markm reviewed The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman by John Garrard
Review of 'The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
Said to be the greatest work of Vasily Grossman, Jewish Soviet journalist and author, this book was impounded and almost certainly destroyed in 1960 by the KGB, but Grossman had given copies to two friends. Finally published in English in the 1980s and in Russia during the period of glasnost in 1988, this is a great, moving, and terrible account of the siege of Stalingrad, the Holocaust, the Gulag, and the circumstances and philosophy of everyday life in Stalin’s Soviet Union. The author constructed the work as a new War and Peace with similarities including the title itself, the many characters, its episodic nature, Hitler and Paulus substituting for Napoleon, and probably many others that I’ve missed. Some of the episodes are reminiscent of Chekov’s stories, with their examination of complex human behavior, the use of humor, the lack of a tied-up ending and the sense that the characters continue …
Said to be the greatest work of Vasily Grossman, Jewish Soviet journalist and author, this book was impounded and almost certainly destroyed in 1960 by the KGB, but Grossman had given copies to two friends. Finally published in English in the 1980s and in Russia during the period of glasnost in 1988, this is a great, moving, and terrible account of the siege of Stalingrad, the Holocaust, the Gulag, and the circumstances and philosophy of everyday life in Stalin’s Soviet Union. The author constructed the work as a new War and Peace with similarities including the title itself, the many characters, its episodic nature, Hitler and Paulus substituting for Napoleon, and probably many others that I’ve missed. Some of the episodes are reminiscent of Chekov’s stories, with their examination of complex human behavior, the use of humor, the lack of a tied-up ending and the sense that the characters continue on after the story ends. Grossman’s well-known fine powers of observation, his interviewing techniques, and his imagination yield especially striking accounts of the thoughts of a child entering the Auschwitz gas chamber and of a Soviet Commissar undergoing interrogation at the Lubyanka prison in Moscow.
Some of the author’s thoughts that caught my eye:
And what did this doctrine of peace and love bring to humanity?....[It] caused more suffering than all the crimes of the people who did evil for its own sake.....People are wrong to see life as a struggle between good and evil....[human kindness] is what is truly human in a human being....Kindness is powerful only while it is powerless.
By the way, do you know the difference between a good type and a bad type? A good type is someone who behaves swinishly in spite of himself.
Tell me what you accuse the Jews of–I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of.
...however rich and famous a man may be, he will still grow old, die and yield his place to the young; that perhaps nothing matters except to live one’s life honestly.
You say life is freedom. Is that what people in the camps think?
