Life and Fate on Radio 4
 

Vassily Grossman's novel 'Life and Fate' is to be dramatized on radio 4 starting this Sunday at 3pm. The saga will be told over 8 hours with a cast that includes Kennith Branagh, David Tennant and Greta Saatchi so you can be assured that the acting will be as good as the writing.

For those of you who haven't read 'Life and Fate' I heartily recommend that you do - it's one of the great war novels of the 20th century, perhaps all time. Grossman himself was a Soviet war correspondent who spent 5 months in Stalingrad during the battle and followed the Soviet forces all the way to Germany. His own mother was trapped behind German lines when Barbarossa began and she eventually died at Treblinka. Grossman's article about that death camp (The Hell of Treblinka which can be found in his biography, A Writer at War) is one of the most genuinely moving things I have ever read on the subject of the holocaust. Grossman's own disillusionment with Communism, and his hatred of totalitarianism, grew during the war and he faced many problems afterwards including good old fashioned censorship: His novel was 'arrested' and did not get published until 1980, by which time Grossman had been dead for about 15 years.

Those of you not in Britain or unable to get Radio 4 may be able to get it on BBC Iplayer. I hope you do - I think its going to be good.