Life and Fate (Russian: Жизнь и судьба, romanized: Zhizn' i sud'ba) is a novel by Vasily Grossman.

[1] A multi-faceted novel, one of its main themes is the tragedy of the common people, who have to fight both the invaders and the totalitarianism of their own state.

In 2021, the critic and editor Robert Gottlieb, writing in The New York Times, referred to Life and Fate as "the most impressive novel written since World War II.

[4] For that reason, the manuscript was censored in the Soviet Union at the time and was only published in the 1980s, nearly two decades after Grossman's death, first in the West and then on Russian soil under glasnost.

It is difficult to summarize the novel, but the plot can be boiled down to three basic plotlines: the Shtrum/Shaposhnikov family, the Stalingrad battle, and life in the prison camps of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany.

The events recounted at Stalingrad center on Yevghenia Shaposhnikova (Lyudmila's sister), Krymov (her former husband), and Novikov (her lover).

Novikov, the commander of a Soviet tank corps, meets General Nyeudobnov and Political Commissar Getmanov, both of whom are Party hacks.

Meanwhile, Krymov, a Political Commissar, is sent to investigate House 6/1, where a tiny group of soldiers have held back the Germans for weeks, even though they are completely surrounded and cut off from all supplies.

His interrogator, Sturmbannführer Liss, asserts that fascism and communism are two sides of the same coin, which upsets Mostovskoy greatly.

The final chapter introduces a set of characters who remain anonymous: an elderly widow observing her tenants, a wounded army officer recently discharged from hospital, his wife and their young daughter.

[6] It is implied, however, that the officer returning to his family is Major Byerozkin, a recurring character from Stalingrad who is shown to be a kind man struggling to retain his humanity.

One such political worker (политработник), Sagaidak, maintained that entire families and villages intentionally starved themselves to death during the collectivisation in the USSR.

The book ends with the surrender of German field-marshal Friedrich Paulus' 6th Army remnants and the return of civilians to the city.

One of the most promising Soviet physicists of his time, Lev Shtrum was arrested and executed during Stalin's Great Purge.

Grossman also includes another German concentration camp where one of his main arguments takes place concerning communism and fascism.

Grossman devotes large sections of the book to the prisoners held at Soviet and German labor and concentration camps, which is necessary for a holistic understanding of the time and events.

"In 1974, Lipkin got one of the surviving copies to put onto microfilm and smuggled it out of the country with the help of satirical writer Vladimir Voinovich and nuclear scientist Andrei Sakharov.

[22] As the policy of glasnost was initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev, the novel was finally published on Russian soil in 1988 in the Oktyabr magazine[23] and as a book.

[8] Robert Chandler, who translated Life and Fate into English, while noting the comparison with Tolstoy, says that there is something Chekhovian about his writing.