Life and Fate (Vintage Classic Russians Series)
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  • Published: 27 February 2017
  • ISBN: 9781784871963
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 912
  • RRP: $22.99

Life and Fate (Vintage Classic Russians Series)

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Formats & editions
Paperback
27 Feb 2017
Paperback
5 Oct 2006
Hardback
3 Jan 2024
EBook
30 Apr 2011
Audiobook
10 Oct 2011
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The Vintage Classics Russians Series - sumptuous editions of the greatest books to come out of Russia during the most tumultuous period in its history

The great Russian 20th-century novel from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Stalingrad.

Life and Fate is an epic tale of a country told through the fate of a single family, the Shaposhnikovs. As the battle of Stalingrad looms, Grossman's characters must work out their destinies in a world torn by ideological tyranny and war.

Completed in 1960 and then confiscated by the KGB, this sweeping panorama of Soviet Society remained unpublished until it was smuggled into the West in 1980, where it was hailed as a masterpiece.

The Vintage Classics Russians Series - sumptuous editions of the greatest books to come out of Russia during the most tumultuous period in its history.
  • Published: 27 February 2017
  • ISBN: 9781784871963
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 912
  • RRP: $22.99
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About the author

Vasily Grossman

Vasily Grossman was born in 1905. In 1941, he became a war reporter for the Red Army newspaper Red Star and came to be regarded as a legendary war hero. Life and Fate, his masterpiece, was considered a threat to the totalitarian regime, and Grossman was told that there was no chance of the novel being published for another 200 years. Grossman died in 1964.

Also by Vasily Grossman

Stalingrad
Everything Flows
A Writer At War
See all

Praise for Life and Fate (Vintage Classic Russians Series)

One of the greatest masterpieces of the twentieth century

Times Literary Supplement

It is only a matter of time before Grossman is acknowledged as one of the great writers of the 20th century... Life and Fate is a book that demands to be talked about

Guardian

One of the finest Russian novels of the 20th century

Daily Telegraph

One of the great writers of the last century

Observer

A literary genius. His Life And Fate is rated by many as the finest Russian novel of the 20th Century

Mail on Sunday

One of the world's great war novels

Independent on Sunday

Vasily Grossman's novel is burnt in my memory, not only by its huge canvas, its meditation on tyranny, and its dazzling description of war, but also because this is the novel that made me cry - not just a few leaked tears, but a full-scale sobbing episode - in Montpellier airport... Grossman lost his mother in a concentration camp. In Life and Fate, he writes with tenderness, and pain, not only of that experience but of what it is like to survive tyranny. A classic indeed

Gillian Slovo, Independent

Vasily Grossman's masterpiece, Life and Fate, is fascinating for many reasons, and one of them is the way that it is both a pastiche and a personal statement; a conscious, cold-blooded attempt to sum up everything Grossman knew about the Great Patriotic War, and at the same time to rewrite War and Peace

London Review of Books