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“... slowly westward. By late 1943 they reached the prewar boundaries of the Soviet Union. According to Vasily Grossman, one of the finest Russian writers of the past century, whose eyewitness reports from the front form a historical source unparalleled in its immediacy, the troops’ behaviour now changed. Many began to act as imperial conquerors, seizing ...”

“... writers, not least those who write in a personal voice which is in itself a variety of pastiche. Vasily Grossman’s masterpiece Life and Fate is fascinating for many reasons, and one of them is the way that it is both a pastiche and a personal statement; a conscious, cold-blooded attempt to sum up everything ...”

“... trying. Peter Porter, Martin Amis, the American cartoonist Art Spiegelman and the Soviet dissident Vasily Grossman are among the many who have done so for the Holocaust although none was ever an inmate of the camps. Of the four, Grossman came closest: born in 1905, a Jew, he spent the war as a reporter, and wrote what ...”

“... presented in big-scale socialist realist novels, good and bad, from Sholokhov’s Quiet Don to Grossman’s Life and Fate. Grossman’s method is indeed socialist realism, used with a wholly Tolstoyan truth and honesty. This itself makes a disturbing, an explosive mixture. But where creating individuals is ...”

“... as Nikolai Gumilyev, Georgy Ivanov, Vladislav Khodosevich, and prose works by Mikhail Bulgakov, Vasily Grossman, Anatoly Platonov and Yevgeny Zamyatin. Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago, for publishing which abroad he was expelled from the Writers’ Union in 1958, is due to appear next year; and publication of some of Nabokov’s novels has been promised. Of ...”

“... Russian archives. Two personal narratives stand out. The first is the notebooks of the novelist Vasily Grossman, found by Beevor in the Russian State Archive for Literature. A great writer moving forward with the armies put down unsparingly what he saw and heard: burning towns collapsing on drunken soldiery, raped girls with battered faces, a mighty ...”

“... ploy as well as a Biblical image to reveal a state of bereavement, and the simple way in which Vasily Grossman did the same thing in his novel about the Russian war, Life and Fate. Jacobson’s approach in Her Story is much closer to the latter, in spite of the way in which he sets up his situation. It remains heartbreakingly ...”

“... At the heart of Vasily Grossman’s great novel of the Second World War, Life and Fate, is an unforgettable depiction of a house cut off from the frontline in Stalingrad. A group of soldiers and civilians are stranded in no man’s land, linked to their comrades-in-arms only by a narrow underground passageway and forced to fight off an onslaught on three sides ...”

“... blurb hyperbole with a wince. But this fanfare has been on a Hollywood Bowl scale that does Grossman, who has proved himself in the past to be a wise and talented writer, no favours at all. ‘To read it is to have yourself taken apart, undone, touched at the place of your own essence; it is to be turned back, as if after a long absence, into a human ...”

“... of Jewish origin in jeopardy, including some very eminent figures. In Life and Fate (1980), Vasily Grossman, who had won fame as a war correspondent, depicted the Soviet and Nazi regimes as parallel; the book was first published in Switzerland more than twenty years after his death. The central theme of Dr Zhivago (1957), the manuscript of which ...”