Since that time, “Life and Fate” has been hailed as a major work of art and has been translated into most European languages, and also into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Turkish, and Vietnamese. In 1986, I translated and published a version in English. Eventually, however, a microfilm was smuggled out of the Soviet Union, and, in 1980, the text was finally published, in Switzerland, in the original Russian. confiscated most copies of the typescript. This made “Life and Fate” anathema to the Soviet authorities, and the K.G.B. A central and powerfully argued theme is the equivalence of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes. The novel includes many subplots-some civilian, some military, some set in German or Soviet concentration camps.

The Soviet Jewish writer Vasily Grossman’s novel “ Life and Fate,” completed in 1960, is an epic story centered on the Battle of Stalingrad, the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany that marked the turning point in the Second World War. Will Stalingrad hold out? Grossman accords a proper humanity to his subsidiary cast of steelworkers, factory chemists and Red Army soldiers, who battle against the odds from their ice-bound dugouts and foxholes.Vasily Grossman faced Soviet censorship and editorial hurdles during the publication process of his novel “Stalingrad.” Photograph from Sputnik / Alamy Unappealingly rat-like and furtive beside the grandly uniformed Duce, the Führer has by now advanced rapidly across the Stalin Line. In grand Tolstoyan fashion, the novel opens with the Hitler-Mussolini reunion in Salzburg in April 1942. Around Shtrum orbit the three Shaposhnikov sisters, their husbands and children. The central character is Viktor Shtrum, a Jewish physicist whose family are fatally caught in the Nazi dragnets.

Grossman wanted a “conspicuously Jewish” theme for his novel, says Popoff: his mother had been murdered in Ukraine by the Nazis. A multitude of lives and fates are played out against a vast panoramic history. Moving majestically from Berlin to Moscow to the boundless Kazakh steppe, the novel attempts to replicate for the USSR what War and Peace had done for 19th-century Russian society and Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in 1812. One needs time and patience to read Stalingrad, but it is worth it. New West End Company BRANDPOST | PAID CONTENT.

Life and fate book