Vasily Grossman And The Soviet Century

Download or read book Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century written by Alexandra Popoff and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-26 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Stalingrad written by Vasily Grossman and published by Random House. This book was released on 2019-06-06 with total page 850 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'One of the great novels of the 20th century' Observer In April 1942, Hitler and Mussolini plan the huge offensive on the Eastern Front that will culminate in the greatest battle in human history. Hundreds of miles away, Pyotr Vavilov receives his call-up papers and spends a final night with his wife and children in the hut that is his home. As war approaches, the Shaposhnikov family gathers for a meal: despite her age, Alexandra will soon become a refugee; Tolya will enlist in the reserves; Vera, a nurse, will fall in love with a wounded pilot; and Viktor Shtrum will receive a letter from his doomed mother which will haunt him forever. The war will consume the lives of a huge cast of characters - lives which express Grossman's grand themes of the nation and the individual, nature's beauty and war's cruelty, love and separation. For months, Soviet forces are driven back inexorably by the German advance eastward and eventually Stalingrad is all that remains between the invaders and victory. The city stands on a cliff top by the Volga River. The battle for Stalingrad - a maelstrom of violence and firepower - will reduce it to ruins. But it will also be the cradle of a new sense of hope. Stalingrad is a magnificent novel not only of war but of all human life: its subjects are mothers and daughters, husbands and brothers, generals, nurses, political officers, steelworkers, tractor girls. It is tender, epic, and a testament to the power of the human spirit. 'You will not only discover that you love his characters and want to stay with them - that you need them in your life as much as you need your own family and loved ones - but that at the end... you will want to read it again' Daily Telegraph THE PREQUEL TO LIFE AND FATE NOW AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH FOR THE FIRST TIME, STALINGRAD IS A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER AND NOW A MAJOR RADIO 4 DRAMA WINNER OF MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION "LOIS ROTH AWARD" FOR TRANSLATIONS FROM ANY LANGUAGE

Download or read book Everything Flows written by Vasily Grossman and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2010-05-05 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Review Books Original Everything Flows is Vasily Grossman’s final testament, written after the Soviet authorities suppressed his masterpiece, Life and Fate. The main story is simple: released after thirty years in the Soviet camps, Ivan Grigoryevich must struggle to find a place for himself in an unfamiliar world. But in a novel that seeks to take in the whole tragedy of Soviet history, Ivan’s story is only one among many. Thus we also hear about Ivan’s cousin, Nikolay, a scientist who never let his conscience interfere with his career, and Pinegin, the informer who got Ivan sent to the camps. Then a brilliant short play interrupts the narrative: a series of informers steps forward, each making excuses for the inexcusable things that he did—inexcusable and yet, the informers plead, in Stalinist Russia understandable, almost unavoidable. And at the core of the book, we find the story of Anna Sergeyevna, Ivan’s lover, who tells about her eager involvement as an activist in the Terror famine of 1932–33, which led to the deaths of three to five million Ukrainian peasants. Here Everything Flows attains an unbearable lucidity comparable to the last cantos of Dante’s Inferno.

Download or read book The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman written by John Garrard and published by Casemate Publishers. This book was released on 2012-10-24 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A definitive treatment of one of the Soviet Union’s most significant writers.”—The Russian Review Vasily Grossman (1905–64), one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century, served for over 1,000 days with the Red Army as a war correspondent on the Eastern front. He was present during the street-fighting at Stalingrad, and his 1944 report “The Hell of Treblinka,” was the first eyewitness account of a Nazi death camp. Though he finished the war as a decorated lieutenant colonel, his epic account of the battle of Stalingrad, Life and Fate, was suppressed by Soviet authorities, and never published in his lifetime. Declared a non-person, Grossman died in obscurity. Only in 1980, with the posthumous publication in Switzerland of Life and Fate was his remarkable novel to gain an international reputation. This meticulously researched biography by John and Carol Garrard uses archival and unpublished sources that only became available after the collapse of the Soviet Union. A gripping narrative. “Fascinating . . . gives the reader a very clear insight into the horrors of the War on the Eastern Front . . . For anyone interested either in WWII or Soviet Communism, this book is a must.”—R.J. (Dick) Lloyd, author of Three Glorious Years “Grossman is a sufficiently important Soviet cultural figure to deserve a biography, and through his the Garrards say a good deal about cultural politics, internal repression, and antisemitism in the Soviet Union.”—Foreign Affairs

Download or read book Forever Flowing written by Vasiliĭ Grossman and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The novel tells the story of Ivan Grigoryevich, who has returned to Russia after thirty years in the Gulag. After short and unsatisfying visits to familiar places and persons in Moscow and Leningrad, the hero settles in a southern provincial town where he briefly establishes a new life with a war widow. Ivan Grigoryevich eventually returns to his boyhood home on the Black Sea, where he is finally able to come to terms with the inhumanity of the new Russian regime.

Download or read book The Road written by Vasiliĭ Semenovich Grossman and published by NYRB Classics. This book was released on 2010-09-28 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The writer whom Vasily Grossman loved most of all was Anton Chekhov. Grossman’s own short stories are no less accomplished than his novels, and they are remarkably varied. “The Dog” is about the first living creature to be sent into space and then returned to Earth. “The Road,” an account of the war from a mule in an Italian artillery regiment, can be read as a 4,000-word distillation of Life and Fate. “Mother” is based on a true story about an orphaned girl who was adopted by Nikolay Yezhov (head of the NKVD at the height of the Great Terror) and his wife; it includes brief portraits of Stalin and several important Soviet writers and politicians—all of them as seen through the eyes of the little girl or of her honest but uncomprehending peasant nanny. As well as a dozen stories—from “In the Town of Berdichev” (Grossman’s first published success) to “In Kislovodsk” (the last story he wrote)—this volume includes an unusual article about the life of a Moscow cemetery. It also contains two letters Grossman wrote to his mother, after her death at the hands of the Nazis, and the complete text of “The Hell of Treblinka,” one of the very first, and still among the most powerful, accounts of a Nazi death camp.

Download or read book Vasily Grossman written by Anna Bonola and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2018-08-21 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vasily Grossman (1905–1964) was a successful Soviet author and journalist, but he is more often recognized in the West as Russian literature's leading dissident. How do we account for this paradox? In the first collection of essays to explore the Russian author's life and works in English, leading experts present recent multidisciplinary research on Grossman's experiences, his place in the history of Russian literature, key themes in his writing, and the wider implications of his life and work in the realms of philosophy and politics. Born into a Jewish family in Berdychiv, Grossman was initially a supporter of the ideals of the Russian Revolution and the new Soviet state. During the Second World War, he worked as a correspondent for the Red Army newspaper and was the first journalist to write about the Nazi extermination camps. As a witness to the daily violence of the Soviet regime, Grossman became more and more aware of the nature and forms of totalitarian coercion, which gradually alienated him from the Soviet regime and earned him a reputation for dissidence. A survey of the remarkable accomplishments and legacy left by this controversial and contradictory figure, Vasily Grossman reveals a writer's power to express freedom even under totalitarianism.