Life and Fate - History of The Manuscript

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 Suslov told Grossman that his novel could not be published for two or three hundred years.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.

Read more about this topic:  Life And Fate

Famous quotes containing the words history of the, history of, history and/or manuscript:

    The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    Considered in its entirety, psychoanalysis won’t do. It’s an end product, moreover, like a dinosaur or a zeppelin; no better theory can ever be erected on its ruins, which will remain for ever one of the saddest and strangest of all landmarks in the history of twentieth-century thought.
    Peter B. Medawar (1915–1987)

    It may be well to remember that the highest level of moral aspiration recorded in history was reached by a few ancient Jews—Micah, Isaiah, and the rest—who took no count whatever of what might not happen to them after death. It is not obvious to me why the same point should not by and by be reached by the Gentiles.
    Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)

    It is not as easy to emigrate with steel mills as it is with the manuscript of a novel.
    Golo Mann (b. 1909)