Shtrum is a physicist and member of the academy of sciences his wife’s first husband has been arrested during the purges her son is a lieutenant in the army Viktor’s mother, in the Nazi-occupied sector, is en route to the gas chamber. Life and Fate is a Soviet War and Peace, in which every aspect of society radiates out from the central characters, Viktor Shtrum and his wife Lyudmila.

Grossman was a Soviet Jewish journalist who covered the battle of Stalingrad and the liberation of the Treblinka extermination camp. It took me three weeks to read it and three weeks to recover from the experience, during which time I could barely breathe. I am not an obvious audience for military history, but Antony and I had met on the management committee of the Society of Authors, and it seemed only polite to read each others’ books.įrom Berlin, I moved on to Life and Fate. Grossman was referenced and footnoted in Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad and Berlin: The Downfall, both bestsellers of the 1990s. Like a handful of other people a decade ago, I felt that I held a samizdat no one else I knew had ever heard of it. I read Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate in 2003. Every time I re-read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway I see how this brief but enormously influential novel, first read in my teens, created in me the sense of lightness and excitement when walking down a London street, or how the phrase “among the cabbages” would resonate as a fragment of a sentence about memory and longing.īut only one book had such a decisive impact that I can date to it a profound alteration in my worldview and even behaviour. After a lifetime of reading you become formed by books you are partly an accumulation of others’ ideas. T here are novels I have re-read after 30 or 40 years that have shocked me with ideas which evidently made such a strong impression they ceased to be someone else’s thoughts and became my own.

Life and fate vasily