Life and Fate

As the siege of Stalingrad grinds on in late 1942, the physicist Viktor Shtrum works on a breakthrough while his family scatters across a country at war. Grossman tracks the wide Shaposhnikov clan into the trenches, the prison camps of both Hitler and Stalin, and the apartments where denunciation can arrive by post. The book holds dozens of lives at once, from soldiers to scientists to political officers, and threads moral essays through the action in the Tolstoyan manner. Its central claim is that the two totalitarian regimes are poles of a single magnet, and that small acts of unbidden kindness are the one human thing the century cannot extinguish.