Life and Fate: Introduction by Polly Jones (Everyman's Library, 403) - Hardcover

Grossman, Vasily

 
9780593321263: Life and Fate: Introduction by Polly Jones (Everyman's Library, 403)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 059332126X ISBN 13: 9780593321263
Verlag: Everyman's Library, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

This panoramic novel about a family scattered across the Soviet Union and Europe during World War II is a monument of modern Russian literature by the Ukrainian-born writer hailed as “the Tolstoy of the USSR.”

Suppressed by the KGB and years later smuggled out of the Soviet Union to be published, Vasily Grossman’s novel is an unsparing story of ordinary Russians tragically caught between the fascism of the invading Nazis and the oppression of their own Soviet government.
 
The sprawling plot follows the travails of the extended family of Viktor Shtrum along the vast eastern front of the war. Shtrum is a brilliant nuclear physicist who faces rising anti-Semitism in Moscow while his relatives navigate the threat of camps and prisons on both the Soviet and the Nazi sides. Grossman’s extensive wartime reporting, combined with his Tolstoyan narrative skills, allow him to portray with unprecedented detail and authenticity the human cost of the struggle between two freedom-denying powers. 
 
In vividly rendered scenes that range from the dramatic battle of Stalingrad to the remote Siberian gulag, and encompassing characters ranging from a grieving mother to a woman in love and from a six-year-old boy on the way to a gas chamber to Stalin and Hitler, Grossman’s masterpiece is a profound and moving reckoning with the darkness of the twentieth century and a testament to the stubborn persistence of kindness and hope.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

VASILY GROSSMAN (1905–1964) was born in Berdichev in Ukraine, in one of the largest Jewish communities in eastern Europe. After studying chemistry and working as an engineer, he was discovered by Maxim Gorky and began publishing his writing. During World War II, Grossman covered the defense of Stalingrad and the fall of Berlin and he wrote the first account of a German death camp. The manuscript of Life and Fate was seized by the KGB in 1960 and Grossman did not live to see it published, but it was smuggled out and published in Europe and North America in the early 1980s.

ABOUT THE INTRODUCER: POLLY JONES is Associate Professor of Russian and Schrecker-Barbour Fellow at University College, University of Oxford. She has published widely on Soviet cultural history; she is the author of Revolution Rekindled and Myth, Memory, Trauma: Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union and is the editor of Writing Russian Lives: The Poetics and Politics of Russian Biography.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

From the Introduction by Polly Jones

One of the longest and most ambitious novels of the twentieth century, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate (completed 1960) is many things at once. Most simply, it recounts the extraordinarily brutal and heroic defence of Stalingrad in late 1942 and early 1943, which the author had begun to dramatize in the novel’s ‘prequel’ For a Just Cause (first published 1952) and earlier reported on as the longest-serving journalist at the Stalingrad front. The novel travels between the battle’s several fronts, but also to Moscow and to evacuee life in Kazan and Kuibyshev (now Samara). Those not directly involved in the fighting are drawn into other, potentially lethal battles with Stalinist bureaucracy and restrictions on free speech and research, or with its police and penal system. Earlier than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag fiction, Grossman’s novel shows the Soviet prison system, from the ‘sleepless’ secret-police headquarters in Moscow to the remote Soviet camps. Yet more scandalously, it compares the Gulag to the Nazi camps and gas chambers, and Soviet ideology to national socialism, concluding that the two totalitarian states were each other’s mirror images, rather than polar opposites. Whence the novel’s deepest political and philosophical meditations on freedom and humanity: how, it asks, could the individual, and individuality itself, survive the ‘tragedy of the twentieth century’?

Small wonder, then, that none of Grossman’s contemporaries believed that the novel could be published in the Soviet Union. They were proved correct when the manuscript was turned down by the Soviet literary journal Znamia in 1960, and then ‘arrested’ by the KGB the following year. Famously, the party’s then ideological chief Mikhail Suslov forecast that the novel would remain unpublishable for over two centuries, and Grossman’s lobbying of Khrushchev did nothing to alter the verdict. In the event, the confiscated manuscripts resurfaced in a Russian archive half a century later. Publication proved possible rather sooner, though Grossman died of cancer in 1964, without knowing (or believing) that it would. Manuscripts concealed and microfilmed by Russian friends travelled Westwards in the luggage of émigré writers and Western diplomats in the second half of the 1970s, leading to publication of the full text in Switzerland in 1980. Its first Russian edition appeared only in 1988 during Gorbachev’s glasnost. The posthumous, foreign (tamizdat) publication of Grossman’s greatest novel, along with several shorter works also unpublished in his lifetime, means that Grossman’s status as one of the greatest twentieth-century Russian writers has been recognized belatedly, and still incompletely.

