6/6/2023 0 Comments Life and destiny grossman![]() ![]() ![]() The commentary included with the book’s first complete Russian edition in 1989 was titled "The Spirit of Freedom" (" Dukh svobody"). ![]() Yet even in such august company, Grossman’s Life and Fate, serialized in the popular literary magazine Oktyabr, was instantly recognized for its brilliance. They trafficked in great books, some that had waited decades to be read: Andrei Platonov’s Chevengur and The Foundation Pit, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem. This being Russia, literature was the first and the main resource of the glasnost warriors. In their search for a usable past, something not to be rejected in disgust, not to shudder over, but to cherish and be inspired by, they were awed by the brave and nearly lost attempts of their fathers and mothers to imagine a just and moral political order. Finally, in 1988, it was embraced by the cultural revolutionaries of glasnost as they slashed and burned their way through the official narrative of Soviet history, encrusted with 70 years of lies. For more than a quarter-century, the book was unavailable in Russia. The KGB immediately destroyed all copies of what Grossman called Life and Fate ( Zhizn’ i sud’ba in Russian) except for two hidden by his friends, and he died in 1964 without ever seeing his work published. ![]() Fifty years ago this past October, Vasily Grossman submitted for publication the greatest Russian novel of the 20th century. ![]()
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