Error loading page.
Try refreshing the page. If that doesn't work, there may be a network issue, and you can use our self test page to see what's preventing the page from loading.
Learn more about possible network issues or contact support for more help.
Title details for Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman - Wait list

Life and Fate

The Complete Series

by Vasily Grossman
Kenneth Branagh
Audiobook
0 of 2 copies available
Wait time: About 5 weeks
Place a hold Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
0 of 2 copies available
Wait time: About 5 weeks

Kenneth Branagh stars in BBC Radio 4's ambitious eight-hour dramatisation of 'Life and Fate', Vasily Grossman's epic masterpiece set during the Battle of Stalingrad.

This powerful work, completed in 1960, charts the fate of both a nation and a family in the turmoil of war. Its comparison of Stalinism with Nazism was considered by Soviet authorities to be so dangerous that the KGB placed the manuscript under arrest and Grossman was informed his book would not be published for at least 200 years.

Having been a household name as one of Russia's most distinguished war correspondents, Grossman died aged 58 - the banning of his book hastening the end of his life - and he would never know the fate of his masterpiece: smuggled out of the Soviet Union on microfilm, to freedom and eventual publication in the West. Today it is increasingly hailed as the most important Russian novel of the 20th Century.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    October 10, 2011

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781445816388
      • File size: 218667 KB
      • Duration: 07:35:33

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      March 4, 1986
      Obviously modeled on War and Peace, this sweeping account of the siege of Stalingrad aims to give as panoramic a view of Soviet society during World War II as Tolstoy did of Russian life in the epoch of the Napoleonic Wars. Completed in 1960 and then confiscated by the KGB, it remained unpublished at the author's death in 1964; it was smuggled into the West in 1980. Grossman offers a bitter, compelling vision of a totalitarian regime where the spirit of freedom that arose among those under fire was feared by the state at least as much as were the Nazis. His huge cast of characters includes an old Bolshevik now under arrest, a physicist pressured to make his scientific discoveries conform to "socialist reality'' and a Jewish doctor en route to the gas chambers in occupied Russia. Ironically, just as Stalingrad is liberated from the Germans, many of the characters find themselves bound in new slavery to the Soviet government. Yet Grossman suggests that the spirit of freedom can never be completely crushed. His lengthy, absorbing novelwhich rejected the compromises of a lifetime and earned its author denunciation and disgracetestifies eloquently to that spirit.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      February 1, 2003
      In 1961, this epic WWII Russian novel about the battle of Stalingrad was seized for being ``anti-Soviet'' by the KGB; it was finally published almost 20 years after the author's death, when a dissident publisher smuggled a microfilm copy to the West.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

Loading