Life and Fate Read Along, Part 2 Chapter 50

This post, covering Part 2, Chapter 50 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.

If you have been on the edge of your seat wondering where Semyonov went, today, a mere 556 pages into Life and Fate, we rejoin him. (Close readers will remember that Semyonov is the army driver who was taken prisoner along with Mostovskoy and Sofya Levinton at the very beginning of the novel.)

After being captured and spending ten weeks in a camp near the front, Semyonov, along with many other prisoners, began being transported. After ten days of the starving journey, he fell off the cart and crawled to the nearest town. Despite being turned away from the first hut, he eventually finds refuge, the narrator noting that “That day his life and fate was decided not by the merciless forces of warring States, but by a human being — old Khristya Chunyak,” (p. 557).