Life and Fate: Introduction by Polly Jones

Life and Fate: Introduction by Polly Jones - Hardcover

$36.00
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Life and Fate: Introduction by Polly Jones
  • Life and Fate: Introduction by Polly Jones
Life and Fate: Introduction by Polly Jones - Hardcover

Life and Fate: Introduction by Polly Jones - Hardcover

by Vasily Grossman
$36.00
$36.00

Book Overview

This panoramic novel about a family scattered across the Soviet Union and Europe during World War II is a monument of modern Russian literature by the Ukrainian-born writer hailed as "the Tolstoy of the USSR."

Suppressed by the KGB and years later smuggled out of the Soviet Union to be published, Vasily Grossman's novel is an unsparing story of ordinary Russians tragically caught between the fascism of the invading Nazis and the oppression of their own Soviet government.

The sprawling plot follows the travails of the extended family of Viktor Shtrum along the vast eastern front of the war. Shtrum is a brilliant nuclear physicist who faces rising anti-Semitism in Moscow while his relatives navigate the threat of camps and prisons on both the Soviet and the Nazi sides. Grossman's extensive wartime reporting, combined with his Tolstoyan narrative skills, allow him to portray with unprecedented detail and authenticity the human cost of the struggle between two freedom-denying powers.

In vividly rendered scenes that range from the dramatic battle of Stalingrad to the remote Siberian gulag, and encompassing characters ranging from a grieving mother to a woman in love and from a six-year-old boy on the way to a gas chamber to Stalin and Hitler, Grossman's masterpiece is a profound and moving reckoning with the darkness of the twentieth century and a testament to the stubborn persistence of kindness and hope.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.
ISBN9780593321263
Author Vasily Grossman
PublisherEveryman's Library
GenreLiterature
FormatHardcover
PublishedMay 2022
LanguageENG- English
Pages952
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

Related Subjects

Fiction Literary War & Military

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More by Vasily Grossman

Life and Fate

Life and Fate - Paperback

Life and Fate - Paperback

By Vasily Grossman

About Vasily Grossman

Vasily Grossman (1905--1964) was born in Berdichev in present-day Ukraine, the home of one of the largest Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. After studying chemistry and working as a mining engineer, he was discovered by Maxim Gorky, whose support enabled him to begin publishing his writing. Grossman was a combat correspondent during World War II, covering the defense of Stalingrad, the fall of Berlin, and writing the first account in any language of a German death camp. Although the manuscript for Life and Fate was initially seized and suppressed by the KGB in 1960, and Grossman did not live to see it published, it was smuggled out of the USSR a decade later with the help of Andrei Sakharov and Vladimir Voinovich. The novel was eventually published throughout Europe and North America in the early 1980s; it appeared in Russia in 1988. A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941--1945, a collection of Grossman's journalistic writings and notebook entries, was published in 2006.

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