Compra usato

19,06 €

Consegna a 3,36 € 23 - 29 maggio. Maggiori informazioni

Scegli il tuo indirizzo

Usato: Ottime condizioni | Dettagli

Venduto da worldofbooksit

Altri venditori su Amazon

Nuovo & Usato (10) da 19,06€ + 3,36 € di spedizione

Segui gli autori

Immagine non disponibile

Immagine non disponibile per
Colore:

Per visualizzare questo video scarica Flash Player

Life And Fate Copertina flessibile – 16 maggio 2006

Edizione Inglese di Vasily Grossman (Autore), Robert Chandler (Presentazione)

4,6 2.225 voti

Visualizza tutti i formati ed edizioni

A book judged so dangerous in the Soviet Union that not only the manuscript but the ribbons on which it had been typed were confiscated by the state, Life and Fate is an epic tale of World War II and a profound reckoning with the dark forces that dominated the twentieth century.

Interweaving a transfixing account of the battle of Stalingrad with the story of a single middle-class family, the Shaposhnikovs, scattered by fortune from Germany to Siberia, Vasily Grossman fashions an immense, intricately detailed tapestry depicting a time of almost unimaginable horror and even stranger hope.

Life and Fate juxtaposes bedrooms and snipers’ nests, scientific laboratories and the Gulag, taking us deep into the hearts and minds of characters ranging from a boy on his way to the gas chambers to Hitler and Stalin themselves.

This novel of unsparing realism and visionary moral intensity is one of the supreme achievements of modern Russian literature.

Leggi di più Leggi meno

Segnala un problema con questo prodotto

Lunghezza stampa

880 pagine
Lingua

Inglese
Editore

New York Review of Books
Data di pubblicazione

16 maggio 2006
Dimensioni

13.21 x 4.62 x 20.07 cm
ISBN-10

1590172019
ISBN-13

978-1590172018
Visualizza tutti i dettagli

Vasilij Grossman
562
Copertina flessibile
41 offerte da 12,00 €
Leo Tolstoy
308
Copertina flessibile
14 offerte da 12,80 €

Descrizione prodotto

L'autore

Vasily Grossman (1905—1964) was born in Berdichev in present-day Ukraine, the home of one of the largest Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. After studying chemistry and working as a mining engineer, he was discovered by Maxim Gorky, whose support enabled him to begin publishing his writing. Grossman was a combat correspondent during World War II, covering the defense of Stalingrad, the fall of Berlin, and writing the first account in any language of a German death camp. Although the manuscript for Life and Fate was initially seized and suppressed by the KGB in 1960, and Grossman did not live to see it published, it was smuggled out of the USSR a decade later with the help of Andrei Sakharov and Vladimir Voinovich. The novel was eventually published throughout Europe and North America in the early 1980s; it appeared in Russia in 1988. A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941—1945, a collection of Grossman’s journalistic writings and notebook entries, was published in 2006.

Robert Chandler is the translator of selections of Sappho and Apollinaire, as well as of Pushkin’s Dubrovsky and Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. His co-translations of Andrey Platonov have won several prizes in both the UK and the US. He is the editor of Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida; his most recent translation is of Hamid Ismailov’s The Railway.

Vasily Grossman (1905'1964) was born in Berdichev in present-day Ukraine, the home of one of the largest Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. After studying chemistry and working as a mining engineer, he was discovered by Maxim Gorky, whose support enabled him to begin publishing his writing. Grossman was a combat correspondent during World War II, covering the defense of Stalingrad, the fall of Berlin, and writing the first account in any language of a German death camp. Although the manuscript for Life and Fate was initially seized and suppressed by the KGB in 1960, and Grossman did not live to see it published, it was smuggled out of the USSR a decade later with the help of Andrei Sakharov and Vladimir Voinovich. The novel was eventually published throughout Europe and North America in the early 1980s; it appeared in Russia in 1988. A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941'1945, a collection of Grossman's journalistic writings and notebook entries, was published in 2006.

Robert Chandler is the translator of selections of Sappho and Apollinaire, as well as of Pushkin's Dubrovsky and Leskov's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. His co-translations of Andrey Platonov have won several prizes in both the UK and the US. He is the editor of Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida; his most recent translation is of Hamid Ismailov's The Railway.

