The Great WWII Novel You Haven’t Read

Vasily Grossman's novel Life and Fate has just been brought back into print by NYRB Press after two decades of terribly unjustified obscurity. Having read a fair share of novels set in World War II (though certainly not all of them), I can say that Life and Fate is the very best in that category I know of. But at 871 pages and with more than 160 characters, it makes for a daunting presence on the bookshelf. In honor of its re-emergence, then, here are 10 reasons to have a go at this challenging book.

1. Men and women risked their lives for it. Grossman, who was likely spared from the purges only by Stalin's death, attempted to publish Life and Fate in 1960. It was censored and all but two hidden copies were "arrested" by the KGB. It was only after Grossman died that his best friend and some sympathetic admirers microfilmed this tome and smuggled it out of the country, at huge personal peril.

2. It provides an illuminating chance to witness the evolution of a masterpiece. During the war, Grossman was the preeminent front-line correspondent for the Soviet Army newspaper, Red Star. In January his war journals were published under the title A Writer at War. Read in tandem with Life and Fate, you can see the two-part process of great writing: the fiery first impressions and then the slow burn of distillation and meticulous crafting of the same material.

3. It gives Americans a larger picture of the war. We justifiably focus on our own mighty contribution to World War II. But more than 20 million Soviets died fighting the Nazis (the U.S. lost around 400,000 in the war), and when they won the Battle of Stalingrad, in which this novel is set, they irrevocably turned the tide of the outcome, long before D-Day.

4. Life and Fate is not just about war. In fact, its central characters are the Shtrums, a middle-class family in Moscow whose domestic conflicts and troubles under the eye of a totalitarian overseer will be, though much amplified, identifiable for all modern readers.

5. It succeeds in representing the death camps. The Holocaust is exploited all too easily in novels, but for Grossman, whose articles on Treblinka were the first about the genocide ever filed, I venture another superlative: His chapters following a woman on the cattle cars and then in a gas chamber are the best I've ever read about the Holocaust. Their unblinking focus on the loss of this human life is intimate and universal, heartbreaking and transcendent.

6. It communicates an original philosophy about fascism. Like War and Peace, on which it is closely modeled, Life and Fate is interspersed with nonfiction chapters in which Grossman expresses his vision of the relation of German fascism (and its Soviet analogue) to humankind: "Life is freedom, and dying is a gradual denial of freedom." Thus fascism is ineluctably leagued with death.

7. Robert Chandler's superb translation is one in which you feel that nothing has been lost.

8. For a novel so long, the prose is remarkably refined—clear, simple, compact and naturalistic.

9. It is a vivid historical document. Among others, General Paulus, General Chuikov, Adolf Eichmann and, most memorably, Stalin, appear as characters.

10. It is a genuine epic. Like the symphony in music, the epic is the greatest formal expression of literature, and we have precious few from the past century. This novel has warfare and housekeeping, love stories and political torture, nuclear physics and nature idylls, a lot of death and the intense and loving lineaments of life. It is both monumental and detail-driven. It seems to have everything under the sun. What I hope I've described is a book that can change a reader's life.

Life and Fate

Vasily Grossman


NYRB Books, $22.95