Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century

Vasily Grossman and the Soviet CenturyThe definitive biography of Soviet Jewish dissident writer Vasily Grossman, called gripping" and "fascinating" by William Taubman in the New York Times If Vasily Grossmans 1961 masterpiece, Life and Fate, had been published during his lifetime, it would have reached the world together with Pasternaks Doctor Zhivago and before Solzhenitsyns Gulag. But Life and Fate was seized by the KGB. When it emerged posthumously, decades later, it was recognized as

The definitive biography of Soviet Jewish dissident writer Vasily Grossman, called “gripping" and "fascinating" by William Taubman in the New York Times

If Vasily Grossman’s 1961 masterpiece, Life and Fate, had been published during his lifetime, it would have reached the world together with Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and before Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag. But Life and Fate was seized by the KGB. When it emerged posthumously, decades later, it was recognized as the War and Peace of the twentieth century. Always at the epicenter of events, Grossman (1905–1964) was among the first to describe the Holocaust and the Ukrainian famine. His 1944 article “The Hell of Treblinka” became evidence at Nuremberg. Grossman’s powerful anti?totalitarian works liken the Nazis’ crimes against humanity with those of Stalin. His compassionate prose has the everlasting quality of great art.