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Grossman's War

Drama

Factual: History

Programmes around Russian writer and journalist Vasily Grossman's two epic wartime novels.

A season of programmes around Russian writer and journalist Vasily Grossman's two epic wartime novels, 'Stalingrad' and  'Life and Fate'.

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Life and Fate: Lieutenant Peter Bach

Grossman's War: Life and Fate: Lieutenant Peter Bach

Life and Fate

Lieutenant Peter Bach

BBC Radio 4 - Grossman's War, Life and Fate, Lieutenant Peter Bach

Vasily Grossman's epic tale of all sides of the Battle of Stalingrad.

In a German field hospital, a young man contemplates life and struggles to make sense of the war. Starring Geoffrey Streatfeild.

Peter Bach, a German officer, is wounded and treated at a military field hospital in November 1942.  

The brief respite from the fighting gives him time to contemplate his secret affair with a Russian girl, Zina, an affair that he roughly denies when confronted with it.

Kenneth Branagh, Janet Suzman, David Tennant, Greta Scacchi and Harriet Walter star in Vasily Grossman's epic saga.   

Lieutenant Peter Bach ..... Geoffrey Streatfeild
Gerne ..... Lloyd Thomas
Fresser ..... Michael Shelford
The Goalkeeper ..... Tony Bell
Zina ..... Jessica Raine
Hospital Sister ..... Christine Kavanagh
Hospital Orderly ..... David Seddon

Dramatised by Jonathan Myerson.

Original music by John Hardy with Rob Whitehead

Director: Alison Hindell

Set against the ferocious Battle of Stalingrad, Life and Fate is a sweeping historical tale that charts the fate of both a nation and a family in the turmoil of war and is increasingly hailed as the most important Russian novel of the 20th century. Its comparison of Stalinism with Nazism was considered by Soviet authorities to be so dangerous that the manuscript itself was arrested and Grossman was told that it would not be published for at least 200 years. He   died in 1964, never knowing that his book would be smuggled to the West and eventually published in 1980.

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in September 2011.

Grossman's War: Life and Fate

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Vasily Grossman's sweeping historical tale set against the ferocious Battle of Stalingrad.

Set against the ferocious Battle of Stalingrad, Life and Fate is a sweeping historical tale that charts the fate of both a nation and a family in the turmoil of war.

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Grossman's War

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