Life and Fate Read Along, Part 2 Chapter 40

This post, covering Part 2, Chapter 40 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.

This chapter might be the shortest in the book. At only about 9 lines, we have no choice but to contemplate why Grossman chose this particular moment to slow the narrative.

Jumping to the end of the war, the narrator describes how a dossier was found in the archives of the Munich Gestapo and how “The final document stated that the sentence passed on the members of the organization had been carried out and their bodies burnt in the crematorium. The first name on the list was Mostovskoy’s,” (p. 531).