On Vassily Grossman's Life and Fate
2025.01.27394 Words
The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is.
Stalingrad and Life and Fate amount to almost 2000 pages of literature. Following over 100 characters across every emotion and feeling of human experience, it's a book that will exhaust and fulfill. Love, loss, happiness, despair, woe, and wonder all live simultaneously. Recommending someone any piece of content this large or deep will surely fall on deaf ears. However, if you are open to recommendations, this is one of the most incredible pieces of literature and is well worth the read over its older parallel, War and Peace.
Most importantly, the book takes place in an era close to us, one characterized by ideologies and looming figures - the Nazis with Hitler and Stalin with the Soviets - which people intuit well without having to do extra research. Compared to War and Peace, readers can focus on the character's struggles and complexities, jettisoning the complex social dynamics of 19th-century landed gentry, aristocracy, France, and Russia. The less cognitive load, the better.
The structure can also be consumed in bite-sized amounts, comprising Chekhovian short stories for each chapter. Interleaving these short stories gives the reader a breather when one character's arc is going on too long. War and Peace also does this but with far fewer characters, chapters, and breaks.
Lastly, the duology is split down the middle for censorship, with Stalingrad being favorable to the Soviet regime and Life and Fate being so critical that it must be buried in someone's garden until it could be sent to the West for publishing. Censorship as a concept is well understood, but as a tangible good is difficult to find. Unless you are willing to do deep research, most people don't see it. This book offers a grand narrative and the chance to see how explicit censorship propagates in literature.
Very few books are recommendable to everyone; even fewer are 2000 pages long. Vassily Grossman has managed to create a compelling grand narrative that speaks plainly to the reader, not treating them as smart or stupid but as they are. Very few, if any, grand narratives approach the reader in such a kind, simple-hearted manner.