Vasily Grossman’s masterpiece Life and Fate is rated by many critics as the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century. A Writer at War is based on the notebooks in which he gathered his raw material. It depicts as never before the crushing conditions on the Eastern Front and the lives and deaths of infantrymen, tank drivers, pilots, snipers and civilians alike.
Deemed unfit for service when the Germans invaded in 1941, Grossman became a special correspondent for Red Star, the Red Army newspaper. A portly novelist in his mid-thirties with no military experience, he was given a uniform and hastily taught to shoot a pistol. Remarkably, he spent three of the following four years at the front observing with a writer’s eye the most pitiless fighting ever known.
Red Army soldiers came to love this awkward intellectual for his physical courage and for the honesty of his reporting. He won huge fame for his novel The People Immortal. Grossman witnessed almost all the major events on the Eastern Front: the appalling defeats and desperate retreats of 1941 when more than 3 million men were captured, the defence of Moscow and fighting in the Ukraine.
In August 1942 he was posted to Stalingrad where he remained during four months of brutal street-fighting. He was present at the battle of Kursk, the largest tank engagement in history, and, as the Red Army advanced, he reached Berdichev where his worst fears about his mother and other relations were confirmed.
A Jew himself, he undertook the faithful recording of Holocaust atrocities in the Ukraine, at Odessa and Majdanek as their extent dawned. His supremely powerful report ‘The Hell of Treblinka’ was quoted at the Nuremberg tribunal.
A Writer at War offers the one outstanding eye-witness account of the war on the Eastern Front and perhaps the best descriptions ever of what Grossman called ‘the ruthless truth of war’.
Antony Beevor first came across the notebooks of Vasily Grossmen when working on his book Stalingrad.
Dr Lyubov Vinogradova, a researcher, translator and freelance journalist, studied biology at university in Moscow, as well as taking degrees in English and German. She received a PhD in microbiology in 2000. She has worked with Antony Beevor for the last fourteen years as well as with other British and American historians.
No other journalist wrote with the same regard for what Grossman called the ruthless truth of war... Coleridge once defined imagination as the power to disimprison the soul of fact; Grossman had this power to the highest degree. A Writer at War is impeccably edited, the commentary as informative as it is unobtrusive
Grossman’s notebooks, which furnished much of the material for his novel, have now been edited and translated into English as A Writer at War by the two persons most qualified to do so: Antony Beevor, as a military historian; and Lyuba Vinogradova, as a Russian researcher able to open doors closed to less persuasive questers... The extracts are linked by the editors with succinct narratives that make it easy to orient oneself in the history of the war. Grossman, like Isaac Babel twenty years before him, lifts war correspondence to new heights
Only in the past fifteen years have Western writers – few Russians have wanted to explore the Stalinist era – used access to archives and surviving veterans to uncover the reality of the Eastern war in all its misery. Antony Beevor is among the foremost, and Lyuba Vinogradova is his superbly gifted researcher. The two have now joined forces to translate and edit the notebooks of Russia’s most famous war correspondent, Vasily Grossman. The outcome is a remarkable addition to the literature of 1941-45. . . A wonderful portrait of the wartime experience of Russia, whose people the author loved so much and felt for so deeply. Beevor and Vinogradova’s collection of his writings form a worthy memorial to a remarkable man
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