Life and Fate Read Along, Part 1 Chapter 53

This post, covering Part 1, Chapter 53, is part of The Slavic Literature Pod’s chapter a day read along of Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate. Learn more about our project here.

Standing close to deployment, Novikov spends this chapter in deep consideration regarding the individual men in his tank corps.

He ponders some of the difficulties a leader faces in this situation—namely, the responsibility for everything. He thinks that “It’s hard to be the absolute master, to feel responsible for the last trifling detail. The tanks have already been loaded, but has everything been done correctly?” (p. 227). In a way, there is no possible world in which Novikov could know everything happening in this tank corps.