Vasily Grossman’s masterpiece Life and Fate is fascinating for many reasons, and one of them is the way that it is both a pastiche and a personal statement a conscious, cold-blooded attempt to sum up everything Grossman knew about the Great Patriotic War, and at the same time to rewrite War and Peace. In vividly rendered scenes that range from the dramatic battle of Stalingrad to the remote Siberian gulag, and encompassing characters ranging from a grieving mother to a woman in love and from a six-year-old boy on the way to a gas chamber to Stalin and Hitler, Grossman’s masterpiece is a profound and moving reckoning with the darkness of the twentieth century and a testament to the stubborn persistence of kindness and hope.Įveryman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.In Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism – a difficult book, but, it seems increasingly clear, the most important critical work of the last twenty years – Fredric Jameson observes that ‘the disappearance of the individual subject, along with its formal consequence, the increasing unavailability of the personal style, engender the well-nigh universal practice today of what may be called pastiche.’ This thought-provoking assertion captures a truth about the shift from the modern to the postmodern: there is something pastiche-like about a great many contemporary writers, not least those who write in a personal voice which is in itself a variety of pastiche. Grossman’s extensive wartime reporting, combined with his Tolstoyan narrative skills, allow him to portray with unprecedented detail and authenticity the human cost of the struggle between two freedom-denying powers.

Shtrum is a brilliant nuclear physicist who faces rising anti-Semitism in Moscow while his relatives navigate the threat of camps and prisons on both the Soviet and the Nazi sides.

The sprawling plot follows the travails of the extended family of Viktor Shtrum along the vast eastern front of the war.

Suppressed by the KGB and years later smuggled out of the Soviet Union to be published, Vasily Grossman’s novel is an unsparing story of ordinary Russians tragically caught between the fascism of the invading Nazis and the oppression of their own Soviet government. This panoramic novel about a family scattered across the Soviet Union and Europe during World War II is a monument of modern Russian literature by the Ukrainian-born writer hailed as “the Tolstoy of the USSR.”

Life and fate