Life and Fate: Introduction by Polly Jones

This panoramic novel about a family scattered across the Soviet Union and Europe during World War II is a monument of modern Russian literature by the Ukrainian-born writer hailed as “the Tolstoy of the USSR.”

Suppressed by the KGB and years later smuggled out of the Soviet Union to be published, Vasily Grossman’s novel is an unsparing story of ordinary Russians tragically caught between the fascism of the invading Nazis and the oppression of their own Soviet government.

The sprawling plot ...