Vasily Grossman’s 'Life and Fate'

The twin catastrophes of WWII and the Holocaust obsessed Vasily Grossman. In 1960, he submitted Life and Fate for publication, a novel that brought these themes together through the intertwined narratives of multiple individual lives. This is the great Soviet novel of military victory and human, moral catastrophe, joining the Jewish tragedy with the tragedy of Soviet reality.

Today, when so much discussion worldwide is given to the subject of the so-called “Double Genocide” theory, which is often seen as diminishing the uniqueness of the Holocaust by equating Soviet and Nazi crimes, Grossman’s Life and Fate dramatizes the need to understand the crimes of Hitler and those of Stalin as part of a single anti-human world that took shape in the middle of the twentieth century.

In 1960, Soviet Chief of Ideology Mikhail Suslov declared that this work could not be published for at least 200 hundred years, but we will read it with the intention of discussing the problems raised by associating these two great crimes of the twentieth century, and how it is possible to understand them together.

Vasily Grossman was born in Berdichev, Ukraine, in 1905, into an “emancipated” middle-class Jewish family and died in 1964. He studied mathematics and physics at Moscow State University and while working as an engineer began to write fiction and journalism. His first story, “The Town of Berdichev,” was published in 1934, and in 1941 Grossman became a frontline war correspondent for Krasnaya Zvezda (“The Red Star”). His wartime journalism, especially his accounts of the Battle of Stalingrad and the Battle of Kursk, brought him immediate recognition and fame throughout the USSR. He witnessed the liberation of Treblinka, Majdanek and other death camps, and with Ilya Ehrenburg wrote The Black Book of Russian Jewry, which was the first account of the Holocaust on Soviet soil.

Required Reading:

Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman, New York Review of Books, paperback

Supplemental Reading:   

A Writer At War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, Pantheon, clothbound
The Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman, John & Carol  Garrard, Free Press, paperback

Jonathan Brent is the Executive Director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City. From 1991 to 2009 he was Editorial Director and Associate Director of Yale Press. He is the founder of the world acclaimed Annals of Communism series, which he established at Yale Press in 1991. Brent is the co-author of Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953 (Harper-Collins, 2003) and Inside the Stalin Archives (Atlas Books, 2008). He is now working on a biography of the Soviet-Jewish writer Isaac Babel. Brent teaches history and literature at Bard College.

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