Today, when so much discussion worldwide is given to the subject of the so-called “Double Genocide” theory, which is often seen as diminishing the uniqueness of the Holocaust by equating Soviet and Nazi crimes, Grossman’s Life and Fate dramatizes the need to understand the crimes of Hitler and those of Stalin as part of a single anti-human world that took shape in the middle of the twentieth century. This is the great Soviet novel of military victory and human, moral catastrophe, joining the Jewish tragedy with the tragedy of Soviet reality. In 1960, he submitted Life and Fate for publication, a novel that brought these themes together through the intertwined narratives of multiple individual lives. The twin catastrophes of WWII and the Holocaust obsessed Vasily Grossman.
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