Life and Fate

Grossman's vast novel turns on the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942–43 and braids it with the two great terrors of the century, the Nazi camps and Stalin's own. The city on the Volga is the fixed centre: the ruined streets, the encircled strongpoint the novel calls House 6/1, and the height of Mamayev Kurgan fought over yard by yard. Beyond it the book reaches to the Berdichev ghetto, where the physicist Shtrum's mother writes her last letter, and to the Lubyanka in Moscow, so that the war and the two tyrannies are held in one frame.

Krymov

Stalingrad (the city on the Volga)

Part 1

Across the Volga and into the burning city come the reinforcements and the commissars, Krymov among them, an old Bolshevik who still believes and will be broken for it. Grossman, who reported the real battle for Red Star, renders the crossings, the cellars and the rubble with the authority of a witness.

Part 1

explicit The novel's battle is the real defence of Stalingrad, now Volgograd, along the west bank of the Volga; the ruined city and its river crossings are the fixed centre of the book.

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Anna Semyonovna

The Berdichev ghetto

Part 1

The physicist Shtrum's mother writes from a Ukrainian ghetto in the days before the Germans kill its Jews, a letter Grossman based on the fate of his own mother at Berdichev. It is the book's unbearable centre, and it sets the Nazi murder of the Jews beside the Soviet terror without ever equating them.

Part 1

explicit Anna Semyonovna's last letter is written from the ghetto of Berdichev in Ukraine, the real town where Grossman's own mother was murdered with the Jews in 1941; sited there, far outside the Stalingrad setting.

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