Vasily Grossman - Life And Fate (Orange Inheritance Edition)
Here you can read online Vasily Grossman - Life And Fate (Orange Inheritance Edition) full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2011, publisher: Random House, genre: Art / Science fiction. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:
Romance novel
Science fiction
Adventure
Detective
Science
History
Home and family
Prose
Art
Politics
Computer
Non-fiction
Religion
Business
Children
Humor
Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.
- Book:Life And Fate (Orange Inheritance Edition)
- Author:
- Publisher:Random House
- Genre:
- Year:2011
- Rating:5 / 5
- Favourites:Add to favourites
- Your mark:
Life And Fate (Orange Inheritance Edition): summary, description and annotation
We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Life And Fate (Orange Inheritance Edition)" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.
THIS ORANGE INHERITANCE EDITION OF Life and Fate IS PUBLISHED IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE ORANGE PRIZE FOR FICTIONBooks shape our lives and transform the way we see ourselves and each other. The best books are timeless and continue to be relevant generation after generation. Vintage Classics asked the winners of The Orange Prize for Fiction which books they would pass onto the next generation and why. Linda Grant chose Life and Fate. This is an epic tale of a country told through the fate of a single family, the Shaposhnikovs. As the battle of Stalingrad looms Grossmans characters must work out their destinies in a world torn apart by ideological tyranny and war.I have urged all my friends to read it... I want others to feel as I have done - that they are entering the heart of the twentieth century, touching its pulse Linda GrantVasily Grossman was born in 1905. In 1941 he became a correspondent for the Red Army newspaper, Red Star, reporting on the defence of Stalingrad, the fall of Berlin and the consequences of the Holocaust, work collected in A Writer at War. In 1960 Grossman completed his masterpiece Life and Fate and submitted it to an official literary journal. The KGB confiscated the novel and Grossman was told that there was no chance of it being published for another 200 years. Eventually, however, with the help of Andrey Sakharov, a copy of the manuscript was microfilmed and smuggled out to the west by a leading dissident writer, Vladimir Voinovich. Grossman began Everything Flows in 1955 and was still working on it during his last days in hospital in September 1964.
Vasily Grossman: author's other books
Who wrote Life And Fate (Orange Inheritance Edition)? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
Vasily Grossman
Vasily Grossman
Vasily Grossman
Vasily Grossman
Carlos Fuentes
Zephra Joan
Anna Bonola
Bit-Yunan Yury
Alexandra Popoff
Garrard John Gordon
Evil Hat Productions
Vasily Grossman
VASILII GROSSMAN
Vasily Grossman
Life And Fate (Orange Inheritance Edition) — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work
Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Life And Fate (Orange Inheritance Edition)" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.
Light
Font size:
↓
↑
Reset
Interval:
↓
↑
Bookmark:
Make
About the Author
Vasily Grossman was born in 1905. In 1941 he became a correspondent for the Red Army newspaper, Red Star, reporting on the defence of Stalingrad, the fall of Berlin and the consequences of the Holocaust, work collected in A Writer at War. In 1960 Grossman completed his masterpiece Life and Fate and submitted it to an official literary journal. The KGB confiscated the novel and Grossman was told that there was no chance of it being published for another 200 years. Eventually, however, with the help of Andrey Sakharov, a copy of the manuscript was microfilmed and smuggled out to the west by a leading dissident writer, Vladimir Voinovich. Grossman began Everything Flows in 1955 and was still working on it during his last days in hospital in September 1964.
Linda Grant was born in Liverpool on 15 February 1951, the child of Russian and Polish Jewish immigrants. She is the author of Sexing the Millennium: A Political History of the Sexual Revolution, The Cast Iron Shore, Remind Me Who I am Again, Still Here, The People On The Street: A Writers View of Israel, The Clothes On Their Backs, The Thoughtful Dresser and We Had It So Good. Her second novel, When I Lived in Modern Times, set in Tel Aviv in the last years of the British Mandate, won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2000.
For more information on Orange Inheritance editions please see www.orange.co.uk/bookclub
Also by Vasily Grossman
Everything Flows
Introduction by Linda Grant
In the summer of 2003 I read Vasily Grossmans Life and Fate. It took three weeks to read and three weeks to recover from the experience. Novels fade, your immersion in their world turns into a faint dream, and then is forgotten. Only great literature grows in the imagination. Grossmans book did more than grow, it seemed to replace everything I had previously thought and felt, filling me with what Grossman calls the furious joy of life itself which I have never lost.
Life and Fate is about the terrible years of the mid-twentieth century in the Soviet Union. Its vast canvas covers the Battle of Stalingrad, the Gulag, the coercion of a state which decides as diktat the nature of reality and of truth, however preposterously distant from actual reality and truth. Generals on the Front, common soldiers, mothers, wives, sons, daughters, sisters, ex-husbands, a boy about to advance on his first kiss, Nazi camp commandant, a prison interrogator, a holy fool, scientists in a Moscow laboratory all of these characters swarm through the pages. Great ideas are discussed: the nature of totalitarianism, the betrayal of the Bolshevik revolution, the nature of anti-Semitism, military strategy, the question of freedom and how we can be free despite the external circumstances that chain us.