Dettagli prodotto

Editore ‏ : ‎ New York Review of Books (16 maggio 2006)
Lingua ‏ : ‎ Inglese
Copertina flessibile ‏ : ‎ 880 pagine
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1590172019
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1590172018
Peso articolo ‏ : ‎ 919 g
Dimensioni ‏ : ‎ 13.21 x 4.62 x 20.07 cm

Posizione nella classifica Bestseller di Amazon: n. 2,369 in Narrativa di guerra
- n. 56,961 in Narrativa letteraria (Libri)
- n. 211,241 in Libri in inglese

Recensioni dei clienti:
4,6 2.225 voti

Informazioni sugli autori

Segui gli autori per ottenere aggiornamenti sulle nuove uscite, oltre a consigli avanzati.

Robert Chandler
Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.
Scopri di più sui libri dell'autore, guarda autori simili, leggi i blog dell’autore e altro ancora
Scopri di più sulla pagina dell'autore
Vasily Grossman
Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.
Scopri di più sui libri dell'autore, guarda autori simili, leggi i blog dell’autore e altro ancora
Scopri di più sulla pagina dell'autore

Recensioni clienti

4,6 su 5

2.225 valutazioni globali

Come funzionano le recensioni e le valutazioni dei clienti

Ordina le recensioni per

Recensioni migliori da Italia

Al momento, si è verificato un problema durante il filtraggio delle recensioni. Riprova più tardi.

Paul Parks

Life and Fate

Recensito in Italia il 3 giugno 2019

Acquisto verificato

Amazingly good book, albeit demanding to read.

Una persona l'ha trovato utile

Utile

giselle helene pons

Life and Fate: War and Peace at Stalingrad

Recensito in Italia il 11 agosto 2015

Acquisto verificato

An unforgettable journey through the Soviet Union during the battle Stalngrad. A kaleidoscopic view of what people were doing and thinking. At times devastantingly cruel, but oh so true.

3 persone l'hanno trovato utile

Utile

holls

Couldn't put it down

Recensito in Italia il 9 agosto 2021

My grandad was a child when the Red Army knocked on his family's door in Polish Lvov and deported them to a labour camp in Siberia. When he was older he fought with the Allies in Anders' army. I've read enough books on that period, from accounts of war to life in gulags and whatnot, but in this book I have found perhaps a glimpse of what life was like then, told with uncharacteristic directness: in doing so, Grossman has created a timeless work of art. This man's vision was relentless and all-encompassing. Chapters detailing the ins and outs of human life as experienced by his characters, both Russian and German, are a pleasure to read, but interspersed with the odd chapter in which the author suddenly gets to grips with the really big issues ( still relevant) like totalitarianism, or the idea of good: chapter 50 had me sobbing, and that's no mean feat for a novel. The author quite simply transcends idealism and shines a light on the
deeper issues that relate to what it means to be human. So sorry he died before this was published; it's one of those books with real power.

Utile

Le recensioni migliori da altri paesi

Traduci tutte le recensioni in Italiano

Akash Srivastava

Everyman's Library books are simply amazing.

Recensito in India il 20 marzo 2024

Acquisto verificato

This book was on my wish list for quite some time. The moment I saw it here on Amazon for Rs.776 I decided to buy it. The book is in good condition. I love books by everyman. Happy with the book. Can't wait to read it. ✌✌

Traduci recensione in Italiano

marc de vlieger

Fantastic book

Recensito in Spagna il 12 settembre 2022

Acquisto verificato

Delivery of the book was on time, even coming from abroad. Excellent piece of literature and one can understand why KGB forbid this book. It gives a fantastic view on Russian society before during and after the 2nd WW. A must read especially for Russians.

Traduci recensione in Italiano

Pat

The Best Book I've Read, Ever

Recensito in Canada il 12 agosto 2020

Acquisto verificato

My only complaint is that it isn't long enough.
Life and Fate has been praised as the War and Peace of the 20th century, and its message today is more timely than ever. I would say it's the best book I have ever read, even better than Tolstoy's last novel, Resurrection.
It's a book about freedom and kindness and our right to be different at a time when liberties are under attack, cruelty is often condoned and diversity is vilified.
Grossman saw where this can lead. In Stalin's Soviet Union almost everyone lived with the icy dread of having their number drawn in the great terror lottery. No one was immune.
At the start of Part 3 of the novel, Krymov, the fanatically loyal battalion commissar, is ordered, out of the blue: "Hand over your weapon and your personal documents." Thus begins his irreversible descent into the Gulag.
One reason the KGB seized Life and Fate is it equates Stalinism with fascism. (He didn't say one was worse or better, just that all totalitarianism is bad.)
I would say the biggest difference between Stalin and Hitler is Stalin got away with it. Stalin lived happily ever after. This book details Stalin's crimes against humanity without downplaying Hitler's monstrous legacy.

