6/12/2023 0 Comments Grossman life and fate review![]() ![]() Yet Life and Fate was only the second half of an epic work that started with Stalingrad, written in the 1940s and all but forgotten until recently. The novel was published at last in 1980, in Switzerland, due to the tireless efforts of a handful of mostly Jewish Russophone writers and intellectuals, and it eventually became a classic. By then, the Orthodox Russian nationalist Solzhenitsyn was the new big thing in Soviet dissidence Grossman’s Jewish themes had a narrower appeal. ![]() The dissident satirist Vladimir Voinovich arranged to have microfilm of Life and Fate smuggled abroad in 1975, but it took years to find a publisher. ![]() Grossman died of cancer in 1964, in despair over the suppression of his masterpiece. Fortunately, two of Grossman’s friends had hidden copies. ![]() Grossman’s attempts to publish his novel in the Soviet Union ended with the manuscript’s famous “arrest” in 1961, one of the only cases when the KGB seized a manuscript but not its author. Vasily Grossman is best known in the West for his World War II novel Life and Fate, which he wrote in the 1950s. STALINGRAD by Vasily Grossman, translated by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler NYRB Classics, 1,088 pp., $27.95 ![]()
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