Vasili Grossman y el siglo soviético

If Vasili Grossman's masterpiece Life and Fate had been published during the author's lifetime, it would have been published at the same time as Doctor Zhivago of Pasternak and before Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, but Life and Fate was kidnapped 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 dedicate himself exclusively to writing. After the outbreak of the Second World War he became a war correspondent for the Red Army, publishing acclaimed chronicles 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 documents written about the Jewish Holocaust and was used as evidence in the Nuremberg trials. After the second world war, 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and Fate and Everything Flows) were censored as anti-Soviet, and when Grossman died in 1964 Life and Fate remained unpublished and would remain unpublished until it could be published in the West at the mercy to the work of a network of dissidents. The first edition in the Soviet Union dates from 1988, during the opening phase of the Mikhail Gorbachev government. The work quickly achieved enormous success and went on to be hailed as one of the literary heights of the 20th century.