Life and Fate Read Along, Part 3 Chapter 56

This post, covering Part 3, Chapter 56 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.

Shortly after his interrogation, Krymov’s thinking starts to reach its apotheosis.

Suddenly the years of seemingly impossible confessions start to make sense. Krymov thinks that “The hide was being flayed off the still living body of the Revolution so that a new age could slip into it; as for the red, bloody meat, the steaming innards — they were being thrown onto the scrapheap. The new age needed only the hide of the Revolution — and this was being flayed off people who were still alive,” (p. 841). Unfortunately for Krymov, he clearly senses that he has become part of the steaming innards thrown onto the scrapheap. Regardless of how long he holds out to confess to the charges that his interrogators created, his fate has been sealed.