"Life And Fate" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grossman Vasily)
THE TEXT AND THE TRANSLATION
The Russian text of Life and Fate, first published in Lausanne in 1980, is based on the collation of two incomplete microfilms. For the main part, the two microfilms complemented one another; gaps and obscurities in one could be filled in from the other. Nevertheless, there are still passages where the published text breaks off in mid-chapter or mid-sentence. No attempt has been made to conceal these hiatuses; they are indicated in this translation by a bracketed ellipsis: […]
I have also chosen to omit or abridge some of the more sententious philosophical passages. Grossman's style is occasionally repetitive; I hope that my abridgments allow the power of his thought to stand out with greater clarity. In justification of such high-handedness, I can only plead that the manuscript was never finally prepared for publication by Grossman himself, and there is evidence he himself wished to carry out further revision. The omissions amount to approximately six pages in the Russian text.
A translation of this length must always, to some degree, be a collective task. I offer my sincere thanks to the large number of people who have helped in their various ways: Igor Golomstok for first bringing the novel to my attention and suggesting I attempt a translation; George Theiner and Hugh Lunghi for publishing extracts from my translation in their admirable magazine Index on Censorship; Mark Bonham Carter, Carol O'Brien and Dan Franklin for their patience, understanding and extraordinarily conscientious editing; James Greene, David Black, Barbara Hart and Dinny Thorold for their criticisms of sections of the manuscript; Robin Leanse for his versions of the poems in Chapters 70 and 72 of Part I, which I have adopted with only slight alterations; Christine and Benito Difazio for providing me with a home while I completed the translation; Elizabeth Grimwade for retyping a number of chapters; Christopher Donnelly of the Soviet Studies Unit at Sandhurst, and Brigadier B. C. Elgood for their help with military terminology. Above all, I must thank Harry Willetts of St Antony's, Oxford, for checking the entire manuscript against the Russian; with his encyclopedic knowledge of both Soviet history and contemporary Russian idiom he has saved me from more blunders than I care to admit.
I wish to dedicate this translation to the memory of four people I would very much like to have read this book: my father Colonel R. E. Chandler; my ex-wife's father, the Russian-Jewish theoretical physicist Grigory Lazarev; Colonel G. H. Nash, a friend and expert on Soviet military history; and my former teacher, Gordon Pirie, who disapproved of dedications.