Additional information
by Vasily Grossman (Author), Robert Chandler (Translator), Polly Jones (Introduction by)
This panoramic novel about a family scattered across the Soviet Union and Europe during World War II is a monument of modern Russian literature by the Ukrainian-born writer hailed as "the Tolstoy of the USSR."
Suppressed by the KGB and years later smuggled out of the Soviet Union to be published, Vasily Grossman's novel is an unsparing story of ordinary Russians tragically caught between the fascism of the invading Nazis and the oppression of their own Soviet government.
Author Biography
VASILY GROSSMAN (1905-1964) was born in Berdichev in Ukraine, in one of the largest Jewish communities in eastern Europe. After studying chemistry and working as an engineer, he was discovered by Maxim Gorky and began publishing his writing. During World War II, Grossman covered the defense of Stalingrad and the fall of Berlin and he wrote the first account of a German death camp. The manuscript of Life and Fate was seized by the KGB in 1960 and Grossman did not live to see it published, but it was smuggled out and published in Europe and North America in the early 1980s.
ABOUT THE INTRODUCER: Polly Jones is Associate Professor of Russian and Schrecker-Barbour Fellow at University College, University of Oxford. She has published widely on Soviet cultural history; she is the author of Revolution Rekindled and Myth, Memory, Trauma: Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union and is the editor of Writing Russian Lives: The Poetics and Politics of Russian Biography.
