A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941-1945 by Vasily Grossman

by Vasily Grossman

Edited and translated from the Russian by Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova Knopf Canada is proud to present a masterpiece of the Second World War, never before published in English, from one of the great Russian writers of the 20th century – a vivid eyewitness account of the Eastern Front and “the ruthless truth of war.”

When the Germans invaded Russia in 1941, Vasily Grossman became a special correspondent for the Red Star, the Red Army’s newspaper. A Writer at War – based on the notebooks in which Grossman gathered raw material for his articles – depicts the crushing conditions on the Eastern Front, and the lives and deaths of soldiers and civilians alike. It also includes some of the earliest reportage on the Holocaust. In the three years he spent on assignment, Grossman witnessed some of the most savage fighting of the war: the appalling defeats of the Red Army, the brutal street fighting in Stalingrad, the Battle of Kursk (the largest tank engagement in history), the defense of Moscow, the battles in Ukraine and much more.

Historian Antony Beevor has taken Grossman’s raw notebooks, and fashioned them into a narrative providing one of the most even-handed descriptions – at once unflinching and sensitive – we have ever had of what he called “the ruthless truth of war.”


From the Hardcover edition.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Russia, World War II, War, Biography, Military History

Paperback

First published September 1, 2005

About the author

Born Iosif Solomonovich Grossman into an emancipated Jewish family, he did not receive a traditional Jewish education. A Russian nanny turned his name Yossya into Russian Vasya (a diminutive of Vasily), which was accepted by the whole family. His father had social-democratic convictions and joined the Mensheviks. Young Vasily Grossman idealistically supported the Russian Revolution of 1917.

When the Great Patriotic War broke out in 1941, Grossman's mother was trapped in Berdychiv by the invading German army, and eventually murdered together with 20,000 to 30,000 other Jews who did not evacuate Berdychiv. Grossman was exempt from military service, but volunteered for the front, where he spent more than 1,000 days. He became a war reporter for the popular Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star). As the war raged on, he covered its major events, including the Battle of Moscow, the Battle of Stalingrad, the Battle of Kursk, and the Battle of Berlin. In addition to war journalism, his novels (such as The People are Immortal (Народ бессмертен) were being published in newspapers and he came to be regarded as a legendary war hero. The novel Stalingrad (1950), later renamed For a Just Cause (За правое дело), is based on his own experiences during the siege.

Grossman's descriptions of ethnic cleansing in Ukraine and Poland, and the liberation of the Treblinka and Majdanek extermination camps, were some of the first eyewitness accounts —as early as 1943—of what later became known as 'The Holocaust'. His article The Hell of Treblinka (1944) was disseminated at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal as evidence for the prosecution.

Grossman died of stomach cancer in 1964, not knowing whether his novels would ever be read by the public.

Reviews

[Steven Godin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Made up mostly of Grossman's own notes, wartime observations, letters, and interviews of those at the heart of Russia's battle during WW2, historian Antony Beevor (who writes much vitally needed explanatory material in-between) with the help of translator Luba Vinogradova creates the most detailed and sweeping panorama of war I have read for a long time. Grossman doesn't hold back on the terrible and horrific Maelstrom that took place, calling his descriptions 'the ruthless truth of war', which represents the best eyewitness account of the Eastern front ever covered in a single book.

Grossman was first sent to front in 1941 as a special correspondent for the official Red Army newspaper 'Krasnaya Zvezda', and covered the brutal conflict, struck by some of the most horrendously cold weather, he depicts the crushing conditions in vivid clarity, right up to entering a war torn Berlin in 1945, where he even got to rummage around in Hitler's official office. Their is such power in his writings throughout, that came from his own emotional responses to the early disasters of the war, and the tragic realization that the destiny of his mother, wife, and child troubled him deeply. Some of the letters he wrote to both his father and wife were so penetratingly moving it left me with a lump in my throat.

