On 2011-07-07, at 4:03 PM, Chuck Grimes wrote: > > I just read the intro to Grossman's Life and Fate, by Robert Chandler. Wow.
It's an epic novel of Soviet society during the Second World War, which has been likened by many critics to Tolstoy's War and Peace. Le Monde called it "the greatest Russian novel of the 20th century". Grossman was a leading Soviet war correspondent who reported on the long seige of Stalingrad and the counter-attack by Soviet forces which decided the outcome of the war and he was among the first observers to describe the destruction of of European Jewry and murder of Soviet POW's in the camps liberated by the Red Army. He drew on these events which lie at the heart of the novel, as well on his own experience of Stalinist repression, as a progressively more dissillusioned writer. By 1954, when Grossman began writing Life and Fate (it was completed in 1960), he had rejected Stalinism from the perspective of an old Bolshevik rather than as an anti-Communist, a distinction which has not been understood or noted by most reviewers. This is apparent in the flattering references to both the Right and Left Oppositions in the novel. It is finely written and moving in many parts, not least a wrenching final letter written to the main protagonist Victor Shtrum (loosely based on Grossman) by his mother on the eve of the Nazi liquidation of the Berdichev ghetto. One reviewer complained about too many "philosophical digressions" and attributed this to the lingering influence of Socialist Realism on Grossman's work, but I found welcome and interesting his ruminations, through his characters, on the Russian revolution, the transformation of the Soviet state under Stalin, the meaning of freedom, Soviet military tactics, the forced collectivization of the peasantry, t! he parallels and oppositions between Stalinist and Nazi totalitarianism, etc. as I'm sure readers on this list will as well. Further: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_and_Fate_(novel) http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n20/john-lanchester/good-day-comrade-shtrum _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