GETMANOV: Stalin?
In my opinion Stalin appears in the novel twice -- as himself (the historical character) and as the fictional character Getmanov. Without a doubt, Getmanov is Stalin.
Despite Grossman's courage and political naivete, there was a limit to what he could say about Stalin in the Soviet Union of the late 1950s.
Stalin had been dead since 1953. In a closed session of the Communist Party Congress in 1956 Khrushchev had denounced Stalin and his legacy of mass murder, torture and slave labour.
But the fact that the ruling dictator was only willing to criticize Stalin in a secret speech -- even though Stalin was dead -- speaks volumes about freedom of expression in the Soviet Union as Grossman was writing Life and Fate.
Getmanov is by far the most hateful of the novel's fictional characters. He is a self-promoter with a fake persona. He always appears to be smiling, but inspires fear. He never misses a chance to denigrate ethnic minorities. Grossman’s Getmanov would be quite at home in Snakes in Suits, a book about psychopaths.
The former obkom secretary, who was appointed as a military commissar to spy on senior officers, had always been considered a man of the masses. "He only had to open his mouth for people to laugh; his vivid, direct way of talking, his sometimes vulgar language quickly bridged the distance between the secretary of an obkom and a worker in overalls.”
On the factory floor, he would present himself as "a true servant of the people, the way he was ready to attack managers." But in his office at the obkom, "his only preoccupations were the preoccupations of Moscow."
...
"What was most extraordinary of all was that Getmanov always seemed to be absolutely sincere."
...
"Despite the fact that he never served at the front, people said of him: 'Yes, our commissar's a true soldier.' He enjoyed holding meetings and his speeches went down well with the troops: he made lots of jokes and spoke very simply, often quite coarsely."
...
"He was quick-tempered and resented it if someone answered him back.”

STALINGRAD
While Getmanov is the embodiment of evil, the defenders of Stalingrad embodied hope.
Stalingrad represented a turning point in the war – dawn’s early light in a long dark night of barbarism.
Up to that point, the Nazi tsunami seemed unstoppable. One European nation after another capitulated. Hitler penetrated Soviet defences like a hot knife through butter. Entire armies were taken prisoner. The fuhrer, the only one Stalin ever trusted, could be forgiven for believing the campaign would be over before winter (assuming he hadn't heard of Napoleon).
To be fair, Stalingrad wasn’t the first place where the blitzkrieg didn’t go as planned. The British inspired the world by holding out amid the most destructive air raids the world had seen up to that point. And though the Nazis reached the gates of Moscow, they never really tried to take it.
But Hitler threw massive resources into the assault on Stalingrad.
In one of the bloodiest battles of human history, the Soviets held out for five agonizing months before finally encircling and capturing the German 6th Army. With this historic victory the Red Army began a relentless drive that pushed the Nazis out of the Soviet Union and continued to Berlin.
According to Grossman, Stalingrad was more than a turning point in the war; it was also a turning point in the defenders’ hopes for freedom and justice after the war.
"Nearly everyone believed that good would triumph, that honest men, who hadn't hesitated to sacrifice their lives, would be able to build a good and just life," he wrote. "This faith was all the more touching in that these men thought that they themselves would be unlikely to survive till the end of the war; indeed, they felt astonished each evening to have survived one more day."
Grossman declared: "The soul of wartime Stalingrad was freedom."
Instead, they got a few more years of Stalin's terror, and no break from totalitarianism after Stalin's death. A symbol of that outcome still stands today. A decade after the Nazis were beaten at Stalingrad (now called Volgograd), Grossman notes slave labour built a megaproject.
"Here, 10 years later, was constructed a vast dam, one of the largest hydro-electric power stations in the world -- the product of the forced labour of thousands of prisoners."

