Based around the pivotal WWII battle of Stalingrad (1942-3), where
the German advance into Russia was eventually halted by the Red
Army, and around an extended family, the Shaposhnikovs, and their
many friends and acquaintances, Life and Fate recounts the
experience of characters caught up in an immense struggle between
opposing armies and ideologies. Nazism and Communism are
appallingly similar, 'two poles of one magnet', as a German camp
commander tells a shocked old Bolshevik prisoner. At the height of
the battle Russian soldiers and citizens alike are at last able to
speak out as they choose, and without reprisal - an unexpected and
short-lived moment of freedom. Grossman himself was on the front
line as a war correspondent at Stalingrad - hence his gripping
battle scenes, though these are more than matched by the drama of
the individual conscience struggling against massive pressure to
submit to the State. He knew all about this from experience too.
His central character, Viktor Shtrum, eventually succumbs, but each
delay and act of resistance is a moral victory. Though he writes
unsparingly of war, terror and totalitarianism, Grossman also tells
of the acts of 'senseless kindness' that redeem humanity, and his
message remains one of hope. He dedicates his book, the labour of
ten years, and which he did not live to see published, to his
mother, who, like Viktor Shtrum's, was killed in the holocaust at
Berdichev in Ukraine in September 1941.
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