My review of Lev Dodin’s staging of “Life and Fate” was in yesterday’s paper, but I wanted to come back to this show and especially its source material, Vasily Grossman’s novel of the same name.

When I read the book a few years ago, I literally couldn’t put it down. Grossman clearly nodded to Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” and its account of Napoleon’s Russian campaign, but Grossman had an advantage over Tolstoy: he had been an eyewitness to what he was describing. During WWII, Grossman was a reporter for “Red Star,” the army’s newspaper, and as such he accompanied to the troops. He may well have been the first embedded journalist. He was there when the Russians discovered Treblinka. He was there when they first entered Hitler’s bunker. This gives “Life and Fate” a remarkable realism.

But what got Grossman in hot water with the Soviet authorities was the parallels he drew between Stalinism and Nazism. The conversations between true-believer Mostovskoy (Igor Ivanov in the play) and concentration-camp officer Liss (Oleg Dmitriev) are particularly illuminating in that regard. The authorities seized Grossman’s manuscript and even destroyed his typewriter’s ribbons, but a copy made it out of the country. The book was finished in 1960, but first published in Switzerland in 1980 and in the USSR in 1988.

Interesting note about Dodin’s process: during the several years he and his troupe prepared the show, he had the actors rehearse in an abandoned Siberian gulag and in Auschwitz.

Finally in my review I mention Anna Shtrum’s monologue. It’s excerpted from a long letter Anna wrote her son, Viktor. This is the last of Anna’s interventions, as Dodin divided up the letter in several parts. A few years ago, French actress Catherine Samie performed the entire letter as an uninterrupted monologue; the show, “The Last Letter,” was filmed by Frederick Wiseman in 2002 and is available on DVD. (As far as I know, it’s the documentarian’s first foray into fiction.)