History of The Manuscript
Life and Fate, the sequel to For a Just Cause that completely overshadows its predecessor, was written in the aftermath of Stalin’s death. Grossman submitted it around October 1960 for potential publication to the Znamya magazine. At this point, the KGB raided his apartment. The manuscripts, carbon copies and notebooks, as well as the typists' copies and even the typewriter ribbons were seized.
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 Suslov told Grossman that his novel could not be published for two or three hundred years. Suslov's comment reveals both the presumption of the censor and recognition of the work's lasting literary value. Grossman tried to appeal against this verdict to Khrushchev personally:
"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."
In 1974, a friend and a prominent poet Semyon Lipkin got one of the surviving copies put onto microfilm and smuggled it out of the country with the help of satirical writer Vladimir Voinovich and nuclear scientist Andrei Sakharov. Grossman died in 1964, never having seen his book published, which did not happen in the West until 1980.
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 have compared Grossman's war novels, and specifically Life and Fate, with Leo Tolstoy's monumental work, especially War and Peace.
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