Literature and Reality (with Robert Chandler)
OnlineIn Vasily Grossman’s case, the boundary between literature and reality is unusually thin. The figure of Viktor Shtrum, the nuclear physicist hero of Grossman’s two Stalingrad novels, is based on that of Lev Shtrum, a Jewish-Ukrainian nuclear physicist executed during the Purges. The fictional Viktor Shtrum in turn prefigures the real Andrey Sakharov, an equally creative and free-thinking nuclear physicist. …