Vasily Grossman, who was on the battlefield and accompanied Russian soldiers in Stalingrad, composed a work with the dimensions of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, touching, at the same time, on one of the crucial moments of the 20th century. This is one of the few novels that seems to encompass the whole of life. Military prison camps and concentration camps; the high commands, with Hitler on one side and Stalin on the other; the soldiers' senseless dispute over a single house in the ruined city; and the family dramas of those left behind and facing political terror and uncertainty. There is no novel about World War II with the same dramatic force, with the same impact. Completed in 1960, and then confiscated by the KGB, the book remained unpublished until the mid-1980s. Once rediscovered, it was elevated to one of the most important novels of the 20th century.