HOPE
When Grossman died in 1964, his country – and this novel – remained in chains, and there was no light on the horizon. Grossman was the first to report on the industrial-scale genocide of the Nazi death camps. His mother was murdered by the Nazis. He'd endured Stalin's terror.
So what hope does this witness to some of humanity’s darkest deeds offer his readers?
It certainly isn’t religion or ideologies, which he notes have been used to justify horrific evil. One of Grossman characters, Madyarov, gives us the author's philosophy in a nutshell:
"Chekhov said: let's put God -- and all these grand progressive ideas -- to one side. Let's begin with man; let's be kind and attentive to the individual man -- whether he's a bishop, a peasant, an industrial magnate, a convict in the Sakhalin Islands or a waiter in a restaurant. Let's begin with respect, compassion and love for the individual -- or we'll never get anywhere."
Grossman's character Ikonnikov, the "holy fool" who is executed for refusing to help build a Nazi gas chamber, discusses how religions and ideologies have endlessly divided and subdivided people -- all in the name of a supposedly universal good overcoming evil. But "whenever we see the dawn of an eternal good ... the blood of old people and children is always shed."
Before he is taken away to be interrogated, Ikonnikov secretly pens his philosophy.
Where good can be found, he wrote, is in the "private kindness of one individual towards another; a petty, thoughtless kindness; an unwitnessed kindness. Something we could call senseless kindness. A kindness outside any system of social or religious good."
... "This kindness is senseless and wordless. It is instinctive, blind."
In the concluding words of Ikonnikov's essay we find Grossman's message of hope: "Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer."

9 persone l'hanno trovato utile

Traduci recensione in Italiano

Ashutosh S. Jogalekar

The case for dumb kindness

Recensito negli Stati Uniti il 29 marzo 2020

Acquisto verificato

On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union in a typhoon of steel and firepower without precedent in history. In spite of telltale signs and repeated warnings, Joseph Stalin who had indulged in wishful thinking was caught completely off guard. He was so stunned that he became almost catatonic, shutting himself in his dacha, not even coming out to make a formal announcement. It was days later that he regained his composure and spoke to the nation from the heart, awakening a decrepit albeit enormous war machine that would change the fate of tens of millions forever. By this time, the German juggernaut had advanced almost to the doors of Moscow, and the Soviet Union threw everything that it had to stop Hitler from breaking down the door and bringing the whole rotten structure on the Russian people’s heads, as the Führer had boasted of doing.

Among the multitudes of citizens and soldiers mobilized was a shortsighted, overweight Jewish journalist named Vasily Grossman. Grossman had been declared unfit for regular duty because of his physical shortcomings, but he somehow squeezed himself all the way to the front through connections. During the next four years, he became one of the most celebrated war correspondents of all time, witnessing human conflict whose sheer brutality beggared belief. To pass the time in this most unreal of landscapes, Grossman had a single novel to keep him company – War and Peace. It was to prove to be a prophetic choice.

Not only was Grossman present during the siege and eventual victory at Stalingrad – a single battle in which more Soviet soldiers and citizens died than American soldiers during all of World War 2 – but he was also part of the Soviet advance into the occupied territories in which the Nazis had waged a racial war of extermination that would almost annihilate an entire race of people. While forward-deployed units of Nazi Einsatzgruppen killed more than a million Jews in Ukraine, Lithuania and other countries, this “holocaust by bullets” was only a precursor to the horror of Auschwitz and Treblinka. Grossman became the first journalist to enter Treblinka and describe what words could scarcely bring themselves to describe. Most of all, the Holocaust hit home for him in a devastatingly personal way – Grossman’s own mother was murdered by the Nazis in the village of Berdychiv; the prewar Jewish population of this small town numbering more than 40,000 was completely annihilated. This singular episode shaped Grossman’s worldview for the rest of his life.

