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7 internautes sur 7 ont trouvé ce commentaire utile :
5.0étoiles sur 5
An extraordinary work, Janv. 15 2006
Vasily Grossman submitted his manuscript for Life and Fate in 1960 at the height of Khrushchev's post-Stalinist cultural thaw. Subsequent to a review of the manuscript Grossman was advised that the book was being arrested. The book could not be published for at least 200 years. All copies of the manuscript were rounded up and sent to party headquarters for safekeeping. The manuscript was arrested because it dared to imply that Hitlerism and Stalinism bore more similarities than differences. Grossman made this point obliquely by putting these words into the mouth of a despicable SS death camp commandant. Nevertheless this was too much for both Khrushchev and the apparatchiks at the National Union of Writers and the book was banned. Life and Fate was eventually published because a manuscript remained at large. The author Vladimir Voinovich helped smuggle a copy to Switzerland where it was published in 1980, 15 years after Grossman's death in 1965. The book was published in the USSR in 1989 to sensational results. Nevertheless, Grossman remains relatively obscure outside Russia and that is a great pity. Grossman was born in 1905. Although Jewish by birth, Grossman was never particularly religious and his family supported the 1917 revolution. After receiving a degree in chemistry Grossman found work in the Donbass coal mines. Encouraged by Maxim Gorky, Grossman began writing short stories and plays. Grossman adopted Stalin's maxim that writers were engineers of human souls and his work was firmly rooted in the rather tedious school of socialist realism. Grossman's play "If You Believe the Pythagoreans" attacked the philosophical rants of intellectuals and argued that they were garbage not "worth a good worker's boot." For all intents and purposes, Grossman was a true believer. How and why did this change? Life and Fate begins to answer that question. Grossman volunteered for the front after the German invasion in 1941 and worked as a reporter for Red Star, an army newspaper known for its forthright reports from the front lines. Grossman received national fame due to his reporting from the front lines. Grossman was the first reporter to write first hand accounts of German concentration camps and his experience there had a devastating impact on his world view. Grossman learned after the war that his mother, who he failed to move from Berdichev to Moscow after the invasion perished in Hitler's genocide. It was the death of his mother and the post war anti-Semitic campaigns of Stalin that may have led Grossman to challenge his own acceptance of Soviet orthodoxy and set him to work on Life and Fate and his other major work, Forever Flowing.
Life and Fate is a remarkable novel despite its occasional unremarkable prose that contains a trace of Grossman's earlier socialist realism style. The book's emotional core involves humanity's struggle for freedom in an unfree world. Josef Skvorecky put the central question of Life and Fate thusly: "Does man lose his innate yearning for freedom? The fate of both man and the totalitarian State depends on the answer to this question. If human nature does change, then the eternal and world wide triumph of the dictatorial state is assured; if his yearning for freedom remains constant, then the totalitarian state is doomed." The scope of the story and the cast of characters are vast and in the tradition of both Tolstoy and Pasternak. This edition contains a list of characters and their geographic location during the story. The central characters include Viktor Shtrum, a scientist, and his extended family. Other central figures include Captain Grekov, the leader of a group of soldiers doing battle with the Nazi's in a bombed out apartment building in Stalingrad. Grekov is an iconoclast doing battle not only with the Nazis but the political commissars that spent more time concerned with political orthodoxy than fighting. Key scenes in the book also take place in a German concentration camp and a Russian labor camp. Life and Fate is a wonderful book. Grossman's assertion towards the end of his work that we can be slaves by fate but not slaves by nature is an important concept to keep a hold of today.
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5.0étoiles sur 5
The Epic Struggle for Freedom!, Fév 11 2009
This is one of the best fictional accounts of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-5 that I have ever read. Grossman weaves a complex story of characters based on a number of very real nd interconnected events that take place in the context of the Battle of Stalingrad. The reader gets to see how both the Russian and the German sides on the Eastern Front deal with the terrible adversities, challenges, and complexities of modern warfare. Many of their choices reflect the convictions of individual men and women engaged in the life-and-death struggle of war. While on the surface the struggle for control of Stalingrad becomes the political objective for both the German and the Soviet armies in late 1942, Grossman introduces a whole other drama that takes the reader inside the consciences of the common foot soldier, inmates at a POW camp, local peasants, field general involved in the seige, bureaucrats secretly planning the death of millions and the very leaders themselves. By connecting all these disparate parties together through various situations surrounding the epic battle, Grossman comes to the timely conclusion that there is no morally right position in war that reflects the general values of society. Evil and tyranny pervade big time in his story. Everybody either fights to destroy or survive, and that both fascism and communism, as the governing ideologies, are both interchangeably evil. Both Stalin and Hitler are portrayed as monsters whose only purpose is to inflict pain and destruction of others in the interest of wielding power. There is no glory in an armed conflict that attempts to strip the individual of his or her right to freedom. In all this, the author does a capable job in preserving the individual's dignity against the scourge of the tyrant. That for Grossman is the real monument to human endeavour. Acts of bravery, courage, and determination are the true forces that define the fate of man's freedom, and not the mailed fist of a crackpot dictator seeking to destroy. Lots of thought-provoking dialogue in this story, which rivals anything coming out Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago" trilogy. His description of the Battle of Stalingrad is both detailed in technical terms and poignant to human emotions. This is a one-of-a-kind narrative that allows the reader to feel like he or she is a big part of the action. I found this to be a very rewarding read because it put me right inside the indiviudal minds and souls of those who both witnessed and participated in this tragic time in history.
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5.0étoiles sur 5
The Fate of Life, Mars 11 2004
Grossman has spoken to us beyond the grave. It is with a heavy, Slavic accent in the "Russian" style - huge tomes, sweeping arcs of drama, a large cast of characters, death, repression, a cry for freedom and an attempt to make sense of both the internal and external world. Some reviewers both here and elsewhere have taken Grossman to task for suggesting that the Soviet regime was a mirror image of the Nazi state. Both were collectivist societeis, both exalted group rights over the individual, both were run by a party apparatus, Both employed terror on their own citizens and remained in power through sheer force. Germany has had to atone for her crimes many times over but the Soviet state has yet to acknowledge the murder of up to 50 million people according to the mathematician dissident Vladimir Bukovsky. The titantic struggle between these two forces forms the basis of the book. But it is not just the battles; Grossman allows us to see the human behind the machine, the wants and needs and hopes of common people. It is impossible for anyone who has not been in battle - particularly a siege - to grasp the futility and absolute unreality of the situation. That is why the small deeds and everyday actions seem to stand out; they are subtle reminders of a time without war, normality and reason. And in this theater of the absurd, Grossman documents the almost insane actions of the Soviet regime: The political commander's rabid focus on Marxist theory when people are starving, the wasting of human beings as mere objects, the violence and above all else, arguing Socialist theory amidst rubble, the dreary, gray, hapless lives in a totalitarain state. There are some who can never bring themselves to criticize the Soviet regime and Marxism's utter failure in almost every field of achievement - economic, political, artistic, financial, scientific. Grossman says yes, this is all true, but what counts are the pathetic lives of the unlucky but steadfast citizens caught in the grip of madmen; this is where the real crime takes place. It ends in a silent desolation that is almost stifling.
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