There is no doubt this is a book written, not for the thrills and spills and tensions of battle, but for the immense gut-wrenching human suffering that becomes clearly evident throughout. Grossman covers so many catastrophic moments with a compassion for humanity, and always maintains a dignified stance in the face of such suffering, but at times he felt like a broken man. It is a window into a world of so much horror and so much death where he always sticks to writing with an unrelenting honesty, it's little surprise he had to take time out during the war to recover from crippling emotional exhaustion.

Although the early parts were interesting, the book doesn't really get into full flow until the battle of Stalingrad in 1942. This really became such a crucial piece, and is covered in great detail, to better understanding the truly monumental struggle that it turned out to be. The loss of life was simply of the scale.

Some of the most haunting and heartbreaking moments came when Grossman writes of what took place at Treblinka (his essay 'The Hell Called Treblinka' was quoted at the Nuremberg tribunal). Some of what he writes here became so overpowering it was almost too much to bare. I wanted to stop. But as Grossman explains -

"This sight is enough to render even the strongest person insane. It is infinitely hard to read this,
but the reader must believe me, it is as hard to write it. Someone might ask; 'why write about this, why remember all that?' It is a writer's duty to tell this terrible truth, and it is the civilian duty of the reader to learn it. Everyone who would turn away, who would shut his eyes and walk past would insult the memory of the dead."

An incredible and important book, that will resonate for some time to come.

[Jan-Maat]

A Writer at War is a selection of Grossman's wartime writings, some journalism for an army newspaper, some scribblings from his notebooks and bits from his letters. I stepped into reading it from Life and Fate which at the time seemed a sensible decision, in hindsight I am not so sure, while there are bits which plainly get recycled into his later fiction - for instance a group of soldiers sawing up a frozen horse for their dinner (or perhaps breakfast - well for a meal for sure) and in general terms the sense of everything being in flux, particularly towards the end of the war with people in motion forwards and backwards, to home or into captivity is true of the atmosphere of his novel too.

Plainly it took a while for Life and Fate to ferment and stew inside Grossman, but one can sense that one thing he did was collapse down his entire experience and changes in outlook during the war years into the time period of the battle of Stalingrad.

One might also be interested in this volume if you have in interest in the second world war, but really I think for me this is a book about journalism - the difference between seeing stuff happen around you and creating, or explaining to an audience, depended on what your attitude is, a narrative. Naturally, as one might guess since Grossman is writing in time of war and more specifically for an army newspaper there is a certain amount of morale boosting propaganda - not quite as far as 'one armed Uzbek kills 14 Germans and captures 20 more, equipped only with a soft boiled egg' but tending in that direction.

The big factor is Grossman's idealism and his Jewishness, both of which were problematic in the politics of the times. Grossman was perhaps using his journalism to teach the Red Army to be the kind of Red Army he wanted to see, the reality of looting and raping, drunkenness and casual killing was less to his taste than acts of kindness or fighting in defence of the Soviet motherland or men from central Asia learning Russian and fighting as equals with everybody else, and as the offensive begins, followed by territorial gains, then the question 'where have all the Jews gone?' seems to be constantly on his mind - the longest piece of journalism in this entire book is a massive article about the Treblinka camp, it is a good sample of all his pieces showing both ability in presenting a compelling and hard hitting information, great diligence in tracking down sources but perhaps the critical sense loosing out to the desire for individual stories and acts of heroism.

In the earlier part of the book there seemed to be more from the notebooks and less journalism, later more journalism and less from the notebooks, we don't get to see how the observations become articles or how the articles get edited and how the readers respond - so the book as it is, is not a compete study of Grossman as journalist.

Really what I am left with is a rough attempt of the biography of the novelist as a younger journalist
- the weight loss, learning to shoot, disillusionment, guilt, growth of a political vision.

