Life and Fate - Major Themes

Major Themes

Theme on Jewish identity and the Holocaust

Throughout Life and Fate, it becomes obvious that a portion of his epic novel’s thesis is about his Jewish identity. Viktor Shtrum is in part a reflection of Grossman’s own character. There are many overlaps between Shtrum’s life and Grossman’s life, such as Grossman’s and Shtrum’s mother’s death in the Holocaust; both seem to find a place in their Jewish identity that was not present before the war. Grossman was one of the first to write about the Holocaust in 1944, seeing first hand that Eastern Europe was empty of Jews; Jewish acquaintances he came to check up on were in mass graves, their houses empty. His article on the camp Treblinka was even used as evidence at the Nuremberg Trials. Raised as a secular Jew, it becomes clear that Shtrum discovers part of his identity through the suffering he encounters.

Grossman’s idea of humanity and human goodness:

One the most important topics that Life and Fate discusses is the nature of humanity—more specifically, the nature of human good. Grossman addresses this theme directly in Ch. 15 of Part II, where he uses Ikonnikov’s letter to provide his own unique perspective on humanity. He first asks whether a good common to all man exists, and then proceeds to describe how the ideal of good has changed for different races and religions. Grossman criticizes Christianity especially, deeming its attempt to create universal good through peace and love responsible for many of the world’s most horrific events. “This doctrine caused more suffering than all of the crimes of people who did evil for its own sake,” he writes (406). Grossman then inquires as to the very nature of life—is it that life itself is evil? And although he provides multiple examples of such evil, Grossman does believe that life itself has some good in it: “Yes, as well as this terrible Good…there is everyday human kindness” (407). But it’s not so simple, for “after despairing of finding Good either in God or in Nature, I began to despair even of kindness... Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.” (410). Here, Grossman offers an alternative to despair: the idea that, despite such great evil, humanity and good will be the ultimate victors. Simple, often unnoticed, human kindness forms the basis for Grossman’s theory, which is to say that despite great evil, small acts of charity reflect the idea that good is both alive and unconquerable no matter what. No matter how great the evil may be, this basic “kernel” of good is a key part of human nature and can never be crushed.

It is thus clear that, despite his acknowledgement of the world’s great evil, Grossman believes humanity to be fundamentally good. If mankind is stripped down to its very core, all that will remain is this invincible kernel; therefore, it is this kernel (and perhaps this kernel alone) that is responsible for the basic goodness of humanity.

Stalin’s distortion of reality and values:

One of Stalin’s most frightening achievements during the period of his rule was his total distortion of the Soviet reality: he replaced an ethical world—one which, at the very least, contained morals and values—with a perverted religion advocating faith in solely the will of the Party. As Ian Buruma writes in his New York Review of Books article entitled "Master of Fear", Simon Sebag Montefiore “sees Stalin less as a gangster boss than as a malevolent priest of a sinister cult” (Buruma). Buruma then informs the reader that “when Stalin was about to order the murder of hundreds of thousands of people in The Great Terror of 1937, he said the following to some of his oldest collaborators who were about to be swept away in the purges: ‘Maybe it can be explained by the fact that you lost faith.’ Here, writes Montefiore, ‘was the essence of the religious frenzy of the coming slaughter.’” (Buruma). Thus, in Buruma's opinion, Stalin dramatically changed the reality of the U.S.S.R. from a world in which common good, kindness, and humanity were at least alive, to a world in which only devotion to the Party mattered.

This worldview is reflected in Ch. 40 of Part I, when Grossman describes Abarchuk and his love for Stalinism. “He had repeated, ‘You don’t get arrested for nothing,’ believing that only a tiny minority, himself among them, had been arrested by mistake. As for everyone else—they had deserved their sentences. The sword of justice was chastising the enemies of the Revolution. He had seen servility, treachery, submissiveness, cruelty…And he had referred to all this as ‘the birthmarks of capitalism,’ believing that these marks were borne by people of the past…His faith was unshakable, his devotion to the Party infinite” (179). As the text indicates, Abarchuk is incapable of understanding the reality of his situation—that he has been wrongly imprisoned and will suffer in spite of his innocence, as has happened to so many others. Abarchuk is so completely immersed in the aura of the Party and so dedicated to the Stalinist religion that he cannot see the ethical violations occurring all around him. He is a reflection of the “religious frenzy” of Stalinism; the prisoner simply refuses to comprehend his situation and instead chooses to focus on his faith and devotion to the Party (Buruma).