Over the next ten years Grossman who had seen Stalin’s 1937 purges and the postwar takeover of Europe became witness to his own country’s descent into oppression, conquest and genocidal aspirations. The words that proclaimed liberty and brotherhood during the fight against the Nazis started sounding hollow. In 1960 he put the finishing touches to what was the culmination of his career and thinking – Life and Fate, a 900-page magnum opus that was on par with some of the greatest fiction of all time. Today Life and Fate stands shoulder to shoulder with the great novels. And similar to the great novels, it takes in the entire world and nothing seems to be missing from its pages. Love, hatred, war, peace, childhood, motherhood, jealousy, bravery, cowardice, introspection, economics, politics, science, philosophy…everything is contained in its universe. More importantly, like the great works of literature, like Shakespeare and Dante, Dickens and Hemingway, like Grossman’s compatriots Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the themes in Life and Fate are timeless, transcending nationality, race, gender and even its wartime setting. It will be relevant two hundred years from now when men and women will still be fighting and killing and discussing and loving. The novel speaks to human beings struggling with common problems across the gulf of time. And it speaks doggedly against the identity politics that riddles our discourse so widely.

Like War and Peace, Life and Fate straddles almost a hundred and fifty characters spread over a variety of times and locations, from the quiet warmth of a matriarch’s dwelling to the absolute nihilism of an extermination camp to several battle locations on the front spread around Stalingrad. Here we encounter characters whose views of life have been forced to be stripped down to their bare bones because of the sheer bleak brutality around them and forced minimalism of their existence. While there are hundreds of major and minor characters, a few key ones stand out. Broadly speaking, the characters fan out from the person of Alexandra Vladimirovna, a factory worker and steely matriarch who had lived in Stalingrad before moving out because of the war, and her two daughters Lyudmila and Yevgenia. The action also centers on Yevgenia’s old husband Krymov who has been an important party official and her new lover Novikov who is a tank commander. Meanwhile, Lyudmila lives with her husband Victor Shtrum, who in many ways speaks for the conscience of the various other characters in the novel. At least in one sense the most interesting person is Mikhail Mostovskoy, a friend of the family who has ended up in a German concentration camp.

It’s hard to keep track of all the characters, but one of the most remarkable things is how even some of the minor, intermittent players leave an indelible memory because of their pronunciations and ideas. There are some extraordinarily poignant moments, such as when Lyudmila’s son Tolya is wounded on the front and she hurries to visit him in the hospital, only to find that he has died shortly before. She asks to be escorted to his grave and spends a moment of hauntingly beautiful, ethereal and yet earthly tragedy mourning at his side, covering him with his shawl so that he won’t be cold. It takes her several minutes to realize the bare truth of Tolya’s non-existence:

“The water of life, the water that had gushed over the ice and brought Tolya back from the darkness, had disappeared; the world created by the mother’s despair, the world that for a moment had broken its fetters and become reality, was no more.”

Perhaps there is no story more emotionally devastating in the book than the story of Sofya Levinton, a Jewish friend of Lyudmila’s who has the misfortune of being snared by the Nazis and put on a cattle train to Auschwitz. On the train Sofya runs into David, a six or seven year-old boy who also shared the misfortune of being cut off from his mother and put in a ghetto with his grandmother. When his grandmother died of disease, the woman she had entrusted David to was too busy trying to save herself. Like two atomic particles randomly bumping into each other by accident, David and Sofya bump into each other on the train. They have no one else, so they have each other. They accompany each other into the camp, into the dressing room, and finally into the gas chamber where there is no light, no life, no meaning. As the Zyklon B starts hissing from the openings above, David clings to the unmarried, childless Sofya:

“Sofya Levinton felt the boy’s body subside in her hands. Once again she had fallen behind him. In mineshafts where the air becomes poisoned, it is always the little creatures, the birds and mice, that die first. This boy, with his slight, bird-like body, had left before her.

‘I’ve become a mother,’ she thought.

That was her last thought.”

In another German concentration camp, Mikhail Mostovskoy has philosophical disputes with a few prisoners who are trying to shake his confidence in communism and are also trying to organize an escape. Mostovskoy is a true believer and is keeping the flame burning bright. But reality is not so easy. The denouement comes when he is called to the office of the camp commandant. His name is Liss. Liss is interested in certain documents which a dissident named Ikkonikov has thrust into Mostovskoy’s hands, right before refusing to help build a gas chamber and being executed as a result. But that is not Liss’s main concern, and he is not here to punish Mostovskoy. Instead he does something worse than provide an easy death: he brings the hammer down on Mostovskoy’s entire worldview when he tells him how similar Nazism and Stalinism are, how they are built on the backs of oppressed and murdered people, how true believers in both ideologies should ideally stand shoulder to shoulder with each other, how this whole war is therefore an unnecessary farce. Mostovskoy is shaken, and his loss of faith very much mirrors Grossman’s own by the time he wrote the book: with its murder and suppression of all dissent, complete control of people’s lives and total disregard for individual freedom, were fascism and communism that different?

