Volume 33, Number 12 · July 17, 1986
Noise, Fire, and Hunger
By Josef Skvorecky
Life and Fate
by Vasily Grossman, translated by Robert Chandler
Harper and Row, 880 pp., $22.50
Unlike older Soviet writers such as Pasternak who spent their formative years before Soviet power was established, with all its deadly erasings of historical memory, and unlike his younger contemporaries, who were cured of Leninist delusions by the bitter pill of the Gulag, Vasily Grossman was the product of a purely Soviet milieu. For most of his life, he remained an establishment writer—or so it seemed, even though he was one of the most talented of Soviet war reporters. He died in 1964, not long after writing Life and Fate, which gives one of the most deeply subversive accounts of the Soviet establishment yet published.
Review, 4388 words
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