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A review by kaeli
Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
5.0
(SPOILERS)
Sometimes you read a novel at the right point in time. Sometimes this timing is a personal and emotional one— I've certainly read books that spoke to exactly whatever I was going through as an individual at the time (this books 19th century counterpart "War and Peace" is an example). But "Life and Fate" seems timely not to me personally, but to our world's current moment.
While living in Taiwan, my friends and I are, more than we were back home in the West, aware of the ever-present eyes of China. We had an air raid drill this spring. Some of our mail is addressed “Taiwan (R.O.C.).” Sometimes the mention of “Chinese Taipei” (as a cheat in Scategories) makes tensions in the classroom flare (sometimes the controversy is related to game points; but then the discussion goes off topic). And because of the proximity to China I am more aware of news stories regarding its oppressive government. We laugh at absurd stories like the banning of Winnie the Pooh on the Chinese Internet; other stories like the arrest of 900 protesters in Hong Kong this summer, or the persecution of Muslim Uighurs, are more serious concerns. It is impossible to be unaware of the anxiety that the non-China Sinophone world feels in regards to the regional superpower.
It’s easy to forget about the news back home, but sometimes something will happen that makes it come rushing back. The shooting in Dayton, Ohio made an impact on our lives because someone in the dorm has family there. The ever increasing mass shootings in the United States, the continuing brutality and murder of black people by law enforcement officers, the fear of ICE detaining and deporting people without due process, and the forced separation of children and parents at the Mexican border are some of the things that weigh most heavily on our thoughts when we think about current events in American.
These two countries have governments that could be described as terror states. But they are still adversaries.
Even knowing about the situation in both countries and the effect wrought on their neighbours, you find people who seem to think they need to pick a side. Some Americans who are “progressive” enough to recognize the evils of their own government come out as pro-China. In Hong Kong, you see some smatterings of pro-USA sentiment in the protests (some, admittedly, expressed by Americans in HK). Many people in an argument seem to think that since one side is definitely wrong, the other side must be right.
"Life and Fate" is set largely in the Soviet Union during the Second World War. Grossman draws countless parallels between his own nation and Nazi Germany. The two are not exactly alike, and in fact the two are adversaries in the war— but while it is acknowledged that it is right to fight against Germany, his characters are not certain that it IS right to fight FOR the USSR. Sure, we know what we stand against— but what do we stand FOR?
I want to make clear: I do not wish to draw an equivalence between injustices and brutalities committed today in China and America to the Holocaust, or to Stalinist terror. I do not wish to blindly equate Stalinism to Nazism, either (and neither did Grossman). To make such a comparison would be ignorant, over-simplistic and disrespectful.
I do, however, want to recognize the parallels. "Life and Fate," after all, was written with another historical parallel in mind: the novel is billed as the Soviet era "War and Peace." The battle of Stalingrad is not really a similar event to the Burning of Moscow in the Napoleonic wars, but the parallel is there, and drawing it makes our understanding of history richer and more layered. It lets us reflect not on events as in a vacuum, but in a continuum, within a larger context. While the words of countless CNN anchors— “This is absolutely unprecedented”— may be true, it is also true that horrors for which there is not a precedent nevertheless didn’t just happen out of nowhere.
This brings us to the moral and political thesis statement of the novel: two governments, which are completely opposed to one another and may seem to be the opposite in every way, can nevertheless both be bad. That the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. And that we must learn how to spot and call attention to evil wherever it crops up, whether it is in a foreign land that we consider hostile territory, or right in our own cities, streets and homes. It is necessary to fight against evil, but we should remember that fighting against one evil does not make us immune to being evil ourselves.
This is a point that should be easy to understand, and in fact seems almost obvious if you watch enough news, or tally up the facts and ponder the observations Grossman so meticulously provides. And yet it is one that, in our current political climate, is for so many impossible to accept. This isn’t new, either— the sentiment was so incendiary in Grossman’s day that the novel could not be published in his lifetime. In fact, it is one of the only two books that was ever “arrested,” as a human being is arrested, in its manuscript form (the other being of course "The Gulag Archipelago"). While it may seem obvious now to point out that life was bad under Hitler as well as under Stalin, we should all ask ourselves how we feel about this message when we apply it to our own lives and fates:
Just because you’re fighting against evil, it doesn’t make you the good guy.
