Simply and without fanfare, this is one of the masterpieces of 20th century literature and you've probably never heard of it. Following the fate of members of one extended family and their friends against the backdrop of the Battle of Stalingrad, Vasily Grossman's novel takes on the burden of understanding not only his times but human nature as well. As a Soviet war correspondent, Grossman covered the siege of Stalingrad. He knew his setting down to the brick dust and his descriptions make his readers viscerally feel the cold, the hunger and the danger. If Life and Fate was simply an account of day-to-day existence during the prolonged siege and the eventual counterattack that changed the course of the war it would still be worthwhile reading for the clarity, insight, humor and compassion of Grossman's prose.

However, Stalingrad is only the center of a series of venues that allow Grossman to expand his vision and address the big questions of his time and, perhaps, of all human history. The book follows the lives, and sometimes the deaths, of Ukrainian Jews on their way to the death camps, Soviet officers imprisoned after being overrun by the German advance, Soviet political prisoners, and the petty and seemingly unremarkable concerns of residents of Moscow. Through these individual but connected stories Grossman relates the simple dilemmas of ordinary people to the massive forces of history and ideology.

Thus in a few chapters this novel covers territory now familiar to us through other works such as Darkness at Noon, 1984, and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Only here Grossman shows us nuances and consequences that the others missed. The interrogation of an old Bolshevik, a prisoner in a German camp, by an SS officer is a masterful exercise in both psychological and political writing. Even physics becomes political under Stalin and we learn about the larger costs of small things. In this, the underlying idea that our choices come with consequences, and that in dire times the consequences are often dire, Life and Fate rises to the ranks of the great works of its or any other time.

Life and Fate is also a riveting narrative, a remarkable accomplishment considering the book's 880 plus pages. It does what few other novels have done, take in the sweep of the large forces of history and make it personal. A Tale of Two Cities, Doctor Zhivago and War and Peace come most readily to mind by way of comparison. Yet it is the political critique of life under Stalin and comparisons with Hitler's Germany that garner the most attention. This is certainly what brought it to the attention of Stalin's secret police who, when Grossman attempted to publish his novel in 1960, suppressed it so thoroughly that it did not make it to the West until the 1980s. It is currently enjoying renewed interest with the release of a paperback NYRB Classics edition. Devastating and yet hopeful, a sprawling narrative and also a thoughtful critique, personal and still universal, Life and Fate is not to be missed.

-- Lee Jaffe, University Library