Another of the most memorable elements of Life and Fate-the letter written by Viktor Shtrum’s mother about her last days in the Berdichev ghetto-is of central importance to both novels. Ikonnikov’s essay on senseless kindness-now a part of Life and Fate and often seen as central to it-was originally a part of Stalingrad. The characters in the two novels are largely the same, and so is the story line Life and Fate picks up where Stalingrad ends, in late September 1942. Grossman, however, had wanted to call it Stalingrad-and that is how we have titled it in the novel’s first English translation. The first of these two novels was initially published in 1952, in a heavily censored edition and under the title For a Just Cause. It is, rather, the second of two closely related novels about the Battle of Stalingrad-it is probably simplest to refer to it as a dilogy.
Most readers, however, have been unaware that Grossman did not originally conceive of Life and Fate as a self-contained novel. There have been stage productions, TV series, and an eight-hour BBC radio dramatization.
It has been translated into most European languages, and also into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Turkish, and Vietnamese.
Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate has been hailed as a twentieth-century War and Peace.
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