Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century
By Alexandra Popoff
Yale University Press, 424pp, £25/$32.50
Vasily Grossman is one of the towering figures of world literature. Even so, full recognition of his stature is arguably work in progress, though surely helped by the publication this year of the English translation of his 1952 novel Stalingrad.
Born in 1905 to Ukrainian Jewish parents, he trained as a chemical engineer, but soon found his vocation as a writer and established himself in the public mind through his wartime dispatches, especially from the Stalingrad front.
