Life and Destiny manages to excite, move, and disturb the reader from the first line and resists – if not surpasses – the comparison with other masterpieces such as War and Peace or Doctor Zhivago. In the battle of Stalingrad, the Nazi army and Soviet troops write one of the bloodiest pages in history. But history is also made up of small pieces of life of people struggling to survive the terror of the Stalinist regime and the horror of extermination in the camps, so that freedom is not crushed by the yoke of totalitarianism, so that human beings do not lose their ability to feel and love. In literature there are few novels that have managed to convey this with such intensity. Life and Destiny is a war novel, a family saga, a political novel, a love novel. It's all that and more. Vasili Grossman perhaps aspired to change the world with his novel but what is certain is that Life and De...read more
