Life and Destiny 3/1

Here we have before us the most important and greatest Russian work of the twentieth century, an ambitious literary epic, comparable to "War and Peace." Its author died of grief after two KGB officers raided his home and confiscated all his papers, the manuscript of his novel, and even the ink cartridges, in a manner that led everyone to believe it had vanished forever. "I beg you to restore my book's freedom," Vasily Grossman pleaded with Soviet Communist Party leader Nikita Khrushchev in February 1962, asking for the return of his manuscript. But it was lost forever in the vaults of the KGB because of its perceived threat to Soviet security—"more dangerous than Doctor Zhivago," they claimed. In the 1970s, a friend discovered the manuscript among some of Grossman's close associates and smuggled it out with the help of the famous dissident Sakharov, after microfilming it. It was first published in Switzerland in Russian by the Russian-owned publishing house "Lage Dome" in 1980 and has since been translated into various languages.