But if Mostovskoy had any lingering doubts about whether his faith in collective action has been built on a house of cards, it collapses completely when he reads Ikkonikov’s pamphlets and hears him speaking from the grave. It’s strange: Ikkonikov is a minor character who appears perhaps in four or five pages of the volume, and the transcript of his documents occupies not more than ten pages in a book numbering almost a thousand pages, and yet in many ways his pamphlet is the single-most important part of the book, communicating as it does the overwhelming significance of individual kindness and action in the face of utter, unending conflict. Individual kindness is the only thing that remains when all humanity has been stripped away from both oppressor and oppressed; when every trace of nationality, race, gender and political views has been obliterated by sheer terror and murder, this kindness is the only elemental thing connecting all human beings simply because they are human beings and nothing else, it is this kindness, this dumb, senseless kindness, that will keep propelling humanity onwards when all else is lost. It is this kindness that goes by the name of ‘good’. As Ikkonikov says,

“Good is to be found neither in the sermons of religious teachers and prophets, nor in the teachings of sociologists and popular leaders, nor in the ethical systems of philosophers… And yet ordinary people bear love in their hearts, are naturally full of love and pity for any living thing. At the end of the day’s work they prefer the warmth of the hearth to a bonfire in the public square.

Yes, as well as this terrible Good with a capital ‘G’, there is everyday human kindness. The kindness of an old woman carrying a piece of bread to a prisoner, the kindness of a soldier allowing a wounded enemy to drink from his water-flask, the kindness of youth towards age, the kindness of a peasant hiding an old Jew in his loft. The kindness of a prison guard who risks his own liberty to pass on letters written by a prisoner not to his ideological comrades, but to his wife and mother.

The private kindness of one individual towards another; a petty, thoughtless kindness; an unwitnessed kindness. Something we could call senseless kindness. A kindness outside any system of social or religious good.

But if we think about it, we realize that this private, senseless, incidental kindness is in fact eternal. It is extended to everything living, even to a mouse, even to a bent branch that a man straightens as he walks by.

Even at the most terrible times, through all the mad acts carried out in the name of Universal Good and the glory of States, times when people were tossed about like branches in the wind, filling ditches and gullies like stones in an avalanche – even then this senseless, pathetic kindness remained scattered throughout life like atom…

This kindness, this stupid kindness, is what is most truly human in a human being. It is what sets man apart, the highest achievement of his soul. No, it says, life is not evil!”

And who promotes this kindness? Not religion with its conditional acceptance and demands to conform. Not the state which also imposes its own demands for conformity. Not even capitalism which makes kindness conditional on the invisible hand of selfish actions. In fact no system of organization can impose this kindness, no matter how much it speaks of it in glowing terms. It can only come about when all systems of organization have been obliterated, when humanity’s bare existence compels its members to recognize a quality in each other that is completely independent of every group identification, every kind of “ism”.

And who spoke of this kindness? Not the religious prophets who sought salvation in the one true God and heaven, not the commissars whose mind-numbing bureaucratic machinations threatened to grind every human particle of unique identity into the featureless dust of one level playing field, not even the scientific rationalists whose discoveries can only describe, not prescribe. No, to describe senseless, stupid, all-encompassing kindness one must look to the great poets and writers, not the philosophers. And through everyday characters and conversations, nobody demonstrates the timeless nature of individual kindness as well as Chekhov:

“Chekhov said: let’s put God – and all these grand progressive ideas – to one side. Let’s begin with man; let’s be kind and attentive to the individual man – whether he’s a bishop, a peasant, an industrial magnate, a convict in the Sakhalin Islands or a waiter in a restaurant. Let’s begin with respect, compassion and love for the individual – or we’ll never get anywhere.”

If you haven’t already, dear reader, I cannot exhort you enough to read Chekhov. Read his plays, read especially his short stories, read anything by him. Throughout Life and Fate the nature of indivisible, immutable bonds between human beings – whether it is a commander and his aide, an aging communist and her son-in-law, and of course the more common and enduring sets of relationships between sons and mothers, daughters and fathers – stand above and beyond the basic essentials of the narrative.

