Monday, December 10, 2007

Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate



Sounds like a book on Pepe's and Putin's shit-list. Check it out below, a must-have for Christmas.

Amazon.com Publishers Weekly: "...modeled on War and Peace, this sweeping account of the siege of Stalingrad aims to give as panoramic a view of Soviet society during World War II as Tolstoy did of Russian life in the epoch of the Napoleonic Wars. Completed in 1960 and then confiscated by the KGB, it remained unpublished at the author's death in 1964; it was smuggled into the West in 1980. Grossman offers a bitter, compelling vision of a totalitarian regime where the spirit of freedom that arose among those under fire was feared by the state at least as much as were the Nazis. His huge cast of characters includes an old Bolshevik now under arrest, a physicist pressured to make his scientific discoveries conform to "socialist reality" and a Jewish doctor en route to the gas chambers in occupied Russia."

(Note: the pic is Vasily, then a Soviet war correspondent during the Second World War).

2 comments:

Arelcao Akleos said...

Sounds like a fascinating book.
So much was murdered under Socialism, Red & Brown. And, today, who cares?

My Frontier Thesis said...

Right, AA. Although the care is growing, at least in my neck of Dakota. A lawyer friend of mine -- an idealist of sorts; a Liberal for Dakota (which means he'd be considered a Republican in Berkeley or San Francisco) -- is currently reading Solzhenitsyn's, "Gulag Archipelago." I suggested Vasily Grossman, too. I hope to get it for Christmas, and read most of it on the United flight from LAX-to-Bejing in early January/08.