Sunday 20 June at 2.00 p.m.
Venue: Stevenson Room, British Museum

Yekaterina Korotkova-Grossman with a portrait of Vasily Grossman

Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate (Vintage), described by Le Monde as the greatest Russian novel of the 20th century, was regarded as so dangerous to the Soviet state that Mikhail Suslov declared that it could not be published for at least 200 years. Yekaterina Korotkova-Grossman, Vasily’s daughter by his first wife, came to know her father only gradually. At first she saw little of him except during New Year holidays. In the mid-1950s she moved from the Ukraine to Moscow, and they became close in the last ten years of his life. Robert Chandler, whose translation of Everything Flows – a work even more critical of Soviet society than Life and Fate – has just been published by Harvill Secker, will talk to Yekaterina about her memories of her father and of her first reading of his work. She will also talk about her memoir Ukraine: On the Edge of an Empire Life which describes the years in Lvov immediately after the Second World War, when the entire city (previously a part of Poland) was, in a sense, deported to the Soviet Union.

Part of the London Review Bookshop’s
World Literature Weekend