That late 19th century Russian masterpiece depicted an earlier turning point of European history, when Napoleon Bonaparte’s retreat from Moscow in 1812 also spelt the end of a mighty empire. In their epic sweep and sprawling range of characters, some of whom were real figures, the novels invite comparison with Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The two novels capture one of the great turning points of 20th century history: the moment when the apparently invincible Nazi war machine was brought to a halt on the banks of the River Volga and then forced into a retreat that ended in total defeat. It was only in 1988, some 24 years after Grossman’s death, that the novel finally appeared in the Soviet Union-and even then, despite Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberalising Glasnost (“openness”) agenda, in partially censored form. The manuscript, on which Grossman had been working for seven years, was “arrested” by the KGB in 1961 when he attempted to get authorisation for its publication. The novel suffered a very different fate in the Soviet Union. 2 This latter novel first appeared in English as far back as 1985, with reprints in 20, when a BBC radio adaptation brought it to a wider audience. 1 Its appearance is particularly welcome to the English-speaking reader because it provides the missing first half (in a sense that will need qualifying) to the novel for which Grossman is most famous in the West, Life and Fate. The year 2019 saw the long overdue publication in English of Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad, its Russian original having been published in the Soviet Union in 1952 (albeit in censored form).

The life and fate of vasily grossman