A powerful book , but perhaps one that is left to try and find an audience. On completely unrelated notes I enjoyed some cross-overs with other reading such as the mystery of shorts in the Soviet Union (as discussed in Wladimir Kaminov's Meine Mutter, ihre Katze und der Staubsauger: Ein Unruhestand in 33 Geschichten ) here the shorts are misread by local inhabitants as some odd form of underwear and one gets the feeling that the worst thing about the invading Italians apparently was their habit of eating frogs and that for some the worst indignity and horror of being occupied by the Germans was simply that some of them went around with no trousers on (ie they wore shorts). In truth perhaps such things disturb our sense of the morality of the universe more than fascist ideology and violence - such is the nature of the human brain. The other over lap was the shock of the relative prosperity that the Soviets discovered crossing into Germany which in another way emphasises one of the points made in Lizzie Collingham's The Taste Of War: World War Two And The Battle For Food - that relative to Germany the Soviet Union was poor and its resources difficult to exploit due to that relative under development, the decision to invade then was a strategic dead-end from the first.


Someone might ask: ' why write about this, why remember all that?' It is the writer's duty to tell this terrible truth, and it is the civilian duty of the reader to learn it. everyone who would turn away, who would shut his eyes and walk past would insult the memory of the dead. Everyone who does not know the truth about this would never be able to understand with what sort of enemy, with what sort of monster, our Red Army started on its own mortal combat (p 301)
from his Treblinka article - nicely articulating Grossman's conception of the war.

[Max · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an inside look at Soviet soldiers and civilians caught up in the fighting in WWII. Vasily Grossman, reporting for the Red Army newspaper Kraznaya Zvezda (Red Star), was there on the front. This book is based on his notebooks containing his unvarnished observations and opinions many of which could not be published under Soviet censorship. The raw excerpts are arranged into chapters combined with some of his finished pieces and letters and linked together with text by the editors providing context. Grossman had a way with people getting them to reveal their true feelings, regardless of whether they were civilians, ordinary soldiers or high ranking officers. At times he wouldn’t take notes while he engaged in conversations to put people at ease. He would write everything down immediately afterwards. Grossman was in constant danger. If captured by the Germans, as a Jew, he would have been shot. This review is filled with quotes much in the same way the book is done.

With the German invasion of Russia Grossman witnessed the retreat and disintegration of the Red Army, the fear and plight of the people abandoning their farms and possessions, clogging the muddy roads with their children, animals and carts. Grossman describes it in the fall of 1941, “Thousands of German aircraft droned the skies continually. The earth moaned under the steel caterpillars of German tracked vehicles. These steel caterpillars crawled through marches and rivers, tortured the earth and crushed human bodies.” By October German panzer divisions were racing deep into Russia reaching the city of Orel where Grossman had retreated only to find he had to join another chaotic retreat. “I thought I’d seen retreat, but I’ve never seen anything like what I am seeing now, and could never imagine anything of the kind. Exodus! Biblical exodus! Vehicles are moving in eight lanes, there’s the violent roaring of dozens of trucks trying simultaneously to tear their wheels out of the mud. Huge herds of sheep and cows are driven through the fields. They are followed by trains of horse driven carts, there are thousands of wagons covered with colored sackcloth, veneer, tin. In them are refugees from the Ukraine. There are also crowds of pedestrians with sacks, bundles and suitcases.”

Grossman eventually makes it back to the newspaper office in Moscow although he misses the defense of Moscow that miraculously held back the Germans. He is reassigned to the southwestern front near Kharkov in January 1942. Here he witnesses a Russian division composed of miners facing off against General Paulus’ Sixth Army which Grossman would encounter again in Stalingrad. Overconfident from stopping the Germans at Moscow Stalin overrode his generals and ordered attacks witnessed by Grossman. The Russians enjoyed a short-lived advance. The weather helped. Grossman reports, “Icy air makes one catch one’s breath. The inside of one’s nostrils stick together, teeth ache from the cold. Germans, frozen to death, lie on the roads of our advance. Their bodies are absolutely intact. We didn’t kill them, it was the cold. Practical jokers put the frozen Germans on their feet, or on their hands and knees, making intricate, fanciful sculpture groups. Frozen Germans stand with their fists raised, or with their fingers spread wide…At night the fields of snow seem blue under the bright moon, and the dark bodies of the frozen German soldiers stand in the blue snow, placed there by the jokers,”

