Some appear only once without serving any important narrative function. I said yesterday that Life and Fate contains dozens, even hundreds of characters. The uncertainty of who speaks the opening sentence, which gives way to the speculation that the narrator is ventriloquizing the collective sentiments of the pilots and thereby gently satirizing them (gently, gently, though: after all, so much suffering awaits them at the front: for most of them, old age really is impossible) the juxtaposition of the slumbering landscape and the sexual possibility of the evening’s entertainment, so reminiscent of the regiment’s nighttime walk from the country home past the brothel in “The Kiss” that amazing and amazingly strange image of the tree “frightened by a bad dream”: all of this is pure Chekhov!īut I didn’t want to talk about Chekhov. Now and then a tree would shake, frightened by a bad dream the water would mumble something and return to silence. On the edge of the village you could glimpse white scarves and hear quiet laughter. Few pilots spent the night in their bunkers. The moon shone down though the grey mist that enveloped the earth. This passage, in which some air force pilots who have been ordered to leave the village where they’ve been billeted decide to spend one last night on the town, as it were, reminded me of “The Kiss”:Įverything-the river, the fields, the forest-was so beautiful, so peaceful, that hatred, betrayal and old age seemed impossible nothing could exist but love and happiness. He said-and no one had said this before, not even Tolstoy-that first and foremost we are all of us human beings. (“Chekhov brought Russia into our consciousness in all its vastness-with people of every estate, every class, every age…. And that was even before one of the characters declaimed at length about Chekhov’s genius. (I’m thinking here of someone like Gurov in “The Lady with the Little Dog.”) Honestly, I’m talking through my hat here because I don’t know enough about Chekhov, but I do know Life and Fate reminded me of him. Grossman learned from Chekhov how to draw us towards characters while also distancing us from them. Nor is it because the “hero” of the book is really some abstraction like the Soviet Union, or the Russian soul, or even the war effort. We know them well, get inside their heads, feel for them.

Not because they’re imperfectly or casually developed. Yet even the characters we might be tempted to call central feel secondary. Yes, Viktor is modeled on Grossman and his fall from and return to political favour is compellingly detailed. Yes, the family Shaposhnikova is at the center of the book. Thesis: in Life and Fate there are only minor characters.

Life and fate