PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY

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English
Everyman Hardcovers
03 January 2024
Written in the 1950s, and suppressed in the USSR until 1988 - with the KGB destroying all Russian manuscripts, and even the typewriter ribbon on which it was written - Vasily Grossman's epic saga, the War and Peace of the Soviet twentieth century, is an astounding work of literature and a devastating historical and political documentary on both Soviet Communism and German Nazism

Based around the pivotal WWII battle of Stalingrad

(1942-3), where the German advance into Russia was eventually halted by the

Red Army, and around an extended family, the Shaposhnikovs, and their many

friends and acquaintances, Life and Fate recounts the experience of

characters caught up in an immense struggle between opposing armies and

ideologies. Nazism and Communism are appallingly similar, 'two poles of one

magnet', as a German camp commander tells a shocked old Bolshevik prisoner. At

the height of the battle Russian soldiers and citizens alike are at last able

to speak out as they choose, and without reprisal - an unexpected and

short-lived moment of freedom. Grossman himself was on the front line as a

war correspondent at Stalingrad - hence his gripping battle scenes, though

these are more than matched by the drama of the individual conscience

struggling against massive pressure to submit to the State. He knew all about

this from experience too. His central character, Viktor Shtrum, eventually

succumbs, but each delay and act of resistance is a moral victory. Though he

writes unsparingly of war, terror and totalitarianism, Grossman also tells of

the acts of 'senseless kindness' that redeem humanity, and his message

remains one of hope. He dedicates his book, the labour of ten years, and

which he did not live to see published, to his mother, who, like Viktor

Shtrum's, was killed in the holocaust at Berdichev in Ukraine in September 1941.

By:  
Introduction by:  
Translated by:  
Imprint:   Everyman Hardcovers
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Dimensions:   Height: 212mm,  Width: 134mm,  Spine: 43mm
Weight:   827g
ISBN:   9781841594033
ISBN 10:   1841594032
Series:   Everyman's Library CLASSICS
Pages:   936
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Vasily Grossman (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. Robert Chandler (Translator) Robert Chandler's translations from Russian include works by Alexander Pushkin, Andrey Platonov, Vasily Grossman and Hamid Ismailov. He is the editor and main translator of Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida and Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov, and together with Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski he co-edited The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry.

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