Radio 4’s ambitious eight-hour dramatisation of Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate will be available as a digital download from October 10th.
The production features an all-star cast including Kenneth Branagh, David Tennant, Greta Scacchi, Janet Suzman, Kenneth Cranham, Eleanor Bron, Harriet Walter and Philip Madoc.
This powerful work, completed in 1960, charts the fate of both a nation and a family in the turmoil of war.
Its comparison of Stalinism with Nazism was considered by Soviet authorities to be so dangerous that the KGB placed the manuscript under arrest and Grossman was informed his book would not be published for at least 200 years.
Having been a household name as one of Russia’s most distinguished war correspondents, Grossman died aged 58 – the banning of his book hastening the end of his life – and he would never know the fate of his masterpiece: smuggled out of the Soviet Union on microfilm, to freedom and eventual publication in the West.
The production is available exclusively as an download and can be ordered via audiogo.co.uk