Life and Fate can be a daunting, monumental read. But its greatness is not the weight of those themes, for at the end of its 871 pages you are left with a message which, to the reader just starting the novel, might appear so banal that it could be inscribed on a greetings card. For Grossman, communism and fascism are ephemera. What matters, what endures, is the individual and the ordinary act of human kindness, indeed the often senseless act of kindness, as when an old Russian woman, about to hoist a brick in the face of a captured German soldier, instead finds to her own incomprehension that she has reached into her pocket and given him a piece of bread. And in the years to come, will still never be able to understand why she did it.
Grossman was not opposing ideology with Christian forgiveness, far from it. He was a Soviet Jew whose Jewishness became more and more meaningful to him as he was caught between the vast threats of anti-Semitism both from Nazi Germany and at home in the form of the increasingly deranged conspiracy theories of Stalin. The passion of Life and Fate is not for ideas or history, but for the ordinary; for human life in all its perplexing, muddled, contradictory and infuriating variety. Grossman takes us into the minds of a group of soldiers waiting in the forest: one is full of dire forebodings, one is singing, one is chewing bread and sausage and thinking about the sausage, one is trying to identify a bird, one worries about whether hed offended his friend, one is composing a farewell poem to autumn, one is remembering a girls breasts, one is missing his dog. This passage leads to the substance of Grossmans central thought, which at the time he was writing could lead to the arrest of a Soviet citizen: The only true and lasting meaning of the struggle for life lies in the individual, in his modest peculiarities, and his right to these peculiarities.
Such treasonous ideas can topple empires.
In the weeks after I first read Life and Fate I was desperate to talk about it, and found a tragic absence. No one I knew had read the novel. Almost no one had even heard of it. The early years of the last decade were the time when Life and Fate and its author were only just beginning to be discovered by English-language readers, following the Harvill Secker publication of Robert Chandlers translation. These early awakenings of interest were largely due to the publication of two best-selling books, Stalingrad and Berlin: The Downfall by the military historian Antony Beevor, who drew heavily on Grossmans journalism as source material. Grossman spent the war as a correspondent, he was there at the Battle of Stalingrad and is believed to have been the first reporter of any nationality to enter the extermination camp of Treblinka and make speakable the horrors he found there.
It was ironic that a former British army officer should lead me directly to one of the greatest European Jewish writers of the century, in a field dominated by Proust, Kafka, Isaac Babel, Bruno Schulz and Joseph Roth.
Life and Fate affected me like no other novel. It affected me personally. The danger in describing this impact is that it will sound to new readers as if Grossman is a writer with a message, and messages tend to kill art stone-dead. Grossman did, of course, have something to say, but its purpose was against the whole notion of the Big Idea. Whatever Grossman was up to, he was not trying to recruit anyone; instead, he was telling us to leave each other alone, to stop harming each other with our insistence on telling others what to think and how to live.
Yet Grossman changed me. The compassion of Kafka for his commercial traveller trapped in the body of an insect, the historic scope of Joseph Roth and Isaac Babels hard-headed understanding of war, were all elements of an impact that it is difficult to describe, even years later. I had written novels about idealists, all failed, but political idealism still seemed worth the effort. Idealism is a romantic pursuit, it speaks to the heart, it flatters our egos. Grossman, no reactionary, taught me that the right to our own modest peculiarities is the only right worth fighting for. In his novel there are no heroes, no saints and no supermen. This must have seemed an extraordinarily dangerous message in the Soviet Union of the early Sixties, despite the Khrushchev thaw.
Life and Fate, unlike the work of the Soviet Unions other internationally-recognised dissident writers, Boris Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, was virtually unknown in the West until the mid-Eighties because the year after its completion in 1960 the book was, in the authors words, arrested. KGB men came to Grossmans flat, removed all copies, removed carbon paper and even the ribbon from his typewriter in case it had left a tell tale imprint. He was told that if his book were ever published, it would not be for another two hundred years. The Soviet Union was careful not to make a martyr of him and he continued to publish stories in important journals in the remaining few years of his life. But there were no Nobel Prizes or committees abroad campaigning for his safety, and part of the torment of his final years was the belief that his lifes work would become, in the word he used to describe the prisoners in Stalins camps, dust: a forgotten book about times everyone wanted to forget.
Light
Font size:
↓
↑
Reset
Interval:
↓
↑
Bookmark:
Make
Similar books «Life And Fate (Orange Inheritance Edition)»
Look at similar books to Life And Fate (Orange Inheritance Edition). We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.
Carlos Fuentes
Zephra Joan
Anna Bonola
Bit-Yunan Yury
Alexandra Popoff
Garrard John Gordon
Evil Hat Productions
Vasily Grossman
VASILII GROSSMAN
Vasily Grossman
Reviews about «Life And Fate (Orange Inheritance Edition)»
Discussion, reviews of the book Life And Fate (Orange Inheritance Edition) and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.