That’s my political take. Now for my literary take:
This book did not live up to the claims of the introduction that it would be “just as brilliant” as "War and Peace." I’ll admit that many of Grossman’s observations and musings on the nature of love, death, life, fate, war, peace and the like were as moving and as true as Tolstoy’s. But the fact remains— and the introduction did warn me— that it is not able to depict “the richness of life” as Tolstoy did. The thing is, I think this was a much bigger detractor than the introduction seemed to think.
The problem was maybe that there were just too many characters. "War and Peace" is no skeleton crew either, but at least the story does follow Pierre, Natasha and Andrei as clear protagonists throughout, enough to get emotionally attached to all of them. About 200 pages into W+P, I stop needing to flip to the list of characters provided by the translators. In "Life and Fate", however, with the exception of Viktor Shtrum, none of the characters hold centre stage long enough for me to get to know them. While I still might feel for their situations and find their narration illuminating and powerful, none of them is a friend to the reader like Natasha and Pierre-- certainly not so at 200 pages. I feel this most strongly with Sofya Levinton, a character whose fate as described by the introduction already moved and hurt me. And yet Sofya only has two sections in the book, one on the way to her death, and the other facing it. I might have wept when she reflected on the precious only-onceness of her life and the cruelty of her death, but I don’t know her— and I wish I did.
On page 600 I still felt as lost as I did on page 150 of War and Peace, checking the character list every time a chapter opened. To me, this took away the enjoyment of the novel. I like to get to know characters really well. But then, maybe the impersonal nature of the work, the overwhelming crush of too many characters, is intentional. I think about my professor Merve Emre’s theory of moving away from empathy when we read literature, how “relating to characters” isn’t helpful when we analyze a work of fiction. I never liked her approach and found it cold— relating to characters is what makes reading pleasurable. But should you read a book like this page-turning, curled up comfortably? Is it wrong that I read Sofya Levinton’s death scene while I was eating pizza? Maybe I’m not supposed to be able to relate to these characters. Maybe this book is not about characters— it’s about people, real people, regular people, living in the world. Maybe the state of their world is what matters, rather than the state of the individuals— a different approach from "War and Peace" (individual men even on the smallest level are the movers and shakers of history there— here we are all just powerless leaves in the stream). Maybe the point is that I don’t know Sofya, but I still ought to be able to feel for her death.
In the end, it’s true what they say about "War and Peace": it’s not a story, it’s just life. And "Life and Fate" is the same. But "War and Peace" is about YOUR life, reader— "Life and Fate" is not. At a certain point I guess empathy fails, there’s a certain degree to which we can’t relate. The conditions described in this novel are of the sort that I cannot possibly imagine, the horrors too specific, too great. It's like "War and Peace" if it was only "War." Tolstoy wrote for a war, a grief and a love that we should all be able to find present in our own lives. But Grossman was writing something specific, which is not about me.
I know Natasha Rostov, so I care about her.
But I don’t know Sofya Levinton, even though as I reader I witnessed her final hours. Sofya didn’t know David, and yet she held him as he died. Mostovskoy didn’t know Ikonnikov, and yet he read Ikonnikov’s last statement. So many characters in the novel are strangers to each other, whether they’ve never met, they work in the same lab, they share a bunk, or they’re in the same family: but they should still care, and so should I. I guess the other moral takeaway is that you shouldn’t have to know someone, understand them or relate to them in order to care what happens to them. "War and Peace" is all about universal human experiences, but maybe the result of a globalized 20th (and 21st) century is that we have seen the other, we see that we cannot understand their lives and experiences, we realize that a universalist take is futile and over-simplified. But we should still care.
The last thing I want to mention about the novel is my favourite part. Like the Great Comet scene in "War and Peace," it comes about halfway through. This is from Ikkonikov's last words:
"I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. 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. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man's meaning. 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."
