‘Life and fate’, the overwhelmed magnitude of cruelty

The huge literary work of Vasili Grossman is currently fashionable thanks to the launch of a new edition by Gutenberg Galaxy in Spain. Over a thousand pages in a fascinating itinerary that leads to the significant Battle of Stalingrad, where Soviet troops were able to stop, finally, the oppressive delusions of grandeur of Hitler, Goebbels and their vassals.

The war works to Grossman as a pretext to sketch the human portrait of a nation, Russia, which is trapped between German shells and Stalinist guidelines of dubious socializing interests. The author explains with unusual harshness the effort of survival of different characters, from a Soviet scientist overwhelmed by the ideological inconsistencies of his superiors to a Nazi command who imperturbably ensures the proper functioning of gas chambers, from a Muscovite teacher annihilated for his Jewish descent to a group of political Russian prisoners whose are shot for their alleged opposition to the Stalin’s regime, from a woman who gives birth in the midst of conflict while hopeful awaits the return of her husband to a German leader that verifies how arrives, inexorably, the extinction of his plans for the future, his dreams. Only from a point of view so broad is possible to address the complexity of a conflict of this nature; the bitterness that emanates is masterly portrayed, with a wide capacity for self-criticism.

Grossman's work represents the survival of art above the injustices; not surprisingly, the novelist was persecuted by the Soviet Government, and only twenty years after his death, in 1983, it was possible the publication of 'Life and fate', in French.