![]() ![]() I read Life and Fate on a trip to Moscow during the post-Soviet badland years, at the very end of the last century. In the Eighties a smuggled microfilm of the novel appeared in Switzerland, leading to its finally being published in English and immediately planting Grossman’s reputation as a supreme chronicler of ideological tyranny and war. When the KGB “arrested” Life and Fate, his monumental novel about the Second World War, in 1961, confiscating (as they thought) all copies and even his used typewriter ribbons, he told a friend, “They have strangled me in a doorway.” He died three years later, in poverty. His standing in the West started, as Soviet artists’ reputations routinely did, after its erasure in the USSR. In little more than three decades Vasily Grossman’s name has posthumously gone from being unknown outside the old Soviet empire to somewhere very high on the roll of the world’s 20th-century novelists. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |