Life and Fate / Vasily Grossman, translated and with an introduction by Robert Chandler, 880 p.

A sprawling novel of the Battle of Stalingrad, which took place during the fall and winter of '42-'43 and was considered the turning point of the war on the Eastern Front.  The novel is semi-autobiographical and tells the story through the lives of the Shtrum/Shaposhnikov family and the many, many people connected with them on the homefront, on the battlefield, and in German and Soviet prison camps.

At the time of the manuscript's completion in 1960, few in the USSR and presumably even fewer in the west were aware of the hideous brutality of Stalinism.  Grossman struggled to have the novel published and the typewriter ribbons he used were initially confiscated along with the text itself.

Grossman makes overt nods to Tolstoy throughout the novel, and readers of War and Peace will find structural and thematic parallels.  If War and Peace illustrates the soul of Russia in its radiance, Life & Fate portrays that same soul looking a bit tarnished.  Stalin's reign is an age in which no one can be trusted, and a chance remark can send a person to a camp for "ten years without right of correspondence," which was universally understood to mean a death sentence.  Grossman excels at drawing the hobbled nature of ordinary human communication, in which no one says what they think and the human hunger for connection is offset by the risk all connection entails.

An amazing book in more ways than I can say here; I will only add that I was impressed by Grossman's autobiographical main character Viktor Pavlovich Shtrum.  Viktor is interesting and human but quite flawed and occasionally unlikeable.  I admire that level of honesty.