In April 1942, Grossman returned to Moscow and took leave. He spent two months writing a novel, The People Immortal that was serialized in Kraznaya Zvezda and was very popular particularly with the troops bringing him fame. This helped him to get access to senior officers on his next assignment. He arrived in Stalingrad at the end of August. “Stalingrad is in ashes. It is dead. People are in basements. Everything is burned out. The hot walls of the buildings are like the bodies of people who have died in the terrible heat and haven’t gone cold yet…It is like Pompeii, seized by disaster on a day when everything was flourishing. Trams and cars with no glass in their windows…burned-out houses” “Sunset over a square. A terrifying and strange beauty: The light pink sky is looking through thousands and thousands of empty windows and roofs. A huge poster in vulgar colors…Bombing again. Bombing the dead city.”

The Russian defensive line was a narrow strip along the Volga only 1 to 5 kilometers deep. Grossman concludes, “Now, there is nowhere further to retreat. Every step back is a big, and probably fatal, mistake.” This was literally true since Stalin ordered anyone retreating or suspected of a self-inflicted wound to be shot. The NKVD was positioned at the river to enforce the order. 13,500 Russian soldiers were executed during the five month battle for the crime of “betrayal of the Motherland” officially referred to as an “extraordinary event”.

Grossman observed civilians caught up in the fighting, “Screams and weeping over the Volga. Germans have dropped a bomb killing seven women and children. A girl in a bright yellow dress is screaming: ‘Mama, Mama!’” “A man is wailing like a woman. His wife’s arm has been torn off. She is speaking calmly in a sleepy voice. A woman with typhoid fever has been hit in the stomach by a shell fragment. She hasn’t died yet. Carts are moving, and blood is dripping from them. And the screaming, the crying over the Volga.”

Grossman points out the importance of Soviet women in the defense of Stalingrad. Some flew small canvas covered biplanes at night turning off their engines and gliding down to drop bombs on German trenches. It was not terribly effective at killing Germans but it kept them awake at night. Then they would drop supplies in the Russian trenches often just tens of meters from the Germans. As Grossman describes it “the sentry can hear soldiers walking in the German trench, and arguments when the Germans divide up the food. He can hear all night the tap dance of the German sentry in his torn boots. Everything is a marker here, every stone is a landmark.”

More typically women served as medics, clerks and signalers. In Stalingrad where intense building by building fighting was the norm, the women died as readily as the men. A female medic wrote “It’s particularly frightening to move during the night when the Germans are shouting not far away, and everything is burning all around. It’s very hard to carry the wounded…I cried when I was wounded. We didn’t collect wounded in the daytime. Only once when Kazantseva was carrying Kanysheva, but a sub-machine gunner shot her in the head.” Klava Koplova, a clerk wrote “I was buried in a bunker while I was typing an order. The lieutenant shouted ‘are you alive?’ They dug me out. I moved to a bunker next door, and was buried there once again. They dug me out again, and I started typing again, and typed the document to the end. I will never forget it if I manage to stay alive.” Most of the girls were young, many just out of high school. “My favorite subject was algebra. I had wanted to study at the Machine Manufacturing Institute…There are just three of us left out of eighteen girls.”

Women who didn’t fight didn’t have it easy either. Grossman describes a village outside Yasnaya Polyana, Leo Tolstoy’s estate, “the blue, ash-gray main road. Villages have become the kingdom of women. They drive tractors, guard warehouses and stables, queue for vodka. Tipsy girls are out singing – they are seeing a girlfriend off to the army. Women are carrying on their shoulders the great burden of work.” Grossman visited Yanaya Polyana on his way to Stalingrad just after German General Guderian, who had used it as his headquarters, had vacated it. Grossman noted, ‘Eighty three Germans were buried next to Tolstoy. They were dug up and reburied in a crater made by a German bomb.”

