**This panoramic novel about a family scattered across the Soviet Union
and Europe during World War II is a monument of modern Russian
literature by the Ukrainian-born writer hailed as "the Tolstoy of the
USSR."
**
Suppressed by the KGB and years later smuggled out of the Soviet Union
to be published, Vasily Grossman's novel is an unsparing story of
ordinary Russians tragically caught between the fascism of the invading
Nazis and the oppression of their own Soviet government.
The sprawling plot follows the travails of the extended family of Viktor
Shtrum along the vast eastern front of the war. Shtrum is a brilliant
nuclear physicist who faces rising anti-Semitism in Moscow while his
relatives navigate the threat of camps and prisons on both the Soviet
and the Nazi sides. Grossman's extensive wartime reporting, combined
with his Tolstoyan narrative skills, allow him to portray with
unprecedented detail and authenticity the human cost of the struggle
between two freedom-denying powers.
In vividly rendered scenes that range from the dramatic battle of
Stalingrad to the remote Siberian gulag, and encompassing characters
ranging from a grieving mother to a woman in love and from a
six-year-old boy on the way to a gas chamber to Stalin and Hitler,
Grossman's masterpiece is a profound and moving reckoning with the
darkness of the twentieth century and a testament to the stubborn
persistence of kindness and hope.
Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on
acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil
stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style
half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.
