Vasiliĭ Semenovich Grossman

Completed in the late 1950s by its distinguished Russian author, this novel has been recognized as fiction on an epic scale: powerful, deeply moving, and devastating in its depiction of a world mutilated by war and ideological tyranny.

Life and Fate

"It is the writer's duty to tell the terrible truth, and it is a reader's civic duty to learn this truth. To turn away, to close one's eyes and walk past is to insult the memory of those who have perished." Vasily Grossman, an official journalist with the Red Army and one of the first Russians to enter the Treblinka death camp, struggles to comprehend the barbarity and the inhuman atrocities committed by the Nazis. An excellent journalist, he presents the facts as reported to him by the survivors and the captured Nazis. As he writes it is "a story so unreal that it seems like the product of insanity and delirium".

The Hell of Treblinka

Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941-1945

A Writer at War

Vasily Grossman

Vasily Grossman's masterpiece "Life and Fate" is rated by many as the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century. Among its admirers is Antony Beevor, the bestselling author of Stalingrad and Berlin. This book is based on the notebooks in which Grossman gathered his raw material.

Verhalen over Rusland en de Oekraïne voor en in de Tweede Wereldoorlog en artikelen over de Holocaust.

Klein leven / druk 1

A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army, 1941-1945

Rasskazy. Povesti (1931-1945)

The People Immortal

Few writers had to confront so many of the last century's mass tragedies as Vasily Grossman. He is likely to be remembered, above all, for the terrifying clarity with which he writes about the Shoah, the Battle of Stalingrad and the Terror Famine in the Ukraine. An Armenian Sketchbook, however, shows us a very different Grossman; it is notable for its warmth, its sense of fun and for the benign humility that is always to be found in his writing. After the 'arrest' - as Grossman always put it - of Life and Fate, Grossman took on the task of editing a literal Russian translation of a lengthy Armenian novel. The novel was of little interest to him, but he was glad of an excuse to travel to Armenia. This is his account of the two months he spent there. It is by far the most personal and intimate of Grossman's works, with an air of absolute spontaneity, as though Grossman is simply chatting to the reader about his impressions of Armenia - its mountains, its ancient churches and its people.

Vasiliĭ Semenovich Grossman

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