During the last 15 years of his life, Levinas frequently and passionately cited one work as emblematic of this crisis and his own special response to it. He referred to it at least twice in print, in 1984 and 1986, and also in 1984 in one of his annual Talmudic lessons. In interviews in the 1980s, however, he was drawn to it numerous times, almost compulsively.
The work is Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, a massive realistic novel about Hitler and Nazism, Stalinism, and the Battle of Stalingrad, but more generally about the crisis of European culture and life.
http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780511287275&ss=exc
