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The prequel to Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, the War and Peace of the 20th Century, now in English for the first time.Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate has been hailed as a twentieth-century War and Peace. However, Life and Fate is only the second half of a two-part work, the first half of which was published in 1952. Grossman wanted to call this earlier work Stalingrad--as it will be in this first English translation--but it was published as For a Just Cause. The characters in both novels are largely the same and so is the story line; Life and Fate picks up where Stalingrad ends, in late September 1942. The first novel is in no way inferior to Life and Fate; the chapters about the Shaposhnikov family are both tender and witty, and the battle scenes are vivid and moving.