THE ORIGINAL TRANSLATION BY ROBERT CHANDLER, UPDATED AND REVISED
The twentieth century War and Peace, a broad portrait of an age and a searing vision of Stalinist Russia, Life and Fate is also the story of a family, the Shaposhnikovs, whose lives in the army, the gulag, a physics institute, a power station and a concentration camp are stunningly evoked, from their darkest to their most poetic moments.
Judged so dangerous by the Soviet authorities that the manuscript was immediately confiscated when completed in 1960, Grossman’s masterpiece was finally smuggled into the West and published in 1980.
The Vintage Classic Russians Series: Published for the 100th anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution, these are must-have, beautifully designed editions of six epic masterpieces that have survived controversy, censorship and suppression to influence decades of thought and artistic expression.
About the Author
Vasily Grossman was born in 1905. In 1941, he became a war reporter for the Red Army newspaper Red Star and came to be regarded as a legendary war hero. Life and Fate, his masterpiece, was considered a threat to the totalitarian regime, and Grossman was told that there was no chance of the novel being published for another 200 years. Grossman died in 1964.
Industry Reviews
One of the greatest masterpieces of the twentieth century * Times Literary Supplement *
It is only a matter of time before Grossman is acknowledged as one of the great writers of the 20th century... Life and Fate is a book that demands to be talked about * Guardian *
One of the finest Russian novels of the 20th century * Daily Telegraph *
Vasily Grossman's novel is burnt in my memory, not only by its huge canvas, its meditation on tyranny, and its dazzling description of war, but also because this is the novel that made me cry - not just a few leaked tears, but a full-scale sobbing episode - in Montpellier airport... Grossman lost his mother in a concentration camp. In Life and Fate, he writes with tenderness, and pain, not only of that experience but of what it is like to survive tyranny. A classic indeed -- Gillian Slovo * Independent *
One of the great writers of the last century * Observer *
