Life and Fate
Stalingrad seen whole, by a war correspondent who put Nazism and Stalinism in the same frame.
Vasily Grossman covered Stalingrad, Kursk and the liberation of Treblinka as a Red Army correspondent, then wrote a novel that set the Nazi and Soviet systems side by side and declined to distinguish morally between them. The manuscript was seized by the KGB in 1961, down to the typewriter ribbons; a copy survived and reached the West in 1980, sixteen years after his death. It is routinely compared to War and Peace, and the comparison holds.
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Laurence Leamer
Set during World War II in Stalingrad, Grossman's novel is a paean to Russian courage as well as a devastating portrait of Communist totalitarianism. Grossman had the courage to write his opus while living in the Soviet Union.
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