The greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century!
Vasily Grossman was born in 1905. In 1941, he became a war reporter for the Red Army newspaper Red Star and came to be regarded as a legendary war hero. Life and Fate, his masterpiece, was considered a threat to the totalitarian regime, and Grossman was told that there was no chance of the novel being published for another 200 years. Grossman died in 1964.
The War and Peace of the 20th century
*Antony Beevor*
One of the greatest masterpieces of the twentieth century
*Times Literary Supplement*
It is only a matter of time before Grossman is acknowledged as one
of the great writers of the 20th century... Life and Fate is a book
that demands to be talked about
*Guardian*
One of the finest Russian novels of the 20th century
*Daily Telegraph*
What better time to read Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman's epic
novel about the second world war, to put our current troubles into
perspective? Grossman's book, which traces the fate of the family
of the brilliant physicist Viktor Shtrum at the time of the Battle
of Stalingrad, records how humanity endured the monstrous evils of
Nazism and Stalinism, surviving like weeds in the cracks of
concrete slabs
*Financial Times*
One of the greatest masterpieces of the twentieth century * Times
Literary Supplement *
It is only a matter of time before Grossman is acknowledged as one
of the great writers of the 20th century... Life and Fate is
a book that demands to be talked about * Guardian *
One of the finest Russian novels of the 20th century * Daily
Telegraph *
Vasily Grossman's novel is burnt in my memory, not only by its huge
canvas, its meditation on tyranny, and its dazzling description of
war, but also because this is the novel that made me cry - not just
a few leaked tears, but a full-scale sobbing episode - in
Montpellier airport... Grossman lost his mother in a concentration
camp. In Life and Fate, he writes with tenderness, and pain,
not only of that experience but of what it is like to survive
tyranny. A classic indeed -- Gillian Slovo * Independent *
One of the great writers of the last century * Observer *
Grossman (1905-64) hoped that Life and Fate (1960), the sequel to his World War II novel In a Just Cause (Za Pra voe delo, 1954; no English translation), would appear in the USSR. Even dur ing the 1960s ``thaw,'' that proved im possible. The translator compares the book to War and Peace , but it is closer to Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle in portraying a society that knows neither physical nor spiritual peace. Grossman uses one family's experiences of the months of the Stalingrad campaign to show the entire mad tapestry woven by Stalin and Hitler. Like Solzhenitsyn, he depicts laboratories, prisons, and the Soviet elite's uneasy privilege, but he also covers both sides of the front and follows Jews to the gas chambers. This sprawling, uneven novel is wrenching, and compelling in its portrait of loyal citizens who repel the Nazi invaders only to face renewed repression at home. Mary F. Zirin, Altadena, Cal.
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