{"id":4101,"date":"2021-04-05T13:22:33","date_gmt":"2021-04-05T13:22:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vocilibereurss.fupress.net\/vita-e-destino\/"},"modified":"2021-12-30T17:20:44","modified_gmt":"2021-12-30T17:20:44","slug":"vita-e-destino","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vocilibereurss.fupress.net\/en\/vita-e-destino\/","title":{"rendered":"Life and Fate (V. Grossman)"},"content":{"rendered":"[vc_row type=”in_container” full_screen_row_position=”middle” column_margin=”default” column_direction=”default” column_direction_tablet=”default” column_direction_phone=”default” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” row_border_radius=”none” row_border_radius_applies=”bg” overlay_strength=”0.3″ gradient_direction=”left_to_right” shape_divider_position=”bottom” bg_image_animation=”none”][vc_column column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_tablet=”inherit” column_padding_phone=”inherit” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ column_shadow=”none” column_border_radius=”none” column_link_target=”_self” gradient_direction=”left_to_right” overlay_strength=”0.3″ width=”1\/1″ tablet_width_inherit=”default” tablet_text_alignment=”default” phone_text_alignment=”default” column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid” bg_image_animation=”none”][vc_column_text]\n
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Cover of “Zhizn’ i sud’ba” by V. Grossman.<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

Title:
\n<\/strong><\/em>Zhizn\u2019 i sud\u2019ba [Life and Fate]
\n<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Author:<\/strong><\/em> Vasilii Grossman (1905-1964)<\/p>\n

Years of Writing:<\/strong> <\/em>1950 [?]-1960<\/p>\n

Year of first Publishing:<\/strong><\/em>\u00a01980<\/p>\n

Publisher:<\/em><\/strong> L\u2019Age d\u2019Homme<\/p>\n

Place of Publishing:<\/strong><\/em> Lausanne<\/p>\n

Description:
\n<\/strong><\/em>Vasilii Grossman began writing his masterpiece Life and Fate<\/em> (Zhizn\u2019 i sud\u2019ba<\/em>), the first part of what he had imagined as a duology on the Battle of Stalingrad (1942 \u2013 43), even before publishing For a Just Cause<\/em> (Za pravoe delo<\/em>, 1952; 1954 revised ed.). It took him a decade to complete. Chapters of Life and Fate<\/em> appeared in Soviet newspapers in 1960 and in October of the same year, Grossman presented the novel to the magazine \u201cZnamja\u201d which refused to publish it for ideological reasons. On 14 February 1961, the KGB seized the writer\u2019s manuscripts, first drafts and typewritten copies, aiming to avoid a new \u201cPasternak incident\u201d, and Grossman was detained by the Soviet regime. If he published abroad, he risked imprisonment. After the writer’s death, the custodians of the two copies of Life and Fate<\/em> hidden by Grossman before his manuscripts were confiscated, his friend Viacheslav Loboda and the writer Semen Lipkin, were also detained. Only in 1974 did the latter, with the help of the writer Vladimir Voinovich\u2019s, manage to bring the novel to the West. One microfilm copy was prepared by Vojnovich and another by Andrei Sakharov<\/a> and Elena Bonner. A selection of 23 chapters was published in the emigrant magazine \u201cKontinent<\/a>\u201d (1975 \u2013 1976) but the novel did not gain significant attention from publishers and critics. In 1978 Voinovich gave a third microfilm copy of the novel to the Austrian Slavist Rosemarie Ziegler, which the publisher L\u2019Age d\u2019Homme of Lausanne released in 1980. The editors, Efim \u0116tkind and Simon Markish, prepared an incomplete version using another microfilm of unknown source; however, they could not decrypt every word. In the Soviet Union some chapters of Life and Fate<\/em> appeared in \u201cOgon\u0451k\u201d in 1987 and the following year the novel (in the 1980 version with the omission of chapter 32 of part II, about anti-Semitism) was published, generating a huge stir, in the magazine \u201cOktiabr\u2019\u201d as well as in a single volume by Knizhnaia Palata, who reissued it in 1989 in a new edition based on the copy kept by Loboda (of which no one had known until then) and the typewritten copy provided by Lipkin. In 2013, the FSB ceded to the Russian State Archives for Literature and Art (RGALI) the writer\u2019s documents seized in 1961, that were archived in the Grossman Fund.
\nThe first translations of Life and Fate<\/em> came out in the 1980s in France (1983), Italy<\/a> and Germany (1984), England (1985), and Sweden (1986), but international acclaim arrived in the 2000s, with new versions in English and French (2006), German (2007), and Italian (2008) based on the 1989 Russian edition, and new translations into Spanish, Polish, Portuguese, and other languages.<\/p>\n

Maurizia Calusio
\n<\/em><\/strong>[30th June 2021]\n

Translation by Alice Bucelli<\/p>\n

Russian editions<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n