On its posthumous publication in 1980, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate was widely compared with War and Peace. For all the novel’s many virtues, the comparison was hyperbolic. In one respect, how-ever, Grossman’s was the more remarkable achievement. Whereas Tolstoy wrote about historical events with the benefit of hindsight, Grossman wrote about ones that he had recently endured.
Life and Fate was the third of Grossman’s novels set during the Nazi invasion of the former Soviet Union. The first was The People Immortal, which, like the second, Stalingrad, is now available in an unexpurgated edition, superbly translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler. It covers a few days in July 1941 when, after their surprise attack, German forces had encircled entire divisions of the Red Army and ravaged villages in Belorussia and Ukraine.
Grossman, a correspondent for the military newspaper Red Star, witnessed many of the horrors. In April 1942, he was given leave to write a novel about life at the Front, which was published a mere three months later. Unlike the two subsequent novels, The People Immortal was intended primarily as propaganda. With the exception of Colonel Bruchmüller, who deplores the backbiting in Berlin and admires the Russian ‘character’, the Germans are presented as outright monsters, ‘smashing crosses in cemeteries… stepping on the throats of old women… ripping linen shifts from the bodies of breastfeeding mothers’.
Meanwhile, the Soviet people are depicted as defending their motherland in prose that swells like a patriotic chorus by Prokofiev:
And tens of millions of people rose to meet them – from the bright Oka and the broad Volga, from the stern, yellow Kama and the cold, foaming Irtysh, from the steppes of Kazakhstan, from the Donbas and Kerch, from Astrakhan and Voronezh.
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