Therefore, Abarchuk and his mentality are, at this point in the book, Grossman’s representations of the archetypical Party member and the dream-world in which he lives. Abarchuk’s situation is easy enough to understand: he has been arrested for a crime that he did not commit, and regardless of his guilt, he will be punished. Instead of understanding and accepting this, however, Abarchuk remains faithful to the Party and truly believes that he has been imprisoned by mistake. Thus, despite being presented with an excellent cause to abandon the Party, Abarchuk maintains his faith—no better allegory can be found for Stalin’s iron grip on Russia’s reality. The Party’s ethical violations are endless, and Abarchuk is getting a small taste of Stalinist injustice during his period in captivity. Nevertheless, he refuses to accept the actual reality of his situation, and instead chooses to remain faithful to the present system—a system which he still believes with all his heart to be correct. No better evidence can be found in Life and Fate for Joseph Stalin’s perversion of the reality, values, and very humanity of mankind.

Life Goes On:

At the end of Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman presents the reader with the broadest concept of his novel: the idea that, despite war, genocide, suffering beyond the realm of imagination, and utter destruction, life goes on. This idea is depicted in the last few lines of the book, as Grossman writes, “Somehow you could sense spring more vividly in this cool forest than on the sunlit plain. And there was a deeper sadness in this silence than in the silence of autumn. In it you could hear both a lament for the dead and the furious joy of life itself. It was still cold and dark, but soon the doors and shutters would be flung open. Soon the house would be filled with the tears and laughter of children, with the hurried steps of a loved woman and the measured gait of the master of the house. They stood there, holding their bags, in silence.” (871). All through Life and Fate, Grossman has painted gritty pictures of war, death, and suffering. He has shown us the loss of hope, destruction, and total fatigue. Indeed, the author references these scenes as he describes the sadness in the silence of the forest—the “lament for the dead”—and the “still cold and dark” house (871). Grossman, however, does not conclude the book with these thoughts. He turns instead to the future, and future hope. The author describes a family scene, with a husband, wife, and children, in addition to the flinging open of doors and shutters—an act symbolic of moving on and reclaiming one’s life. Therefore, Grossman wants the reader to come away from reading Life and Fate with an appreciation for the darkness of WWII, but also an understanding of the cyclical nature of life. We may suffer, but, in the end, life always goes on; happiness and peace return eventually.

Science

As a Soviet physicist, the main character of the novel, Viktor Shtrum, offers an irregular view of the Soviet system. Science, in the novel, plays the role of a calming constant, the last remnant of rationality in a world of chaos. Despite Stalin’s alterations and manipulations of societal and human truths, he cannot deny the plausibility of physics. For this reason, Viktor is affected by both the disrupted world of his personal life and the soothing world of mathematics. He finds that his two lives begin to split inexplicably as he becomes more and more pressured from both sides. As his anxiety over his dysfunctional formula eats away at him, he realizes that he can no longer discuss such things openly with his wife. And vice-versa, as his friendship with his partner, Sokolov, is threatened by Viktor’s anti-Party feelings and temper, his work also suffers.

In Chapter 17 of Part One, Viktor discourses on the new strides made in physics during the forties and fifties. He remarks that the stability of science previously falsely represented the universe. Instead, he wonders at the newfound bending, stretching, and flattening of space. “The world was no longer Euclidean, its geometrical nature no longer composed of masses and their speeds.” (Grossman 79) While this discovered chaos may at first seem to contradict the sanctity of reason, it actually strengthens it. With this realization, Viktor learns that the political and social chaos Russia is undergoing in fact fits right in with the fundamental laws of the universe. This is why science was such a key field under the Soviet regimes.

Under Stalin, free thought was oppressed and discouraged. Therefore, Viktor’s work as a physicist was increasingly difficult under the watchful eye of Stalin. During much of the novel, Viktor finds himself at a loss for the solution to a problem concerning an atomic phenomenon. The point as which he finally figures it out, however, is a point when he has just thoroughly slandered Stalinism and Soviet society. This goes to show that Grossman believed that true freedom of thought was entirely impossible in anyone who accepted Stalin as their leader.

