Wassili Grossman

Vasily Semyonovich Grossman (1905–1964) was a Soviet writer and journalist. He initially belonged to the officially approved literary establishment of the Soviet Union. As a correspondent for the army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star), he reported on the war. His experiences at the front and the destruction of European Jewry changed his outlook, and he became one of the most uncompromising chroniclers of his time. His great Stalingrad epic includes the novel Life and Fate, which was confiscated in 1961 and published only 16 years after Grossman’s death by a Swiss émigré press. The work was translated into numerous languages and is regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century Russian literature.