Vasilii Grossman was a novelist and short-story writer who in his own way chronicled the tragic and bitter history of Russia in the twentieth century. His works explore the complicated events of the Russian Civil War and especially the Nazi atrocities during World War II. He also has the distinction of having written the first account anywhere of the Nazi death camps: his work Treblinskii ad (The Hell of Treblinka, 1945). His descriptions of life under the Soviets are a bitter indictment of that regime, a fact that led to complications with the government and extensive censorship of his works. In fact, his novel Zhizn' i sud'ba (Life and Fate, 1980) was seized by the KGB in 1961 when he first tried to get it published, though the author escaped arrest. The novel was finally published in its entirety abroad. With the advent of glasnost in the 1980s, Grossman's work began...