Smuggled on Microfilm; Typewriter ribbons seized! "The Book was arrested!"

_Life and Fate_ by Vasily Grossman

Life and Fate by is a novel by Vasily Grossman, written in the Soviet Union in 1959 and published in 1980. Life and Fate takes place in the Soviet Union winter of 1942-43 during Nazi Germany's invasion during the Battle of Stalingrad. It is also a history of Stalinist Russia.

During the Second World War, Grossman enlisted in the Red Army as a war correspondent. With the Red Army, he found himself on the front line in Stalingrad and witnessed the heroic Soviet offensive against the Wehrmacht’s Sixth Army, led by Paulus. Grossman then followed the Red Army in its victorious advance from Kursk to Berdichev, from Kiev to Warsaw, and then on to Berlin. During this time, he witnessed the horrors of the prison camps and wrote the first report about the death camps, The Hell of Treblinka which was used as testimony during the Nuremberg trials of the major Nazi war criminals (1945– 46). ¹

even the typewriter ribbons were seized

Life and Fate was written in the 1950s and submitted for possible publication. Quickly after it was submitted, the KGB raided his apartment; the manuscripts, carbon copies and notebooks, as well as the typists' copies and even the typewriter ribbons were seized.² The KGB did not know that he had left two copies of the manuscript with friends.

microfilmed and smuggled

In 1974 one of the surviving copies was microfilmed and smuggled out of the country with the help nuclear scientist Andrei Sakharov and writer Vladimir Voinovich. It was published in the West in 1980.³ It was published in Russia in 1988.

Life and Fate challenged the shibboleths of official war memory, which had already become the key legitimating foundation of the post-war Soviet system.⁴ “The Novelist as Truthteller: The Achievement and Legacy of Vasily Grossman” discusses Grossman’s contributions.⁵

1. Vasily Grossman : A Writer's Freedom, edited by Anna Bonola, and Giovanni Maddalena, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2018.

2. Chandler, Robert. Introduction to Life and Fate, page xv. 1985. New York, New York Review of Books Classics.

3. Sacks, Sam. "Life is Freedom: The Art of Vasily Grossman." The Quarterly Conversation. Scott Esposito.

4. Finney, Patrick. “Vasily Grossman and the Myths of the Great Patriotic War.” Journal of European Studies 43, no. 4 (2013): 312–28.

5. “The Novelist as Truthteller: The Achievement and Legacy of Vasily Grossman.” Discussion on YouTube. PEN America. May 23, 2013. Vasily Grossman's career as a novelist and reporter extended from the depth of Stalin's terror in the 1930s to the slushy uncertainties of Kruschev's thaw. Along the way, he wrote one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century literature, Life and Fate. This panel explores the life and work of a writer intimately acquainted with questions of courage and cowardice, for whom fiction was nothing if not the pursuit of truth.