The Story of the Manuscript

On February 14, 1961, KGB agents stole the manuscript and all typewritten copies of Life and Fate from Grossman's home. However, Grossman had entrusted two typed copies to two trusted persons:
The first, a final, typed draft, to Semyon Lipkin. The second, typed but with many handwritten corrections, to Vyacheslav Ivanovich Loboda.

The First Copy

After the death of Grossman, Lipkin tried to smuggle his copy into the West. He had two microfilms made: the first by Vladimir Voinovich and the second by Andrei Sakharov and his wife Elena Bonner in their clandestine laboratory.

In the late 1970s, Rosemarie Zigler, an Austrian researcher in Slavic studies, got past the border with the two microfilms in a little box no bigger than a pack of cigarettes. In Paris, the box was entrusted to Efim Etkind, the distinguished critic and filologist.

Once in the West, however, no publisher wanted to put out the umpteenth "war novel." Finally, Vladimir Dimitrijevic, a Serb editor in Switzerland, agreed to do it.

Along with Simon Markish, Etkind undertook a precise philological effort to put together the two microfilms and to reconstruct the parts which the low quality of the photographs had left incomplete.

L'Age d'Homme published the first edition of Life and Fate in 1980 in Russian with several gaps. The first translations in French (L'Age d'Homme, 1981) and in Italian (Jaka Book, 1982) derive from this edition.

In 1988 the novel finally emerged in Russia. Life and Fate was published first as a series in the magazine Oktyabr and then in a single volume by the publishing house "Knishnaya Palata." .

The Second Copy

Vyacheslav Ivanovich died in a car accident. Custody of the typed copy passed to his wife, Vera Ivanovna, who hid it in the cellar.

Only after the Losanna edition came out in Russia did Vera Ivanovna give up her copy of Life and Fate, which has the handwritten corrections. Released to the heirs of Grossman, it represented the complete novel at last, which was published in Moscow in 1990. The heading reads "Based on the author's manuscript."