Vasili Grossman y el siglo soviético

If Vasili Grossman's masterpiece Life and Fate had been published in the author's lifetime, it would have been published at the same time as Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and before Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, but Life and Fate was seized by the KGB. When it was published posthumously decades later, it was recognized as the War and Peace of the 20th century. Vasili Grossman (1905-1964) trained as an engineer, but left his job in the 1930s to devote himself exclusively to writing. After the outbreak of World War II he became a war correspondent for the Red Army, publishing acclaimed accounts of the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk and Berlin. His testimony about the Nazi death camps, written after the liberation of Treblinka, is among the first written documents about the Jewish Holocaust and was used as evidence in the Nuremberg trials. After World War II, Grossman's faith in the Soviet state was undermined by the anti-Semitic turn of the Stalin regime. Although he was never arrested by the Soviet authorities, his two masterpieces (Life and Fate and Everything Flows) were censored as anti-Soviet, and when Grossman died in 1964 Life and Fate remained unpublished and would remain so until it could be published in the West thanks to to the work of a network of dissidents. The first edition in the Soviet Union dates back to 1988, during the opening phase of Mikhail Gorbachev's government. The work quickly achieved enormous success and went on to be hailed as one of the literary pinnacles of the 20th century.