On listening to Life and Fate

It’s not often that Radio 4 clears its entire drama schedule for a week and replaces it with a single nine-hour radio play. Yet on the week of the 18th September that is precisely what will happen. The play—Life And Fate, with Kenneth Branagh in the starring role—is an adaptation of the postwar novel by little-known Russian writer Vasily Grossman.

Although Life and Fate centres around the moribund physicist Viktor Shtrum and the epic battle of Stalingrad, the novel weaves hundreds of interrelated stories and characters together to show a vivid cross-section of life under Stalin. Grossman was a high-profile frontline reporter during the war, and his fiction displays the same perceptiveness and honesty for which his journalism was renowned. Stories and characters arise and subside like waves in the broad river of humanity, winding through the horrors of the Eastern Front; the result is a novel that manages to be at once sweepingly panoramic and minutely detailed.



Life and Fate, by all accounts, is a work of colossal genius. Martin Amis called Grossman “the Tolstoy of the USSR,” and the historian Antony Beevor—speaking on a special Grossman edition of Start The Week on Radio 4 today—described the book as “one of the greatest Russian novels of the twentieth century.” Mark Damazer, the former controller of Radio 4 who commissioned the drama adaptation, was more laudatory still, calling Life andFate “the best and most important novel of modern times.”

Grossman completed Life and Fate in 1960, but because of the novel's dissidence—it dared to compare Nazism and Stalinism, for example—the manuscript was confiscated by the KGB, who famously seized the typewriter and carbon paper that Grossman used to write it. A decade and a half later, a small group of radicals managed to smuggle a microfilm version of the book under the Iron Curtain; an English edition was finally published in 1985. Frustratingly enough, by that point all eyes were on Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak and Life and Fate was eclipsed.

This new radio adaptation should bring the work to light again, though for the best parts of Life and Fate, you have to read the book. For one thing, the radio play is abridged. Life and Fate is a gargantuan work, with over a thousand different named characters, and the way Grossman manages to capture such a panoramic macro-microcosm is one of the most engaging aspects of the novel; the radio play, spanning only nine hours, will be unable to properly emulate this.

More fundamental, however, is the fact that the BBC dramatists decided against the use of a narrator for Life and Fate. One effect of this is to remove a barrier of artifice between the events of the story and the listener. An unintended consequence, however, is that Grossman's superlative prose is denied a mouthpiece. This is a great loss. On almost every page can be found a passage that is so perceptive and wise, expressed in prose that is so fluid and perfectly balanced, that it takes your breath away. If you listen to the radio play, you will gain a sense of the overall movement of plot, the characters, settings, atmosphere and so forth. But you’ll miss out on Grossman’s extraordinary narrative insight, as well as his exquisite facility for what Orwell called “words and their right arrangement,” which Robert Chandler's translation upholds magnificently.

Nowhere can this more clearly be seen than in his rendition of the Chekhovian vignette. To give one example, Krymov, a commissar in the Red Army, is caught in a night battle on the outskirts of Stalingrad. In the midst of the fight, as “rifles flash, red and green eyes gleam momentarily, and the air is full of the whistle of iron,” he finds himself noticing how “one second can stretch out for eternity, and long hours can crumple together. The sense of duration is linked to such fleeting events as the whistle of shells and bombs, the flashes of shots and explosions. The sense of quickness, on the other hand, is linked to protracted events: crossing a ploughed field under fire, crawling from one shelter to another. And as for hand-to-hand fighting—that takes place quite outside time.”

The Russians succeed in routing the Germans. The following morning, Krymov is sitting sleepily on a crate amongst the “ploughed-up earth and the empty shells of buildings,” as all around him dishevelled soldiers prepare breakfast. There is the sound of a spoon clinking against a tin mug. One man “give[s] a long yawn and begin[s] to shake up his straw bedding.” It is then that Rubinchik the barber appears, and begins to play a melody on his fiddle in the midst of the appalling desolation. The leads Krymov to reflect further:

“Somehow the music seemed to have helped him to understand time. Time is a transparent medium. People and cities arise out of it, move through it and disappear back into it. It is time that brings them and time that takes them away. But the understanding that had just come to Krymov was a very different one: the understanding that says, 'This is my time,' or 'No, this is no longer our time.' Time flows into a man or State, makes its home there and then flows away; the man and the State remain, but their time has passed. Where has their time gone? The man still thinks, breathes and cries, but his time, the time that belonged to him and him alone, has disappeared…Such is time: everything passes, it alone remains; everything remains, it alone passes. And how swiftly and noiselessly it passes. Only yesterday you were sure of yourself, strong and cheerful, a son of the time. But now another time has come—and you don't even know it. In yesterday's fighting, time had been torn to shreds; now it emerged again from the plywood fiddle belonging to Rubinchik the barber. This fiddle told some that their time had come and others that their time had passed. 'I'm finished,' Krymov said to himself. 'Finished!'"

Life and Fate truly is one of the great modern novels, not just in its scope but also in its elegant prose and profoundly insightful vignettes. Now, at long last, its time has come. The radio adaptation is surpassingly excellent. But only the book itself can demonstrate beyond doubt why Grossman deserves to be considered one of the twentieth century's most important and accomplished writers.

More on Grossman: read Robert Chandler's 2006 essay on Life and Fatehere