Grossman was as complex as the characters he drew. He also understood the contingencies of betrayal, like Viktor Shtrum, the novel's hero, who signs a letter denouncing men he knew to be innocent of a plot to kill Stalin. Of all second world war novelists, Grossman had the most intimate knowledge of his subject he was in Stalingrad for five months of the siege, and lost his own mother in the death camps. Life and Fate, the novel that resulted from these experiences, itself invites comparison with its forbear, echoing it in its title and in the scale of its ambition.Īn epic family saga like Tolstoy's, Life and Fate – which is to be dramatised over eight hours on Radio 4 next week with a cast that includes Kenneth Branagh, David Tennant and Greta Scacchi – is a far darker work, examining the nature of totalitarianism, love, loyalty and guilt and, above all, what it means to be human, even at the point of annihilation at the gas chamber door. In fact Grossman read it twice as he undertook his singular journey, witnessing the Soviet defeat during Operation Barbarossa, the siege of Stalingrad and the momentous tank battle at Kursk, and visiting Hitler's own office after the fall of Berlin. Tolstoy's War and Peace was the only novel that Vasily Grossman, the great Russian war correspondent, read during the second world war. T here is an overt connection between Russia's two greatest war novels.
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