Life and Fate captures key facets of Grossman’s identity as a Jewish, Russian and Soviet writer and intellectual. Born in late 1905, Grossman spent his childhood and youth between Ukraine and Russia (with a short spell in Switzerland), and his formative years straddled the revolutionary divide of 1917. Both his parents were active in left-wing circles, especially his father, who left the family when Grossman was young, but stayed close to his son throughout his life. Though he resided in Moscow for most of his literary career, Grossman never forgot his roots in the largely Jewish town of Berdichev in Ukraine, where his mother remained until her death (as dramatized in Life and Fate). His science degrees in Kiev and Moscow, and his early work as a chemist and engineer in the Donbass, sparked an abiding interest in science and industry, including a central storyline of Life and Fate, about the physicist Viktor Shtrum.

Shtrum’s battles with anti-semitism in Stalinist academia also reflected another facet of Grossman’s biography. Alongside his contemporary and friend Ilya Ehrenburg, Grossman emerged from the 1930s onwards as one of the most prominent Soviet Jewish writers. Both authors were secular and assimilated, yet also profoundly distressed by the Jewish tragedy of World War II, spurring their leading roles in the short-lived Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Through this organization and their publications, they sought to draw domestic and international attention to the Holocaust, especially on Soviet soil, but came under severe pressure in late Stalinism. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Grossman was forced to abandon The Black Book project on the Holocaust, and to collude in state harassment and repression of Jewish intellectuals, while enduring anti-semitic attacks himself.

            These clashes with the Soviet authorities underpin the novel’s reflections on the moral and personal costs of complicity with state power. Neither Grossman’s reluctant signing of a letter in support of Stalinist repression, nor his reputation as a budding ‘red Tolstoy’, could protect his novel For a Just Cause from years of bruising censorship before its publication in 1952, whereupon it almost immediately suffered a backlash from the Stalinist authorities and Soviet press. The experience left Grossman agonizingly aware of the precarity of Soviet critical acclaim and fame, yet he persisted in writing, and later defending, its audacious sequel. While minor works and translations were published in the early 1960s, his final years were largely characterized by unpublished writing (including works written ‘for the desk drawer’, such as his last major opus, Forever Flowing, also later smuggled and published abroad), and by unequal battles with Soviet officialdom. This has led some to term this once celebrated Soviet writer a ‘dissident’ by the time of his 1964 death.

Like the author himself, Grossman’s writings are hard to categorize. They comprise journalism and essays, historical and philosophical reflection, epic and modernist narratives, vast novels, and elegant short stories. Life and Fate, which he saw as his life’s work, combines many of these narrative approaches, but is rooted in eyewitness testimony, gathered over years of reporting on Soviet fighting and Nazi atrocities. There was nothing unusual in this emergence from journalism into literature. The lines between the two had been blurred since the revolution, as Soviet authors blended fact and fiction in writing about the Civil War, and later the industrialization and collectivization of the late 1920s and 1930s. In the latter period, Grossman made his name through journalism (including dispatches from the new industrial city of Magnitogorsk), short stories (notably In the Town of Berdichev, 1934) and a long first novel, Stepan Kol’chugin, serialized from the late 1930s and drawing heavily on his work as a mining engineer. By the time of this novelistic debut, the state literary doctrine of Socialist Realism was already insisting that Soviet writers ‘show reality in its revolutionary development’, which in practice meant substituting an optimistic projection of progress towards communism for empirical observation. Yet there was not long to adjust to these requirements before the outbreak of World War II.

Alongside better-known contemporaries, such as Ehrenburg, Konstantin Simonov and Aleksandr Tvardovsky, Grossman signed up to be a war correspondent as soon as Operation Barbarossa began on 22 June 1941. Deeply embedded with Soviet troops (unlike Ehrenburg, who was kept further from the front), Grossman followed the chaotic defeats and retreats of 1941–2, stayed in Stalingrad for much of the battle, and then travelled all the way to Berlin in May 1945. Throughout, his...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Everyman's Library
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
059332126X
ISBN 13 
9780593321263
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
890
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Everyman's Library
https://myeverymanslibrary.com

Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY, 14-1
NEW YORK
NY
10019
USA
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9781590172018: Life and Fate: (New York Review Books Classics)

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  1590172019 ISBN 13:  9781590172018
Verlag: NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, 2006
Softcover