Expert Commentary on...

Life and Fate

by Vasily Grossman and translated by Robert Chandler

Life and Fate, the masterpiece by Soviet writer Vasily Grossman, is one of our most recommended books. Modeled on Tolstoy’s War and Peace, it bore witness to the horrors of both the Soviet experience of World War II and the Holocaust. Sadly for Grossman, it was considered too harmful to be published in his lifetime. Read what historians and literary scholars have to say about it below:

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Recommendations from our site

“Life and Fate…is probably the most important work of fiction about World War II. But, in fact, it is more than just a fiction because it is based on very close reporting from his time with the soldiers. It is a deliberate act of literary homage to Tolstoy as one can see in the title. It is definitely the War and Peace of the 20th century.”

Antony Beevor, Military Historian and Veteran

“It’s the first novel to come out of the 1940s and 50s that attempts a comparative indictment of Hitlerism and Stalinism, the two varieties of totalitarianism that Grossman knew too well.”

Maxim D Shrayer, Literary Scholar

“An amazing and terrifying account, not simply of the battles, but of the armies fighting them.”

Michael Howard, Military Historian and Veteran

“This is a wonderful, rich, melancholic, hopeful book. It’s a bit like Like A Tear in the Ocean: it embeds a piece of history in a well-crafted work of fiction and its characters represent the cornerstones of the period.”

Andreas Wesemann, Entrepreneurs & Business People

“It is about the strange interval of freedom during the Second World War in which the Soviet regime had to trust its people because it couldn’t compel their loyalty.”

Francis Spufford, Historian

The book, according to the author

“The current situation is senseless. I am physically free, but the book to which I have dedicated my life is in jail—but it is I who wrote it, and I have not repudiated and am not repudiating it.… I continue to believe that I have written the truth and that I wrote it loving, empathizing with, and believing in the people. I ask for freedom for my book.”

Quoted in Leon Aron, Roads to The Temple (2012)

Commentary

“Tolstoy’s novel was the only book Grossman read during the war, and he read it twice; War and Peace hangs over Grossman’s book as a template and a lodestar, and the measure of Grossman’s achievement is that a comparison between the two books is not grotesque.”

"Good Day, Comrade Shtrum," John Lanchester, London Review of Books, 18 October, 2007

“The KGB immediately destroyed all copies of what Grossman called Life and Fate (Zhizn’ i sud’ba) except for two hidden by his friends, and he died in 1964 without ever seeing his work published.”

"The Russian Masterpiece You've Never Heard of," Leon Aron, Foreign Policy, October 12th 2010