forms the basis of the book. But it is not just the battles; Grossman allows us to see the human behind the machine, the wants and needs and hopes of common people. It is impossible for anyone who has not been in battle - particularly a siege - to grasp the futility and absolute unreality of the situation. That is why the small deeds and everyday actions seem to stand out; they are subtle reminders of a time without war, normality and reason.

And in this theater of the absurd, Grossman documents the almost insane actions of the Soviet regime: The political commander's rabid focus on Marxist theory when people are starving, the wasting of human beings as mere objects, the violence and above all else, arguing Socialist theory amidst rubble, the dreary, gray, hapless lives in a totalitarain state.

There are some who can never bring themselves to criticize the Soviet regime and Marxism's utter failure in almost every field of achievement - economic, political, artistic, financial, scientific. Grossman says yes, this is all true, but what counts are the pathetic lives of the unlucky but steadfast citizens caught in the grip of madmen; this is where the real crime takes place. It ends in a silent desolation that is almost stifling.