Quotes from book

Life and Fate

Life and Fate is a 1960 novel by Vasily Grossman and is seen as the author's magnum opus. Technically, it is the second half of the author's conceived two-part book under the same title. Although the first half, the novel For a Just Cause, written during the rule of Joseph Stalin and first published in 1952, expresses loyalty to the regime, Life and Fate sharply criticises Stalinism.Vasily Grossman, a Russian Jew, became a correspondent for the Soviet military paper Krasnaya Zvezda, having volunteered and been rejected for military service in 1941. He spent approximately 1,000 days on the front lines, roughly three of the four years of the conflict between the Germans and Soviets. He was also author of the novel The People Immortal. He was one of the first journalists to write about the ethnic cleansing of people in Eastern Europe and he was present at many famous battles. Life and Fate was his defining achievement, its writing in part motivated by his feeling guilt over the death of his mother in the Berdychiv massacre at Berdychiv in September 1941.