Sometimes you read a novel at the right point in time. Sometimes this timing is a personal and emotional one— I've certainly read books that spoke to exactly whatever I was going through as an individual at the time (this books 19th century counterpart "War and Peace" is an example). But "Life and Fate" seems timely not to me personally, but to our world's current moment.
While living in Taiwan, my friends and I are, more than we were back home in the West, aware of the ever-present eyes of China. We had an air raid drill this spring. Some of our mail is addressed “Taiwan (R.O.C.).” Sometimes the mention of “Chinese Taipei” (as a cheat in Scategories) makes tensions in the classroom flare (sometimes the controversy is related to game points; but then the discussion goes off topic). And because of the proximity to China I am more aware of news stories regarding its oppressive government. We laugh at absurd stories like the banning of Winnie the Pooh on the Chinese Internet; other stories like the arrest of 900 protesters in Hong Kong this summer, or the persecution of Muslim Uighurs, are more serious concerns. It is impossible to be unaware of the anxiety that the non-China Sinophone world feels in regards to the regional superpower.
It’s easy to forget about the news back home, but sometimes something will happen that makes it come rushing back. The shooting in Dayton, Ohio made an impact on our lives because someone in the dorm has family there. The ever increasing mass shootings in the United States, the continuing brutality and murder of black people by law enforcement officers, the fear of ICE detaining and deporting people without due process, and the forced separation of children and parents at the Mexican border are some of the things that weigh most heavily on our thoughts when we think about current events in American.
These two countries have governments that could be described as terror states. But they are still adversaries.
Even knowing about the situation in both countries and the effect wrought on their neighbours, you find people who seem to think they need to pick a side. Some Americans who are “progressive” enough to recognize the evils of their own government come out as pro-China. In Hong Kong, you see some smatterings of pro-USA sentiment in the protests (some, admittedly, expressed by Americans in HK). Many people in an argument seem to think that since one side is definitely wrong, the other side must be right.
"Life and Fate" is set largely in the Soviet Union during the Second World War. Grossman draws countless parallels between his own nation and Nazi Germany. The two are not exactly alike, and in fact the two are adversaries in the war— but while it is acknowledged that it is right to fight against Germany, his characters are not certain that it IS right to fight FOR the USSR. Sure, we know what we stand against— but what do we stand FOR?
I want to make clear: I do not wish to draw an equivalence between injustices and brutalities committed today in China and America to the Holocaust, or to Stalinist terror. I do not wish to blindly equate Stalinism to Nazism, either (and neither did Grossman). To make such a comparison would be ignorant, over-simplistic and disrespectful.
I do, however, want to recognize the parallels. "Life and Fate," after all, was written with another historical parallel in mind: the novel is billed as the Soviet era "War and Peace." The battle of Stalingrad is not really a similar event to the Burning of Moscow in the Napoleonic wars, but the parallel is there, and drawing it makes our understanding of history richer and more layered. It lets us reflect not on events as in a vacuum, but in a continuum, within a larger context. While the words of countless CNN anchors— “This is absolutely unprecedented”— may be true, it is also true that horrors for which there is not a precedent nevertheless didn’t just happen out of nowhere.
This brings us to the moral and political thesis statement of the novel: two governments, which are completely opposed to one another and may seem to be the opposite in every way, can nevertheless both be bad. That the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. And that we must learn how to spot and call attention to evil wherever it crops up, whether it is in a foreign land that we consider hostile territory, or right in our own cities, streets and homes. It is necessary to fight against evil, but we should remember that fighting against one evil does not make us immune to being evil ourselves.
This is a point that should be easy to understand, and in fact seems almost obvious if you watch enough news, or tally up the facts and ponder the observations Grossman so meticulously provides. And yet it is one that, in our current political climate, is for so many impossible to accept. This isn’t new, either— the sentiment was so incendiary in Grossman’s day that the novel could not be published in his lifetime. In fact, it is one of the only two books that was ever “arrested,” as a human being is arrested, in its manuscript form (the other being of course "The Gulag Archipelago"). While it may seem obvious now to point out that life was bad under Hitler as well as under Stalin, we should all ask ourselves how we feel about this message when we apply it to our own lives and fates:
Just because you’re fighting against evil, it doesn’t make you the good guy.
