Vasily Grossman
Life and Fate
Жизнь и судьба · 1980
A novel the KGB tried to destroy. A story the 20th century could not silence. The War and Peace of our age — and its indictment.
“I have seen the bitter fate of man. And I understood one thing: there is no fate worse than to be the executioner of your own people.”
Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate is one of the greatest Russian novels of the twentieth century. Set during the Battle of Stalingrad, it follows more than 150 characters through the cauldron of war, the horror of the Holocaust, and the machinery of Soviet terror. The KGB confiscated the manuscript in 1961, telling Grossman his book would not be published for two or three hundred years. They were wrong. This is the story of a novel that refused to die.