Life and Fate (1959)

.

Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman: 01 Viktor and Lyuda > .
Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman's epic masterpiece >> .

Life and Fate (Жизнь и судьба) is a novel by Vasily Grossman. Written in the Soviet Union in 1959, it narrates the story of the family of a Soviet physicist, Viktor Shtrum, during the Great Patriotic War, which is depicted as the struggle between two comparable totalitarian states. A multi-faceted novel, one of its main themes is the tragedy of the common people, who have to fight both the invaders and the totalitarianism of their own state.

Begun by Grossman while Stalin was still alive, Life and Fate was his sequel to For a Just Cause. It was written in the 1950s and submitted for possible publication to Znamya magazine around October 1960. Very quickly after it was submitted, the KGB raided his apartment; the manuscripts, carbon copies and notebooks, as well as the typists' copies and even the typewriter ribbons were seized. The KGB did not know that he had left two copies of the manuscript with friends, one with the prominent poet Semyon Lipkin, a friend, and the other (Grossman's original manuscript) with Lyolya Klestova, often erroneously identified as Lyolya Dominikina, a friend from his university days.

On 23 July 1962, the Politburo ideology chief Mikhail Suslov told the author that, if published, his book could inflict even greater harm to the Soviet Union than Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, speculating that it could begin a public discussion on the need for the Soviet Union. Suslov has been said to have told Grossman that his novel could not be published for two hundred years; however more recent research amongst the documents of both Grossman and Suslov, in writing about this meeting, provide no evidence for this; they doubt that Suslov actually said this. Suslov's comment reveals both the presumption of the censor and recognition of the work's lasting significance. Grossman tried to appeal against this verdict to Khrushchev personally, unaware of Khrushchev's personal antagonism towards Grossman, and misunderstanding the climate of the time.

"I ask you to return freedom for my book, I ask that my book be discussed with editors, not the agents of the KGB. What is the point of me being physically free when the book I dedicated my life to is arrested ... I am not renouncing it ... I am requesting freedom for my book."

In 1974, Lipkin got one of the surviving copies to put onto microfilm and smuggled it out of the country with the help of satirical writer Vladimir Voinovich and nuclear scientist Andrei Sakharov. Grossman died in 1964, never having seen his book published, which did not happen in the West until 1980 at the publishing house L'Age d'homme, thanks to the efforts of Shimon Markish, professor of the University of Geneva and Efim Etkind (then in Paris) who achieved the meticulous work of reading from the microfilm.

As the policy of glasnost was initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev, the novel was finally published on Russian soil in 1988 in the Oktyabr magazine and as a book.