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Vasily Grossman's "Life and Fate" is a sweeping panorama of World War II that mercilessly juxtaposes Stalinism and Nazism.

By Victor Sonkin
Published: May 11, 2007

Ever since the Siege of Troy, every truly epic event in history has been reflected in literature, and it is usually only a matter of time before a literary masterpiece of appropriate proportions appears. Thus, Napoleon's doomed Russian campaign became the historic core of Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace," while Yemelyan Pugachov's uprising inspired Alexander Pushkin's novel "The Captain's Daughter," and the turmoil of the post-revolutionary period was depicted in Mikhail Sholokhov's "And Quiet Flows the Don."

Against such a background, the absence of a major literary work devoted to the Soviet Union's participation in World War II is all the more conspicuous. Today, this has become virtually the only piece of national history and mythology that provokes almost unanimous sentiments of pride. Yet even though there is some first-rate wartime poetry (notably by war correspondent Konstantin Simonov), the long-winded Soviet-era epics on the subject were forgotten as soon as they were published.

There is one exception, and it is Vasily Grossman's novel "Life and Fate." Grossman was a Russian Jew whose early literary work attracted critical attention and earned him a place in the Writers' Union. During the war, he served as a correspondent for the army newspaper, The Red Star, and was among the first to document the atrocities of the Nazi concentration camps; his reports were later circulated as evidence at Nuremberg.

"Life and Fate" was submitted for publication in 1960. It is a sweeping panorama of the war, with numerous characters, much philosophical musing and a merciless juxtaposition of Stalinism and Nazism. Instead of applauding the new Tolstoy, the authorities seized the manuscript and searched Grossman's apartment. The author wrote a defiant letter to Nikita Khrushchev, and effectively made himself an outcast. He died in 1964, long before his major books were published.

Mikhail Suslov, the infamous ideology tsar of the Politburo, said soon after its submission that "Life and Fate" would not be published in this country for another 200 years. As usual, this prophecy was wrong. Soviet dissidents, including Andrei Sakharov, helped publish the novel in the West in 1980, and it finally came out in the Soviet Union just eight years later.

This week, as we honor war veterans, including Grossman, and look back at postwar history, there is an important question that "Life and Fate" makes us ponder. Germany has been atoning for its sins ever since 1945. Have we been doing the same?

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