That’s my political take. Now for my literary take:
This book did not live up to the claims of the introduction that it would be “just as brilliant” as "War and Peace." I’ll admit that many of Grossman’s observations and musings on the nature of love, death, life, fate, war, peace and the like were as moving and as true as Tolstoy’s. But the fact remains— and the introduction did warn me— that it is not able to depict “the richness of life” as Tolstoy did. The thing is, I think this was a much bigger detractor than the introduction seemed to think.
The problem was maybe that there were just too many characters. "War and Peace" is no skeleton crew either, but at least the story does follow Pierre, Natasha and Andrei as clear protagonists throughout, enough to get emotionally attached to all of them. About 200 pages into W+P, I stop needing to flip to the list of characters provided by the translators. In "Life and Fate", however, with the exception of Viktor Shtrum, none of the characters hold centre stage long enough for me to get to know them. While I still might feel for their situations and find their narration illuminating and powerful, none of them is a friend to the reader like Natasha and Pierre-- certainly not so at 200 pages. I feel this most strongly with Sofya Levinton, a character whose fate as described by the introduction already moved and hurt me. And yet Sofya only has two sections in the book, one on the way to her death, and the other facing it. I might have wept when she reflected on the precious only-onceness of her life and the cruelty of her death, but I don’t know her— and I wish I did.
On page 600 I still felt as lost as I did on page 150 of War and Peace, checking the character list every time a chapter opened. To me, this took away the enjoyment of the novel. I like to get to know characters really well. But then, maybe the impersonal nature of the work, the overwhelming crush of too many characters, is intentional. I think about my professor Merve Emre’s theory of moving away from empathy when we read literature, how “relating to characters” isn’t helpful when we analyze a work of fiction. I never liked her approach and found it cold— relating to characters is what makes reading pleasurable. But should you read a book like this page-turning, curled up comfortably? Is it wrong that I read Sofya Levinton’s death scene while I was eating pizza? Maybe I’m not supposed to be able to relate to these characters. Maybe this book is not about characters— it’s about people, real people, regular people, living in the world. Maybe the state of their world is what matters, rather than the state of the individuals— a different approach from "War and Peace" (individual men even on the smallest level are the movers and shakers of history there— here we are all just powerless leaves in the stream). Maybe the point is that I don’t know Sofya, but I still ought to be able to feel for her death.
In the end, it’s true what they say about "War and Peace": it’s not a story, it’s just life. And "Life and Fate" is the same. But "War and Peace" is about YOUR life, reader— "Life and Fate" is not. At a certain point I guess empathy fails, there’s a certain degree to which we can’t relate. The conditions described in this novel are of the sort that I cannot possibly imagine, the horrors too specific, too great. It's like "War and Peace" if it was only "War." Tolstoy wrote for a war, a grief and a love that we should all be able to find present in our own lives. But Grossman was writing something specific, which is not about me.
I know Natasha Rostov, so I care about her.
But I don’t know Sofya Levinton, even though as I reader I witnessed her final hours. Sofya didn’t know David, and yet she held him as he died. Mostovskoy didn’t know Ikonnikov, and yet he read Ikonnikov’s last statement. So many characters in the novel are strangers to each other, whether they’ve never met, they work in the same lab, they share a bunk, or they’re in the same family: but they should still care, and so should I. I guess the other moral takeaway is that you shouldn’t have to know someone, understand them or relate to them in order to care what happens to them. "War and Peace" is all about universal human experiences, but maybe the result of a globalized 20th (and 21st) century is that we have seen the other, we see that we cannot understand their lives and experiences, we realize that a universalist take is futile and over-simplified. But we should still care.
The last thing I want to mention about the novel is my favourite part. Like the Great Comet scene in "War and Peace," it comes about halfway through. This is from Ikkonikov's last words:
"I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. 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. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man's meaning. 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."