The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman

Vasily Grossman (1905-64), one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century, served for over 1,000 days with the Red Army as a war correspondent on the Eastern front. He was present during the street-fighting at Stalingrad, and his 1944 report ‘The Hell of Treblinka’, was the first eyewitness account of a Nazi death camp. Though he finished the war as a decorated lieutenant colonel, his epic account of the battle of Stalingrad, Life and Fate, was suppressed by Soviet authorities, and never published in his lifetime. Declared a ‘non-person’, Grossman died in obscurity. Only in 1980, with the posthumous publication in Switzerland of Life and Fate was his remarkable novel to gain an international reputation. This meticulously researched biography by John and Carol Garrard uses archival and unpublished sources that only became available after the collapse of the Soviet Union. A gripping narrative.

REVIEWS

Husband-and-wife Russian experts John and Carol Garrard highlight complex Jewish aspects of their subject's own life in The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman, writer of the seminal 20th century epic, Life and Fate, recently receiving renewed popularity after the BBC's dramatisation of Robert Chandler's fine translation.
Jewish Chronicle