Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century by Alexandra Popoff. New Haven. 2019. Yales University Press. 9780300222784. 395 pages. hardcover. Jacket photograph: Vasily Grossman with the Red Armu in Schwerin, Germany, 1945. HIP/Art Resource, NY.
DESCRIPTION - The definitive biography of Soviet Jewish dissident writer Vasily Grossman. If Vasily Grossman's 1961 masterpiece, Life and Fate, had been published during his lifetime, it would have reached the world together with Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and before Solzhenitsyn's Gulag. But Life and Fate was seized by the KGB. When it emerged posthumously, decades later, it was recognized as the War and Peace of the twentieth century. Always at the epicenter of events, Grossman (1905–1964) was among the first to describe the Holocaust and the Ukrainian famine. His 1944 article “The Hell of Treblinka” became evidence at Nuremberg. Grossman's powerful anti‑totalitarian works liken the Nazis' crimes against humanity with those of Stalin. His compassionate prose has the everlasting
quality of great art. Because Grossman's major works appeared after much delay we are only now able to examine them properly. Alexandra Popoff's authoritative biography illuminates Grossman's life and legacy.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - ALEXANDRA POPOFF is a former Moscow journalist and Alfred Friendly Press Partners fellow. She is an expert on Russian literature and cultural history and the author of several literary biographies, including the award-winning SOPHIA TOLSTOY (2010) and THE WIVES (a Wall Street Journal best non-fiction title for 2012). Her new book VASILY GROSSMAN AND THE SOVIET CENTURY was selected by the Christian Science Monitor among five best biographies published in March 2019. She lives in Canada.
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