He studied mathematics and physics at Moscow State University and while working as an engineer began to write fiction and journalism. Vasily Grossman was born in Berdichev, Ukraine, in 1905, into an “emancipated” middle-class Jewish family and died in 1964. In 1960, Soviet Chief of Ideology Mikhail Suslov declared that this work could not be published for at least 200 hundred years, but we will read it with the intention of discussing the problems raised by associating these two great crimes of the twentieth century, and how it is possible to understand them together. Today, when so much discussion worldwide is given to the subject of the so-called “Double Genocide” theory, which is often seen as diminishing the uniqueness of the Holocaust by equating Soviet and Nazi crimes, Grossman’s Life and Fate dramatizes the need to understand the crimes of Hitler and those of Stalin as part of a single anti-human world that took shape in the middle of the twentieth century. This is the great Soviet novel of military victory and human, moral catastrophe, joining the Jewish tragedy with the tragedy of Soviet reality.
In 1960, he submitted Life and Fate for publication, a novel that brought these themes together through the intertwined narratives of multiple individual lives.
The twin catastrophes of WWII and the Holocaust obsessed Vasily Grossman.
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