CRITICISM – One of the greatest Russian writers of the 20th centurye century details the first months of the war between Russians and Germans, in Ukraine, in the Donbass region, hiding nothing of the Nazi atrocities.
Of the Soviet writer and journalist Vasily Grossman (1905-1964), we first know Life and Destiny. An immense fresco of Soviet Russia at war, a sort of world novel which takes up the narrative structure of War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy to evoke the German offensive and the Soviet counter-offensive which culminated with the victory of the Red Army at Stalingrad on February 2, 1943. In the background of the war drama where Hitler and Stalin appear as characters , the novelist traces the destiny of a Jewish family scattered by the forces of destiny between Germany and Siberia, through a dense and complex plot which depicts an era of misfortune where the image of a boy on the way towards a gas chamber has the gift of petrifying the reader.
The victorious battles of the Soviet army did not prevent Vasily Grossman, himself a victim of Russian anti-Semitism during Stalin’s liquidation of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in 1952, from seeing that the Stalinist regime…
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