I stumbled on this on recommendation of a friend - and having just finished it - I have to say that it's a great novel and one that puts today's political antics (and so-called activism) in pathetic contrast with the harsh reality of life in Russia/Ukraine during (and before) WWII.
Grossman's a good writer and I found him (as others have observed) somewhere between Tolstoy and maybe Pushkin in style and his ability to paint a picture of the Russian soul and spirit. [from other reviews]
A book judged so dangerous in the Soviet Union that not only the manuscript but the ribbons on which it had been typed were confiscated by the state, Life and Fate is an epic tale of World War II and a profound reckoning with the dark forces that dominated the twentieth century.
On 23 July 1962, the Politburo ideology chief Mikhail Suslov told the author that, if published, his book could inflict even greater harm to the Soviet Union than Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, speculating that it could begin a public discussion on the need for the Soviet Union. Suslov told Grossman that his novel could not be published for two hundred years. Suslov's comment reveals both the presumption of the censor and recognition of the work's lasting significance. Grossman tried to appeal against this verdict to Khrushchev personally, unaware of Khrushchev personal antagonism towards Grossman, and misunderstanding the climate of the time.
"I ask you to return freedom for my book, I ask that my book be discussed with editors, not the agents of the KGB. What is the point of me being physically free when the book I dedicated my life to is arrested... I am not renouncing it... I am requesting freedom for my book."
In 1974, Lipkin got one of the surviving copies put onto microfilm and smuggled it out of the country with the help of satirical writer Vladimir Voinovich and nuclear scientist Andrei Sakharov. Grossman died in 1964, never having seen his book published, which did not happen in the West until 1980.