Another character, in a completely different set of circumstances on the Stalingrad front:

“Human groupings have one main purpose: to assert everyone’s right to be different, to be special, to think, feel and live in his or her own way. People join together in order to win or defend this right. But this is where a terrible, fateful error is born: the belief that these groupings in the name of a race, a God, a party or a State are the very purpose of life and not simply a means to an end. No! The only true and lasting meaning of the struggle for life lies in the individual, in his modest peculiarities and in his right to these peculiarities.”

If that is not a soaring counterpoint to and a damning indictment of the identity politics that has completely taken over our discourse today, I do not know what is.

When word of Grossman’s magnum opus got out the KGB stormed his apartment. They considered the novel so dangerous that they confiscated not only the manuscript but also the typewriter ribbons which were used to craft the novel. This level of paranoia could only exist in the Soviet Union. Why they did this is clear after reading it. Not only does Life and Fate show, through devastatingly understated examples of indelible characters who gradually become disillusioned, the hollow nature of the Soviet system’s promises and its similarity with the fascism that its patriotic adherents thought they were fighting, but it also demonstrated through the character of physicist Victor Shtrum, the anti-Semitism that while not as fatal as that in Nazi Germany, was slowly but surely brewing in the country’s corridors and the hearts and minds of its people. Even before the war ended it was clear that the Germans’ campaign of Jewish cleansing in Ukraine and parts of Russia could not have been carried out without the complicity of local populations who held grudges against Jews for decades. Grossman’s personal motivation because of his mother’s murder brought to his depiction of the Soviet Union’s initially “benign” and then increasingly oppressive anti-Semitism particularly strident and urgent force. The party line in the country refused to have writers like Grossman single out Jewish victims of the Holocaust because they knew that doing so would shine a mirror into their own faces. The combination of Grossman’s expose of the Soviets as being little different from the Nazis and anti-Semites to boot sealed his novel’s fate.

When Grossman asked when his book might see the light of day, a high-ranking party official named Suslov said there was no question of the volume being published for another two hundred years; by announcing such a draconian sentence on Grossman’s work, he inadvertently announced the novel’s incendiary nature. Grossman died in 1964 without seeing his book smuggled out and translated by Robert Chandler, a sad and lonely man in a Moscow apartment battling stomach cancer.

But his act of defiance, expressed in this profound book as an assertion of the fundamental nature of the individual and a rejection of collectivism of all kinds, spoke to the ages, escaped the fetters of its two hundred-year oppressors and brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union. And it could well bring about the collapse of the systems we take so much pride in because we fail to see how they are turning us into inchoate groups. So let us now practice thoughtless, stupid, unwitnessed kindness. It’s the one constant in life and fate.

181 persone l'hanno trovato utile

Traduci recensione in Italiano

oz

Excellent picture of the stalinist era and Stalingrad battle

Recensito in Francia il 3 agosto 2017

Acquisto verificato

Strongly recommend. Captivating novel and documentary from a witness. I learned a lot and enjoyed reading. Prepare yourself for shocking and vivid scenes.
This is a Russian novel... i.e. lots of names. Have a photocopy of the personalities list for quick reference.

Una persona l'ha trovato utile

Traduci recensione in Italiano

Vedi altre recensioni

Amazon Advertising Trova, attira e coinvolgi i clienti	Amazon Music Streaming di milioni di canzoni	AbeBooks Libri, arte e articoli da collezione	Audible Download Audiolibri	Amazon Web Services Servizi Cloud Scalabili

Amazon Seconda mano I nostri prodotti usati e come nuovi	Kindle Direct Publishing Pubblica i tuoi libri in formato elettronico	Shopbop Designer, Marche, Fashion e stile	Amazon Business Servizio per clienti business

Segui gli autori

Life And Fate Copertina flessibile – 16 maggio 2006

I clienti che hanno visto questo articolo hanno visto anche

Descrizione prodotto

L'autore

Dettagli prodotto

Informazioni sugli autori

Robert Chandler

Vasily Grossman

Recensioni clienti

Recensioni migliori da Italia

Al momento, si è verificato un problema durante il filtraggio delle recensioni. Riprova più tardi.

Le recensioni migliori da altri paesi