l A current literary world likes occasionally an important discovery, an unexpected success, a great writer unknown, he may be dead. This cruel and wordy world of books seems to need to shake off the lethargy of updates to "table" of bookstores with a miracle, with an appearance rumbling past, a reminder that off the table there is also literature ... but that also falls on the table.
Life and Fate part of one of these events, and in a triple is like the unexpected news that I speak. Not only for its literary interest, but because the history of publishing success is itself a novel. They are loud more than one thousand pages, which is bringing its author Vasily Grossman , in the small circle of the most ambitious novelists in history. Mann, Balzac, Tolstoy, Pérez Galdós, Proust and a few others as well as Grossman, form this select club of authors milpaginarios . But Grossman also never knew whether his work would be published. Could have suspected that his book would disappear, wiped out by the largest and most cruel dictatorship of all time: the Soviet government. Could have guessed that without effort and determination, his greatest work, would end locked in a basement and not go out as his many friends and colleagues did in the Lubyanka .
The book was seized. He had been sent for publication in 1960, but was immediately banned. Grossman's house was attacked, and seized manuscripts, copies, notes and tapes to his typewriter. But the work escapes, leaving the iron dam communist. A conspiracy, which involved nuclear physicist Sakharov (Nobel Peace Prize), made in 1974 is made a microfilm copy of one of the original survivors, and go to Switzerland. Be published in 1980, 16 years after Grossman's death. In The Soviet Union was not published until the advent of perestroika and glasnost of Gorbachev.
published in Spain in 1988, translated from French. Possibly due to the leftists who triumphs in the cultural life of Spain in those years, the work goes unnoticed. Antonio Muñoz Molina recognizes that is the case, he did not read the novel. It does not seem the time to torpedo the left with a work against communism. So Grossman, and his novel, are ignored, as Solzhetitsyn . It's amazing ability left to forget that the greatest crimes of humanity have been produced by communists. But that's another story.
But the most striking or outrageous as you see, is that to recognize this work in Spain does not lack an unexpected event, but two . And in 2007 it was decided to address the direct translation from Russian and published in a volume edited beautifully. Great writers and critics recognize it as a masterful novel of the greatest works of the twentieth century. As long as one can speak ill of Stalin , the work is finally scheduled by the cultural world as graceful. And not only that, but just entering the album chart, staying several weeks bestseller in Spain.
If we consider the third event unlikely that Grossman was able to write such a work in political conditions in which he lived, we are dangerously close to Miracle capitalized. The work has centered around the Battle of Stalingrad , decisive episode of the second world war and the bloody battle that mankind has played with nearly two million dead. It is not only a novel war: it is anti-Semitism, communism, socialism, the behavior of purging and cleansing that behind the Communist Party were cruelly. It speaks of the huge blackmail which was subjected to hundreds of millions of people by a regime that hid behind the enemy, another dictatorship cruel and morbid, to have total authority. But mostly the novel is about human feelings than two dozen characters before the war, human beings, men and women before the misfortune and disappointment.
Only someone as ambitious, with the ideas so clear, as Grossman could write such a wealth of details and feelings. To compare the novel with War and Peace , and even joked about it in the book. One character is an admirer of Tolstoy , in particular, War and Peace. Contends that only a person who had attended the Napoleonic wars could describe such a success. In the same novel is reminded that Tolstoy did not attend those battles, as occurred before he was born. It is therefore a wink of Grossman, who actually participated in the battle of Stalingrad, and was able to describe at first hand what suffering and despair, and how the people defended their territory for the benefit of the cruel dictator.
Grossman's novel tells the life of a theoretical scientist in the rear, and tells the terror underwent scientists (biologists were particularly sought to be considered anti-revolutionary ideas of Darwin ), the terror of betrayal and jealous tip. But the author tells how a man survives in the most difficult moments, and how love comes in all times and places. The women in the novel does not show less courage than men in battle. Grossman joins us with one of them until efficient gas chamber German, and takes us by the Academy of Sciences in Moscow. He explains the complicated intricacies of the single party and the disgrace of their most loyal advocates. No matter left unturned, no consciousness without worry, no mind unchanged. As these characters he describes, enduring all the misfortune that could befall them, had to be Grossman, who trusted the party to the end of his life abhor.
Grossman was aware of the impossibility of publishing the novel in the world of the Cold War. Likewise, in Spain at the beginning of the eighties still looked evil to criticize the worst dictatorship history. After these great injustice to this masterpiece, now find pleasure in the novel on the shelves of thousands of English homes. This story is itself the reason why it has become successful and has appeared on the news desk of the library. As civil war in Spain is a fashion in novels, it is fashionable in Europe World War II. The echo of this fashion may have helped to make that hole Grossman in memory of Muñoz Molina and all of us.
This unprecedented success has generated the publication of a sequel by the publisher, Galaxy / Gutenberg. On "Life and Fate" tells the vicissitudes of the book, written by Todorov, Etkind and the same Grossman. Although I do not think it reaches the table, it sure is interesting to delve into the diverse and tiny miracles that have made possible the most important publishing event in Spain in 2007. And to continue the wheel.
