Grossman's readership and reputation continue to grow and grow
Life and Fate and
A Writer at War have both sold over 25,000 copiesA new translation of a major novel unavailable in English for many years: review coverage guaranteedTranslated by Robert Chandler, the acclaimed translator of
Life And FateVasily Grossman was born in 1905. In 1941 he became a correspondent for the Red Army newspaper,
Red Star, reporting on the defence of Stalingrad, the fall of Berlin and the consequences of the Holocaust, work collected in
A Writer at War.
Life and Fate, his masterpiece, was considered a threat to the totalitarian regime, and Grossman was told that there was no chance of it being published for another 200 years. Grossman began
Everything Flows in 1955 and was still working on it during his last days in hospital in September 1964.
'Everything Flows is as important a novel as anything written by Solzhenitsyn, and Robert Chandler's superb translation makes it a joy to read'
Antony Beevor
Ivan Grigoryevich has been in the Gulag for thirty years. Released after Stalin's death, he finds that the years of terror have imposed a collective moral slavery. He must struggle to find a place for himself in an unfamiliar world. Grossman tells the stories of those people entwined with Ivan's fate: his cousin Nikolay, a scientist who never let his conscience interfere with his career, Pinegin, the informer who had Ivan sent to the camps and Anna Sergeyevna, Ivan's lover, who tells of her involvement as an activist in the Terror famine of 1932-3.
Everything Flows is Vasily Grossman's final testament, written after the Soviet authorities suppressed Life and Fate.
'Vasily Grossman is the Tolstoy of the USSR' Martin Amis
As eloquent a memorial to the anonymous little man in the Stalinist state as
Dr Zhivago is to the artistic spirit in post-Czarist Russia and
The First Circle to the scientific intelligentsia
Vasily Grossman is the Tolstoy of the USSRPossibly the greatest chronicler of the second world warOnly Dante, in his account of Ugolino and his sons starving to death in a locked tower, has written of death from hunger with equal powerSupplies a wealth of information about the social context and Soviet terminology
