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864 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1960
The intuition of a deafened and isolated soldier often turns out to be nearer the truth than judgements delivered by staff officers as they study the map.
An extraordinary change takes place at the turning-point in a battle: a soldier looks round, after apparently gaining his objective, and suddenly finds he has lost sight of his comrades; while the enemy, who had seemed so weak, scattered and stupid, is now united and therefore invincible. A deep change in perception takes place at this mysterious turning-point: a gallant, intelligent ‘We’ becomes a frail, timid ‘I’, while the enemy changes from a hunted, isolated prey to a terrible, threatening ‘Them’.
As he overcame the enemy resistance, the advancing soldier had perceived everything separately: a shell-burst here, a rattle of machine-gun fire there, an enemy soldier there, hiding behind that shelter and about to run… He can’t not run – he’s cut off from that isolated piece of artillery, that isolated machine-gun, that isolated soldier blazing away beside him. But I – I am we, I am the mass of infantry going into the attack, I am the supporting tanks and artillery, I am the flare lighting up our common cause. And then suddenly I am alone – and everything that was isolated and weak has fused into a solid roar of enemy rifle-fire, machine-gun fire and artillery fire. This united enemy is now invincible; the only safety lies in my flight, in hiding my head, in covering my shoulders, my forehead, my jaw…
Often, it is the understanding of this transition that gives warfare the right to be called an art. This alternating sense of singularity and plurality is a key not only to the success of night-attacks by companies and battalions, but to the military success and failure of entire armies and peoples.
is better seen as a separate novel that includes many of the same characters. It is important not only as literature but also as history; we have no more complete picture of Stalinist Russia. The power of other dissident writers – Shalamov, Solzhenitsyn, Nadezhda Mandelstam – derives from their position as outsiders; Grossman's power derives at least in part from his intimate knowledge of every level of Soviet society. In Life and Fate, Grossman achieves what many other Soviet writers struggled but failed to achieve: a portrait of an entire age.