Vasily Grossman is one of the most interesting and least understood writers of the last century. Born in Berdichev into the family of a Jewish schoolteacher, he came of age in an era of great changes and convulsions: revolution, civil war, the Stalinist repressions, the Great Patriotic War. He witnessed them all, and they left a deep mark on his work and his view of the world.
Grossman wrote several novels and novellas, but his magnum opus is beyond question Life and Fate — an epic of the Battle of Stalingrad that bears comparison with Tolstoy's War and Peace. In it he follows the fortunes of several families caught in the meat grinder of the war, and meditates on the meaning of life, on morality, on history. Written in the 1950s and 1960s, the novel was published only in the 1980s, after its author's death.
He was a profound thinker as well as a gifted writer, brooding on the nature of human freedom, on the role history plays in our lives, on the bond between the individual and society. His books are not simply works of fiction but philosophical treatises, working through the hardest questions and problems. He was also a journalist and correspondent, and his dispatches from Stalingrad and other hot spots of the war became classics of the trade.
Grossman's life was not an easy one. To be born into a Jewish family in those days was no simple matter; he met with antisemitism and discrimination, and was forced to change his name to escape persecution. As a wartime correspondent he saw all the horrors of the war; after it he was subjected to censorship and repression, and his works were banned. He kept writing all the same, and his work stands as testimony to an unbowed spirit and a fidelity to his art.
Grossman matters today because his books are not merely historical documents but living reflections on our own present — the work of a writer who thought about the future, less a legacy of the past than a message addressed to it. He believed in the power of human freedom and in the importance of individual morality, and his writing continues to inspire.