This sacrifice is still a point of pride in Russia today, where it is commemorated, rightly, as a turning point in World War II. The terrifying, astonishing source material for Stalingrad is the Battle of Stalingrad, in which between 1.25 million and 1.8 million people were killed. Life and Fate’s success reflects the insatiable Western appetite for literature about Soviet crimes there is far less enthusiasm for stories of Soviet victory. There is also the problem of subject matter. Even Grossman’s primary English-language translator, Robert Chandler, confesses that he resisted reading Stalingrad for many years, only taking the plunge at the urging of historian Jochen Hellbeck. Its misfortunes are not difficult to explain: Unlike Life and Fate, Stalingrad was published in the Soviet Union under Stalin and gained a reputation as Stalinist hackwork. Only now is the novel available in English for the first time, in a version edited by Robert Chandler and Yury Bit-Yunan and beautifully translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler. Yet Life and Fate was only the second half of an epic work that started with Stalingrad, written in the 1940s and all but forgotten until recently. The novel was published at last in 1980, in Switzerland, due to the tireless efforts of a handful of mostly Jewish Russophone writers and intellectuals, and it eventually became a classic. By then, the Orthodox Russian nationalist Solzhenitsyn was the new big thing in Soviet dissidence Grossman’s Jewish themes had a narrower appeal. The dissident satirist Vladimir Voinovich arranged to have microfilm of Life and Fate smuggled abroad in 1975, but it took years to find a publisher. Grossman died of cancer in 1964, in despair over the suppression of his masterpiece.

Fortunately, two of Grossman’s friends had hidden copies. Grossman’s attempts to publish his novel in the Soviet Union ended with the manuscript’s famous “arrest” in 1961, one of the only cases when the KGB seized a manuscript but not its author. Vasily Grossman is best known in the West for his World War II novel Life and Fate, which he wrote in the 1950s. STALINGRAD by Vasily Grossman, translated by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler NYRB Classics, 1,088 pp., $27.95

Grossman life and fate review