The inspiration for THE LAST LETTER, Life and Fate is a nearly 900-page novel that traces the saga of one Russian family over a number of decades, from the Russian Revolution to the Battle of Stalingrad. In a kaleidoscope of scenes located on both sides of the front, author Vasily Grossman describes the tragic events of the early-to-mid-20th century, a history that witnessed human violence inflicted on millions of people. THE LAST LETTER is adapted from a chapter in which protagonist Viktor Strum’s mother, Anna Semyonova, writes to him from the Berdichev ghetto, where she awaits imminent death.

Life and Fate is loosely based on the life of Grossman, who was born in 1905 in the Ukrainian town of Berdichev. After studying chemistry at Moscow University, Grossman became a well-regarded journalist and writer of “social realist” novels. From 1941 to 1945, he was the chief war correspondent for the Soviet newspaper Izvetzia, reporting from the frontlines and following the Soviet army from Gomel to Stalingrad, then from Stalingrad to Berlin. He was one of the first journalists to provide a chronicle of the Holocaust.

In 1941, Grossman’s mother, Ekaterina Savelievna, a French teacher in Berdichev, was murdered in the Germans’ massacre of the town’s entire Jewish population. Because of Soviet anti-Semitism, Grossman lost his job after the war and was declared a “non-person.” He stopped writing approved “Soviet realist” fiction and began to do his own work.

Grossman wrote Life and Fate between 1954 and 1961, but the KGB soon confiscated his work, deeming his expose of the Soviet regime ideologically objectionable. His observations of Nazi nationalism and the Holocaust, especially in an earlier “black book” he co-wrote that included documentary evidence of Nazi crimes committed in Soviet territory, went against the era’s Soviet anti-Semite campaigns. Three years later, he died in poverty.

In 1980, the manuscript of Life and Fate was anonymously smuggled out of the country on microfilm, and published in Switzerland. Other editions soon followed in France, Germany, England and the United States, with numerous reprintings. The book received both critical and commercial success and Grossman was acclaimed as a major Russian writer, two decades after his death.

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