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__TOC__ HISTORY OF THE MANUSCRIPT After Grossman submitted the manuscript for publication to the ''Znamya'' magazine, the KGB raided his apartment. The manuscripts, carbon copies, notebooks, as well as the typists' copies and even the typewriter ribbons were seized. With the post-Stalinist Khrushchev Thaw period underway, Grossman wrote to Nikita Khrushchev : "I ask you to return freedom for my book, I ask that my book be discussed with editors, not the agents of the KGB. What is the point of me being physically free when the book I dedicated my life to is arrested... I am not renouncing it... I am requesting freedom for my book." On July 23 , 1962 , the Politburo ideology chief Mikhail Suslov told the author that if published, his book could inflict even greater harm to the Soviet Union than Pasternak 's '' Doctor Zhivago ''. Suslov notified Grossman that his novel could not be published for at least two hundred years. Grossman died in 1964 , not knowing whether his novel would ever be read by public. It was published in 1980 in Switzerland with the help of fellow dissidents: Andrei Sakharov secretly photographed draft pages preserved by Semyon Lipkin , and Vladimir Voinovich managed to smuggle the films abroad. As the policy of Glasnost was initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev , the novel was finally published on Russian soil in 1988 in the ''Oktyabr'' magazine and as a book. Some critics compared Grossman's war novels with Leo Tolstoy 's monumental prose. STORYLINE The novel narrates the history of the Shaposhnikov family and the Battle Of Stalingrad . ''Life and Fate'' is a multi-faceted novel, one of ideas being that the Great Patriotic War was the struggle between two comparable Totalitarian states. The tragedy of the common people is that they have to fight both the invaders and the totalitarianism of their own state. In one scene, Sturmbannführer Liss tells Old Bolshevik Mostovsky, a Nazi Concentration Camp inmate, that both Stalin and Hitler are the leaders of qualitatively new formation: "When we look at each other's faces, we see not only a hated face; we see the mirror reflection. ... Don't you recognize yourself, your {Link without Title} will in us?" Grossman describes the type of Communist party functionaries, who blindly follow the party line and constitute the base for the oppressive regime. One such political worker (политработник), Sagaidak, maintained that entire families and villages intentionally starved themselves to death during the Collectivisation In The USSR . An entire chapter is dedicated to the evil of Anti-Semitism . FOOTNOTES |
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