ÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½

The LRB has a of Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate:

Vasily GrossmanÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™s masterpiece Life and Fate is fascinating for many reasons, and one of them is the way in that it is both a pastiche and a personal statement; a conscious, cold-blooded attempt to sum up everything Grossman knew about the Great Patriotic War, and at the same time to rewrite War and Peace. TolstoyÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™s novel was the only book Grossman read during the war, and he read it twice; War and Peace hangs over GrossmanÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™s book as a template and a lodestar, and the measure of GrossmanÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™s achievement is that a comparison between the two books is not grotesque.