Vasily Grossman - Collected Works, incl. Life and Fate (14 books)

* Vasily Grossman - Collected Works, incl. Life and Fate (14 books)

VASILY GROSSMAN (1905–1964) was a Soviet writer, journalist, and one of the most formidable and clear-eyed witnesses of the twentieth century, charting the depths of Soviet totalitarianism and the horrors of World War II with unparalleled moral courage. Originally trained as an engineer, his early literary efforts, including KOLCHUGIN'S YOUTH (1937-40), earned him recognition from the Soviet establishment and the admiration of such diverse writers as Maxim Gorky, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Isaac Babel.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Grossman was engaged as a war correspondent by the Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda, for which he wrote first-hand accounts of the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, and the fall of Berlin. Grossman's celebrated eyewitness report, "The Hell of Treblinka" (1944), was among the earliest accounts of a Nazi death camp by a reporter and later used as evidence during the Nuremberg Trials. His wartime journalism and shorter fiction are collected in THE ROAD (2010). An expanded collection of Grossman’s frontline journalism was recently published as FROM THE FRONT LINE: STALINGRAD–TREBLINKA–BERLIN, 1941–45 (2026). In addition to journalism, his novels such as THE PEOPLE IMMORTAL (1942) were published in newspapers and he came to be regarded as a legendary war hero.

During the war, Grossman and fellow writer Ilya Ehrenburg undertook a project that was to be called THE BLACK BOOK . Under their direction, over twenty writers worked to document the horrors suffered by Soviet Jewry at the hands of the Nazis. Its publication was blocked in the Soviet Union upon the conclusion of the war. Its insistence on the uniqueness of Jewish suffering – above and beyond the rest of Soviet citizenry – was denounced by the Central Committee as anti-Soviet. It was not until 1980 that a partial version found its was into print. The compete work was finally published in Lithuania in 1993.

As a result of his experiences during the war, Grossman pivoted from a celebrated state reporter into an uncompromising dissenter, dedicating the remainder of his life to documenting the devastating human costs of both Nazi fascism and Soviet Stalinism. His first major epic novel, STALINGRAD (1952), offers a sprawling yet deeply intimate portrait of the historic battle, capturing the collective heroism of Soviet society while navigating the strictures of state censorship. Its legendary sequel, LIFE AND FATE (1980), represents his greatest masterpiece, a work so politically explosive that the KGB "arrested" the manuscript by confiscating its carbon copies and typewriter ribbons. Smuggled out of the USSR on microfilm years after Grossman’s death, the novel is a profound philosophical indictment of totalitarian systems, famously drawing daring structural parallels between the terror of Hitler's camps and the brutality of Stalin's Gulag.

Beyond his epic novels, Grossman masterfully condensed his political critiques and philosophical inquiries into shorter fiction and deeply personal novellas. FOREVER FLOWING (written from 1955-1963, and also translated as EVERYTHING FLOWS ), also had to be smuggled out of the country where it was published by a West German émigré publishing house. It provides a searing examination of the Soviet penal system and the psychological wreckage inherited by its survivors. The narrative follows a released Gulag prisoner returning to a society permanently deformed by fear, while offering an unprecedented, unsparing historical analysis of the state-engineered Ukrainian famine (the Holodomor) and the foundational violence of the Leninist state.

His final completed book, AN ARMENIAN SKETCHBOOK (1962), shifts away from the grim realities of war to offer a lyrical, deeply humanistic travelogue and meditation on national identity, language, and personal mortality. Together, these works reveal a writer of immense scope whose radical empathy and obsession with absolute truth cost him his livelihood, but guaranteed his enduring legacy in world literature.


The following books are in ePUB and/or PDF format as noted:

== FICTION ==

* Everything Flows [tr. Chandler et al.] (NYRB, 2009) – ePUB
* Forever Flowing [tr. Whitney] (Harper & Row, 1972) – PDF
* Kolchugin's Youth [tr. Edmonds] (Hutchinson, 1946) – PDF^
* Life and Fate [tr. Chandler & Chandler) (NYRB, 2012) – ePUB
* No Beautiful Nights [tr. Donnelly] (Julian Messner, 1944) – PDF^
* Stalingrad [tr. Chandler & Chandler] (NYRB, 2019) – ePUB
* The People Immortal [tr. Chandler & Chandler] (NYRB, 2022) – ePUB

== JOURNALISM & NON-FICTION ==

* An Armenian Sketchbook [tr. Chandler & Chandler] (NYRB, 2013) – ePUB
* From the Front Line: Stalingrad-Treblinka-Berlin, 1941-1945 [tr. Chandler & Chandler] (NYRB, 2026) – ePUB
* The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays [ed. Chandler] (NYRB, 2010) – ePUB
* A Writer at War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army, 1941-1945 [tr. Beevor & Vinogradova] (Vintage, 2007) – ePUB

== EDITOR ==

* The Black Book [tr. Glad & Levine] (Holocaust Library, 1981) – PDF^
* The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry [tr. Patterson] (Routledge, 2017) – ePUB / PDF

== BIOGRAPHY ==

* Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century [Alexandra Popoff] (Yale, 2019) – ePUB / PDF


PDF^ courtesy of @Mohamed5438


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