Grossman documents the experiences of many different people at Stalingrad. He quotes a Russian antitank gunner proud of his success in the intense fighting around Stalingrad. “I saw at once that I had hit it. It took my breath away. A blue flame ran over the armour, quick like a spark. And I understood at once that my anti-tank shell had got inside and gave off this blue flame. And a little smoke rose. The Germans inside began to scream. I’d never heard people scream this way before, and then immediately there was a crackling inside. It crackled and crackled. The shells had started to explode. Then the flames shot out, right into the sky.” A young worker in Stalingrad describes his experience “On 23 October, fighting began inside the plant. Workshops were on fire, as well as railways, roads, trees, bushes and grass. At the command post…they had two boxes of grenades and they beat the Germans off. The Germans had brought tanks to the plant. The workshops changed hands several times. Tanks destroyed them, firing at point blank range. Aircraft were bombing us day and night.”

In November 1942 The Soviets encircled the Germans in Stalingrad by attacking the poorly outfitted and trained Romanian troops protecting their flanks. Advancing with the troops Grossman describes what he and the soldiers saw. “There is a flattened Romanian. A tank has driven over him. His face has become a bas-relief. Next to him there are two crushed Germans. There is one of our soldiers too, lying in the trench half buried. Empty cans, grenades, hand grenades, a blanket stained with blood, pages from German magazines. Our soldiers are sitting among the corpses, cooking in a cauldron slices cut from a dead horse, and stretching their frozen hands towards the fire.” “A killed Romanian and a killed Russian were lying next to each other on the battlefield. The Romanian had a sheet of paper and a child’s drawing of a hare and a boat. Our soldier had a letter ‘Hello, Daddy…Come and visit us… I miss you very much. Come and visit, I wish I could see you, if only for an hour. I am writing this and tears are pouring. That was your daughter, Nina, writing.’”

The Germans attacked the Kursk salient. Grossman was on the field with an anti-tank crew facing the new German Tiger tank that Hitler was sure would lead to victory. He reports “A gun-layer fired point-blank at a Tiger with a 45mm [anti-tank] gun. The shells bounced off it. The gun-layer lost his head and threw himself at the Tiger.” But the Soviet counterattack worked, Hitler’s faith in the new Tiger tank notwithstanding. In a battle of over 1,200 tanks, the Soviet armored divisions had a casualty rate over 50%, but they crushed the Panzer’s last great attack. Burned out tanks were everywhere and days later the Germans retreated. Statistics are one thing, but individual experience is another. “A lieutenant wounded in the leg and with a hand torn off, was commanding a battery attacked by the tanks. After the enemy attack had been halted, he shot himself, because he didn’t want to live as a cripple." Soviet soldiers feared being crippled more than death. They were afraid women would no longer want them, but it was the Soviet government that treated them like vermin after the war.

As the Germans retreated, Grossman interviewed those who had been subject to German occupation. One example, a boy in the Ukraine, “’Where is your father?’ ‘Killed,’ He answered. ‘And mother?’ ‘She died.’ ‘Have you got any brothers or sisters?’ ‘A sister. They took her to Germany.’ ‘Have you got any relatives?’ ‘No, they were all burned in a partisan village.’ And he walked into a potato field, his feet bare and black from the mud, straightening the rags of his torn shirt.”

