There were two major acts in the life of Jewish-Russian writer Vasily Grossman, and in each he played a different role.

The first is bound up in the epochal events of the twentieth century: the battles of Stalingrad, Kursk, and Berlin; the genocides at Treblinka and Auschwitz. In the travel memoir he wrote late in his life, published for the first time in English earlier this year, under the title “An Armenian Sketchbook,” Grossman brushes the surface of his experiences in the Second World War: “I crossed the Volga more than once under German fire. I experienced both massive bombing raids and barrages of mortar and artillery fire.” He was the star correspondent for the Red Army, and his dispatches for the newspaper Red Star documented with thrilling immediacy the Nazi lightning attack upon the U.S.S.R., the decisive reversal at Stalingrad, and the Soviet’s slow, bloody bulldozer-march to the German capital. That westward advance took him through the Nazi camps in Poland and his 1944 report “The Hell Called Treblinka” was the first article about a death camp ever published. It remains one of the finest, providing firsthand forensic documentation—Grossman meticulously lays out the physical dimensions of the camp, down to the square footage—and then icily explaining the engineering of genocide.

Grossman was a fiction writer before the war, and his journalism—even his concentration camp reportage—is uncommonly enlivened by telling descriptions of the besieged landscape, expert character profiles, and an irrepressible tendency toward philosophical reflection and emotional outburst. (His dispatches were collected in the superb 2006 book “A Writer at War.”) When the war ended, he returned to fiction, taking on the twin tasks of eyewitness and interpreter, shaping everything he had seen in the forge of artistic creation.

“Life and Fate,” his resulting magnum opus, is not likely to be unseated as the greatest Second World War novel ever written. Grossman’s challenge over the ten years of its composition seems nearly insuperable: to evoke the scope and magnitude of the conflict without turning his characters into cogs in a vast military machine. “Fascism has rejected the concept of a separate individuality, the concept of ‘a man,’ and operates only with vast aggregates,” he writes in one of the novel’s interwoven meditations. The war itself, Grossman believed, was a noble struggle against that very process of dehumanization.

Grossman’s touchstone for the book was “War and Peace,” which he claimed to have read twice in the course of the war. Tolstoy’s ethical agenda had been to explode the great-man theory of history, the notion that a few godlike kings and generals dictate the movements of the rest of the world as though it were composed of so many chess pawns. So his devotion to truthfully portraying his creations—to illuminating the soul of each member of that enormous cast—was a matter of moral necessity.

Likewise in “Life and Fate.” The novel has over a hundred and fifty characters, and each is patiently individualized, delineated with a journalist’s fidelity to appearances and an artist’s clairvoyance into meaning. Grossman’s exaltation in human detail amplifies as he approaches the most brutally impersonal aspect of the Second World War, the Holocaust. Instead of becoming lost in the numbers of mass slaughter, he concentrates on two characters being conveyed to a death camp, and from there to a gas chamber. One is a middle-aged female doctor, the other is a small boy separated from his parents. The woman looks after the boy and discovers in her final moments that, for the first time, she has become a mother. As death comes upon her, Grossman begins to fervently recite a litany of the intimate particulars from her life, as though chanting from a sacred breviary:

Her eyes—which had read Homer, Izvestia, Huckleberry Finn, and Mayne Reid, that had looked at good people and bad people, that had seen the geese in the green meadows of Kursk, the stars above the observatory at Pulkovo, the glitter of surgical steel, the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, tomatoes and turnips in the bins at market, the blue water of Issyk-Kul—her eyes were no longer of any use to her. If someone had blinded her, she would have felt no sense of loss.

The war and its aftermath caused Grossman his own share of suffering. His mother was killed by the Nazis in the village of Berdichev, in a mass execution in 1941. Grossman had not asked his mother to move in with his family in Moscow, and his guilt over the failure to protect her forms a moving plot in “Life and Fate.” But in these years he appears to us as a figure of strength, probity, and purpose, a voice of remembrance and an agent of renewal. Stalin’s death, in 1953, had seemed to usher in a new dawn of liberalization and creative freedom, and Grossman was hopeful that “Life and Fate” would be among the great works of that era, apotheosizing the Russian resistance to Fascism while taking a reckoning with its own totalitarian history. He had undertaken the role of the writer as hero, capable of the Herculean feat of imposing order on immense confusion and thereby drawing meaning from it.

The final act of Grossman’s life began in 1961, when “Life and Fate” was “arrested” by the K.G.B., who said that it could not be published for two hundred and fifty years. The reason they gave was that Grossman had placed too much emphasis on the Nazi persecution of Jews—the pointedly anti-Semitic official decree was that war chroniclers could not divide the dead into groups—but biographers have speculated that Khrushchev saw an unflattering resemblance of himself in one of the novel’s fictional commissars. (A hidden copy of the book was eventually smuggled out of the U.S.S.R. in 1974, ten years after Grossman’s death.)

The censorship made him a persona non grata among members of the Soviet Writer’s Union, effectively stripping him of his livelihood. Meanwhile, his marriage fell apart (his wife resented their decline in status and could not understand why her husband wouldn’t write books that were acceptable to the State) and his health deteriorated. A friend recalled that he aged “before our eyes. His curly hair turned greyer and a bald patch appeared. His asthma … returned. His walk became a shuffle.” Soon he began to experience symptoms of the stomach cancer that would eventually kill him. If he was once the stalwart messenger who had escaped from cataclysm and was prepared to tell the world what he had seen, now he was Job. The history of loss and affliction he had transmuted into fiction had become autobiography.