Memories and Letters: Vasily Grossman, Ed. by Fedor Guber
This collection of letters, extracts, official documents and photographs, edited and annotated by his stepson Fedor Guber, paints for the first time an intimate, personal picture of Grossman’s world, his family and friends, and the events that turned a young chemistry student into the writer whose acute sense of human dignity in the face of unimaginable suffering has helped to define our understanding of the Soviet Union and Second World War.
Vasily Grossman was one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century. Once embraced by the Soviet authorities for his newspaper reports from the frontline at Stalingrad and his support of Stalinism, he became disenchanted with the Soviet dream and was eventually made a non-person when his masterpiece, Life and Fate, was seized by the KGB as a threat to the Soviet Union. He died shortly afterward, never having seen the novel published that would cement his reputation as ‘the Tolstoy of the USSR’ (Martin Amis).
