"the book itself was arrested"

Radio Life and Fate is BBC Radio 4's new drama experiment spread across all of the drama slots which aren't The Archers next week, and unexpectedly they're releasing the whole thing as a podcast to make it easier to keep up with. Subscription details are here. Synopsis:

"Kenneth Branagh and David Tennant star in an eight-hour dramatisation of Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. Thirteen episodes will be broadcast from 18 to 25 September on Radio 4. This epic masterpiece, centred around the bloody battle of Stalingrad, charts the fate of both a nation and a family in the turmoil of war. Completed in 1960, the novel was deemed so dangerous by the KGB that the book itself was arrested."

The wikipedia has this useful history of the manuscript:

"Life and Fate, the sequel to For a Just Cause that completely overshadows its predecessor,[3] was written in the aftermath of Stalin’s death. Grossman submitted it around October 1960 for potential publication to the Znamya magazine. At this point, the KGB raided his apartment. The manuscripts, carbon copies and notebooks, as well as the typists' copies and even the typewriter ribbons were seized.

"On July 23, 1962, the Politburo ideology chief Mikhail Suslov told the author that, if published, his book could inflict even greater harm to the Soviet Union than Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. Suslov told Grossman that his novel could not be published for two or three hundred years.  Suslov's comment reveals both the presumption of the censor and recognition of the work's lasting literary value. Grossman tried to appeal against this verdict to Khrushchev personally."

Finally, this week's Start The Week offered a background discussion and that's also downloadable here. I think you can tell I'm excited.