Life and Fate
by Vasily Grossman | 
Generations of Winter
by Vassily Aksyonov |
Everything Flows
by Vasily Grossman |
The Island of Crimea
by Vasily Aksyonov | 
The First Circle
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |
A Theatrical Novel
by Mikhail Bulgakov | 
The White Guard
by Mikhail Bulgakov |
Sofia Petrovna
by Lydia Chukovskaya |
The Funeral Party
by Ludmila Ulitskaya | 
Unforgiving Years
by Victor Serge |
August 1914
by Alexander Solzhenitsyn | 
And Quiet Flows the Don
by Mikhail Sholokhov | 
The Earth and Sky of Jacques Dorme
by Andrei Makine |
The Foundation Pit
by Andrey Platonov | 
The Twelve Chairs
by Ilya Ilf | 
The Alice Network
by Kate Quinn |
The Island of Sea Women
by Lisa See |
The Victory Garden
by Rhys Bowen |
The One I Was
by Eliza Graham | 
The Glass Room
by Simon Mawer |
Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate has been hailed as a twentieth-century War and Peace. However, Life and Fate is only the second half of a two-part work, the first half of which was published in 1952. Grossman wanted to call this earlier work Stalingrad--as it will be in this first English translation--but it was published as For a Just Cause. The characters in both novels are largely the same and so is the story line; Life and Fate picks up where Stalingrad ends, in late September 1942. The first novel is in no way inferior to Life and Fate; the chapters about the Shaposhnikov family are both tender and witty, and the battle scenes are vivid and moving. One of the most memorable chapters of Life and Fate is the last letter written from a Jewish ghetto by Viktor Shtrum's mother--a powerful lament for East European Jewry. The words of this letter do not appear in Stalingrad, yet the letter's presence makes itself powerfully felt and it is mentioned many times. We learn who carries it across the front lines, who passes it on to whom, and how it eventually reaches Viktor. Grossman describes the difficulty Viktor experiences in reading it and his inability to talk about it even to his family. The absence of the letter itself is eloquent--as if its contents are too awful for anyone to take in.