Life and Fate Read Along, Part 1 Chapter 54

This post, covering Part 1, Chapter 54, 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.

Today we are transported from one Shaposhnikova former partner to another; from one front line to another. Krymov’s excitement in Stalingrad is boiling over as thinks about living in a time where history has exited the books and instead jumped into the world around him.

The front seems to present itself anew to Krymov. He thinks that “Here, in Stalingrad, the glitter of sunlight on water, the colour of the sky and the clouds, struck him with a new intensity. It had been the same when he was a child,” (p. 231). The whole scene seems imbued with a new energy that has not been seen in years, but one that seems vaguely reminiscent to Krymov.