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In the newest biography of the writer Vasily Grossman (1905, Berdychiv & 1964, Moscow), the author, Canadian researcher Alexandra Popoff, focuses on clarifying the moral, psychological and everyday complexities of a talented person's existence in a totalitarian state. Turning to Grossman's correspondence with family and friends, private interviews, and the texts of his novels Stepan Kolchugin, The Defence of StalingradFor the Right Cause, Everything Flows, especially Life and Fate, and other works (including the Black Book, compiled jointly with I. Ehrenburg), A. Popoff draws the main line of the writer's activity in the constant dilemma between the possibility of meeting the ideological demand of the time and the compulsion to write in the desk drawer, «without permission», that is, the artificial need to choose between incomplete and complete truth, between adaptation and the desire for freedom, between ideology and life. The reader feels the scale of the price that Grossman paid for the opportunity to be himself in the surrounding falsity of existence.