Reality of war

Grossman, in many chapter involving Seryozha Shaposhnikov and Novikov, portrays the stark difference between life on the battlefield and in the cities. In chapter sixty of part one, Seryozha is introduced among the war-hardened soldiers of the surrounded House 6/1. Here, Grossman offers an interpretation of war that compares it to an all-engrossing haze. “When a man is plunged up to his neck into the cauldron of war, he is quite unable to look at his life and understand anything.” (Grossman 255) This statement sets up the book to be looked at from two different perspectives: those whose lives are entirely immersed in war, and those who either straddle or are more distanced from it.

In his writing, Grossman gives a very distinct feeling to war scenes that is absent from chapters devoted to city-life and totalitarian rule. Battles are imbued with an intense feeling of isolation, from government, politics, and bureaucracy. Instead, they focus on the thoughts of the human, the individual who is participating. Thoughts of family, lovers, friends, and home become the centerpiece of these violent sections. In House 6/1, even in their vulnerable position, everyone becomes infatuated with the one woman present and ‘gossip’ reigns. By setting this up, the author seeks to separate the true meaning of the war from the ideologies that supposedly govern it. In addition, their feelings and emotions that are directed towards their relations become a flurry of unrelated thoughts, brought on by the chaos of war.

In domestic settings, however, the focus becomes entirely on meaning behind the war, political ideologies, and largely abstractions. Aside from the direct personal relationships and casualties experienced, conversation in cities often concerns the war as an abstraction, not as an experience. In this way, there is a stark difference in perception in and out of Stalingrad. As Grossman paints it, war completely devours those involved, becoming in many ways an alternative reality irreconcilable with their former reality. There is an increased amount of freedom, lacking the constraints of Russian bureaucracy, but also an increased risk of death. It poses different daily questions to the individuals involved, asking them how they should spend and survive their day instead of asking if it’s worth it to do so.

Grossman's views on totalitarianism

The impact of totalitarianism on society was another major theme in Grossman’s novel. The battle of Stalingrad was between two totalitarian governments. One was the Fascist Nazis, who were the clear antagonists throughout the novel. The other group was the Stalinist Communists. Grossman could not blatantly speak out against Communism when writing Life and Fate, but he was able to conceal his beliefs about the Soviet communist regime through his characters and by drawing similarities to fascism.

Many of the characters in Grossman’s novel are directly affected by totalitarianism. The character Abarchuk is a devoted Communist who ends up in a work camp. He tells himself that he is only there because it is where he can most help the Communist Party, but it is clear that he is just another victim of an unjust government. The character Krymov is another who has done nothing wrong yet still is detained. He is charged with treason after his ex-wife’s lover reports on him. The protagonist of the novel, Viktor Shtrum, is a rebel throughout much of the novel. He does his work for the furthering of science, not to help the Soviet cause. He also refuses to go to work until the Soviet leaders give him adequate staff. But a simple call from Stalin puts him right back to work and he even signs a letter denouncing any claims that the Soviet government imprisons people based on political beliefs.

Grossman sees Soviet totalitarianism to be the same as fascism. He dedicates entire chapters comparing the two. One way this is done is through a dialogue a Nazi concentration camp prisoner has with his SS interrogator. Instead of actually interrogating his prisoner, Mostovsky, the SS officer Liss attempts to show Mostovsky the similarities between Communism and Fascism. Liss claims that the Nazis learned from Stalin that “to build Socialism in one county, one must destroy the peasants’ freedom … Stalin didn’t shilly-shally- he liquidated millions of peasants. Our Hitler saw that the Jews were the enemy hindering the German National Socialist movement. And he liquidated millions of Jews”. Through Mostovsky, Grossman shows how similar all totalitarian governments are and how blind people must be not to realize it.

There are some chapters where Grossman is even more candid in his views on totalitarianism. He declares that “Rather than overtly renouncing human feelings, he declares the crimes committed by Fascism to be the highest form of humanitarianism”. But many of the characters in Life and Fate commit crimes and imprison people in the name of Idealism. Grossman also references events that happened in Russia such as uprisings in Berlin, Hungary and Siberia during the 1950s in his criticism of totalitarianism.