Vie et destin

"Every era has a city that represents it to the world and houses its soul, its will. Stalingrad was that city for a certain period of the Second World War. It concentrated all the thought and passion of the human race."

1942. A decisive battle is being fought in Stalingrad, and the whole of Europe is holding its breath. The second part of a masterly diptych dedicated, along with Pour une juste cause, to the Second World War, Vie et Destin is an epic novel that depicts violence and hope in the heart of the darkness of the conflict. From the Eastern Front to the gulags of Siberia, from the death camps of Poland to the ravaged villages of Ukraine, Vassili Grossman inscribes the individual destinies of an entire people in the great upheavals of his time.
Confiscated by the KGB, the manuscript of Life and Destiny was smuggled to the West, where its publication in 1980, at the height of the Cold War, was a major event.
This vibrantly realistic fresco remains today a powerful plea against fascism and a universal, timeless literary work.