Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century
About this audiobook
If Vasily Grossman’s 1961 masterpiece, Life and Fate, had been published during his lifetime, it would have reached the world together with Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and before Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag. But Life and Fate was seized by the Russian KGB. When it emerged posthumously, decades later, it was recognized as the War and Peace of the twentieth century. Always at the epicenter of events, Grossman (1905–1964) was among the first to describe the Holocaust and the Ukrainian famine. His 1944 article “The Hell of Treblinka” became evidence at the Nuremberg trials. Grossman’s powerful antitotalitarian works liken the Nazis’ crimes against humanity with those of Stalin.
We are only now able to examine Grossman’s prose, which has the everlasting quality of great art, as well as his life and legacy, which Popoff’s authoritative biography illuminates.
About the author
Alexandra Popoff is the award-winning author of literary biographies, including Sophia Tolstoy: A Biography; The Wives: Women behind Russia’s Literary Giants, a Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2012 in Nonfiction; and Tolstoy’s False Disciple: The Untold Story of Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Chertkov. She began her career as a journalist working in Moscow. As an Alfred Friendly Press Fellow she published her work in the Philadelphia Inquirer and its Sunday magazine. She also contributed to the Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, Globe and Mail, National Post, and Boston Globe.
Claire Bloom gained international fame in 1951 with her screen debut in Charles Chaplin’s motion picture Limelight. Among her many memorable films are Richard III, The Haunting, Look Back in Anger, and A Doll’s House.
Stefan Rudnicki is an award winning audiobook narrator, director and producer. He was born in Poland and now resides in Studio City, California. He has narrated more than three hundred audiobooks and has participated in over a thousand as a writer, producer, or director. He is a recipient of multiple Audie Awards and AudioFile Earphones Awards as well as a Grammy Award, a Bram Stoker Award, and a Ray Bradbury Award. He received AudioFile’s award for 2008 Best Voice in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Along with a cast of other narrators, Rudnicki has read a number of Orson Scott Card's best-selling science fiction novels. He worked extensively with many other science fiction authors, including David Weber and Ben Bova. In reviewing the twentieth anniversary edition audiobook of Card’s Ender's Game, Publishers Weekly stated, "Rudnicki, with his lulling, sonorous voice, does a fine job articulating Ender's inner struggle between the kind, peaceful boy he wants to be and the savage, violent actions he is frequently forced to take." Rudnicki is also a stage actor and director.
