Life and Fate

Today I cried.

I was in my car. It was three o’clock and I was sitting in a car park, sobbing my socks off.

Because of the radio.

I have been intermittently listening to the Radio 4 adaptation of Vassily Grossman’s epic book; ‘Life and Fate.’

It has been getting a lot of publicity recently.  It is a huge undertaking. Hours of radio time are being devoted to it, and there is a stellar cast: David Tennant, Samuel West, Eleanor Bron, Kenneth Branagh and a whole host of other major names.

Grossman’s book was banned during his lifetime. The Soviet authorities considered it to be too dangerous to publish because of the comparisons it draws between communism and Nazism.  It is now considered the most important book of Russian literature in 20th Century Fiction.

I have never read it.

I am also only listening to it in snatches.  I only really get quality radio time in the car, and it is on just as I am going to pick the children up from school.

The names confuse me. Grossman has that peculiarly Russian trait of giving people seventeen names where one would suffice.

It is also centred around the real events of The Battle of Stalingrad, about which I know very little.

It is however, totally absorbing. The surreal way in which I am listening to it is a bit like listening to poetry.  It is the sound it makes rather than the sense that grabs you first.

Today the episode I listened to was about a woman called Sofya, who is a Russian doctor, and also a Jew. She is captured by the Nazis during a battle and the last ten minutes of the broadcast was unutterably moving as we hear her in the cattle trucks, on her way to the concentration camp, and then her thoughts as she moves towards the gas chambers knowing that her death is awaiting her.

Her words are lyrical, and beautiful, and unutterably sad.

You can listen to them here.

Isn’t it wonderful that writing can do this to people? That words can twist your guts and open your soul and leave you wrenched with sobs in a car park on a wet Tuesday afternoon?

And that we have access to them?

We are so lucky that nobody restricts us from listening and reading and finding things out. We are so lucky that we have access to amazing, risky, esoteric radio and television.  I do not think we celebrate it enough.

And we should.

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