Stalingrad · 1980 · citedLife and Fate
Vasily Grossman
Grossman's vast novel turns on the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942–43 and braids it with the two great terrors of the century, the Nazi camps and Stalin's own. The city on the Volga is the fixed centre: the ruined streets, the encircled strongpoint the novel calls House 6/1, and the height of Mamayev Kurgan fought over yard by yard. Beyond it the book reaches to the Berdichev ghetto, where the physicist Shtrum's mother writes her last letter, and to the Lubyanka in Moscow, so that the war and the two tyrannies are held in one frame.
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