ABSTRACT
In the Soviet Union of the 1950s and 1960s, physicists and in particular nuclear physicists enjoyed extraordinarily high prestige. Not only were they supposed to safeguard Soviet superiority in the context of the Cold War, but they also embodied the overall optimism concerning the benefits of a peaceful use of nuclear energy. From the late 1950s, however, the so-called fiziki-liriki debate introduced a somewhat more critical perspective into the perception of nuclear technology. Leading intellectuals besought a moral containment of the natural sciences that otherwise would unfold a destructive potential on the scale of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it was understood that the impulse to reign in this potential was to be provided by the arts. Vasilii Grossman, himself a scientist by training, explored the danger of nuclear war in several of his works. This chapter examines, how in Grossman's novel, Life and Fate, the danger of nuclear warfare is debated within the context of a critique of totalitarianism that is closely linked with Grossman's experience of both the Stalinist crimes and the Holocaust and his confrontation with anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union.
