After Stalin’s death in 1953, Grossman enjoyed a period of public success. He was awarded a prestigious decoration, “The Red Banner of Labour”, and Za pravoe delo (For a Just Cause), the first of his two Stalingrad novels, was republished. Meanwhile he was writing two masterpieces, neither of which was to be published in Russia until the late 1980s: Zhizn’ i sud’ba (Life and Fate) and Vse techet (Everything Flows). Though sometimes described as a sequel to the politically less heretical For a Just Cause, Life and Fate is better seen as a separate novel that includes many of the same characters.
Life and Fate is important both as literature and as history. Grossman achieves in it what many other Soviet writers struggled but failed to achieve: a portrait of an entire age. Every character,...
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Citation: Chandler, Robert. "Zhizn' i sud'ba". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 25 November 2010 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=21502, accessed 09 June 2026.]
