Road - Vasily Grossman

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- FR

This is the true story of Vito Ciancimino - Don Vito da Corleone, the 'Mayor of the Corleones' - who spent forty years in the grip of death, mafia, politics, business deals and the secret service. Don Vito recounts years of clandestine and previously censored contacts between politicians and the mafia - between the Italian State and the Cosa Nostra. The key witness is Massimo, the penultimate and hitherto closest of Don Vito's five children, who has given his personal testament for the first time. His account rewrites some of the most important events of Italy's recent history. In the words of Attilio Bolzoni of Republica: 'This is the portrait of a man who was a key player from post war Italy to our days in one of the most daunting of Italian affairs, a figure who inspired fear, a devil. He was friend with mafia bosses and great politicians, of killers and respectable gentlemen. Vito Ciancimino was the incarnation of power itself, maybe the most hated and feared, the most suspected and worshipped, man of Palermo and of the whole Sicilian society'. If Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah revealed the workings of the mafia system at street level, Francesco La Licata and Massimo Ciancimino's Don Vito tells us about the people who held the reins of power.

By the author of Life and Fate, now a major Radio 4 drama starring Kenneth Branagh.

Vasily Grossman is widely recognized as one of the outstanding literary figures of the twentieth century. The short fiction collected here - satire, comedy, tragedy and pure narrative - illustrate the remarkable breadth of his work, and demonstrate all the bold intelligence, delicate irony and extraordinary vividness for which he has become known.

In addition to the eleven stories, this volume includes the complete text of 'The Hell of Treblinka', one of the first descriptions of a Nazi extermination c& a powerful and harrowing piece of journalism written only weeks after the camp was dissolved.

Beautifully illuminated by Robert Chandler's introductions and endnotes, with photographs from the family archive, and an Afterword by Grossman's stepson, Fyodor Guber.

Autorentext

VASILY SEMIONOVICH GROSSMAN (1905-1964) was born into a Jewish family in Berdichev, in what is now Ukraine. In 1934 he published both "In the Town of Berdichev" - a short story that won him immediate acclaim - and the novel Glückauf, about Donbas miners. During the Second World War, he worked as a reporter for the army newspaper Red Star; his "The Hell of Treblinka" (1944) was one of the first accounts of a Nazi death camp to be published in any language. His long novel Stalingrad was published in 1952. During the next few years Grossman worked on his second Stalingrad novel: Life and Fate. In February 1961, the KGB confiscated his typescript, but he was able to continue working on Everything Flows, which is yet more critical of the Soviet regime, until his last days. The short stories he wrote during his last three years are among his supreme achievements; English translations are included in The Road. Grossman died on 14 September 1964, on the eve of the twenty-third anniversary of the massacre of the Jews of Berdichev, in which his mother had died.