Grossman could only interview a small handful of Jews who survived. Almost all were gone. Grossman heard about the fate of Kiev Jews at Babi Yar. The dimensions of the Holocaust began to unfold. Grossman wrote about this in his notebook, but he wasn’t allowed by Soviet authorities to publish articles about the fate of the Jews. All victims of the Nazi’s in the Soviet Union were required to be referred to as Soviet citizens. Based on interviews with witnesses he recounts the horrors, most poignantly in the mass killings in his home town, Berdichev, where his mother was killed. A small section, “Pits were dug at the end of Brodskaya Street. Units from an SS regiment arrived in Berdichev the night of 14 September…The whole area of the ghetto was surrounded…at four in the morning the signal was given…the SS and police began driving them out…The executioners killed those who could not walk…The whole city was woken by the terrible screams of women and children’s crying…the people were taken to sheds at the airfield where they waited their turn…This slaughter of the innocent and helpless went on all day. Their blood poured onto the yellow clay ground. The pits filled with blood, the clay soil was unable to absorb it, blood overflowed the pits…The executioners boots were soaked in blood.”

The Soviets raced into Poland. Grossman was there when they found Treblinka. Before leaving the Nazis tried to hide their crimes, but in the chaos some prisoners escaped and Grossman interviewed them and the people from the surrounding village. The article he wrote, “The Hell of Treblinka”, summarizing his findings was published in November 1944 in a Soviet literary journal, Znamya. It was quoted at the Nuremburg trials. It wouldn’t do justice to Grossman’s article to pick quotes from it here. Many consider it his finest writing. It is compelling and unbelievably upsetting. It takes a chapter in A Writer at War and is highly recommended for anyone who wants to understand how a death camp worked. I’ve read other accounts, but this one stands out and will not be forgotten.

The book proceeds until Grossman is in Berlin. The most notable thing being Grossman’s concern over the widespread raping and looting by the Red Army once it left Soviet territory. But I consider the Treblinka article as a fitting end, because it was the climax of his writing. This compendium of notes, articles and letters is skillfully put together by the editors. It reveals a gifted man who combined keen observation, a dogged determination to get the truth, a true concern for the individual, deftness at getting people to reveal themselves, and a masterful way with the written word. This is exemplified in his great novel Life and Fate, a must read for anyone drawn to the writings in this volume. Conversely this book will be appreciated by anyone who enjoyed Life and Fate.

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

An English language translation has just been released (June 2019) of Vasily Grossman’s novel “Stalingrad”, and I intend to read it sometime this year. As a precursor, I decided to try this collection of his WWII writings. Grossman served right though the conflict, from the summer of 1941 to the fall of Berlin. As an already established writer, he was assigned as a war correspondent to the Soviet military newspaper “Red Star”, although he certainly didn’t use that an excuse to avoid the frontline.

Many of these extracts are based on incidents recorded by the author on small notebooks he carried with him. This was a punishable offence in itself, as at the time Soviet soldiers were not allowed to keep private diaries, but what he wrote was even more dangerous. Grossman hero-worshipped the ordinary Red Army soldiers for their courage and resilience, but during the disasters of 1941 he also recorded how Ukrainian peasants welcomed the German Army, or of how soldiers were executed for alleged desertion or cowardice. Even as the War moved on and the Soviet Union recovered its lost territories, Grossman touched on the forbidden subject of collaboration. If the NKVD had discovered his notebooks, he would have received a long sentence in a prison camp, at the very least.

The book was edited and translated by Anthony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova, who provide helpful explanatory comments on remarks that might otherwise be confusing to Westerners or even to modern-day Russians. They suggest that Grossman’s articles in Red Star were by far the most popular with ordinary troops. Other writers praised the collective strength of the Red Army, but Grossman spoke at length with frontline soldiers and often told their individual stories. The Battle of Stalingrad was clearly a central event in Grossman’s life, as I’m sure it would have been for anyone who was a participant. He wrote to his father that “This City has become human for me” and afterwards spoke of his sadness at leaving - “Where did it come from, this feeling of parting?”

One chapter is taken up with Grossman’s shocked impressions of the Treblinka death camp. I think this article was published, as there is evidence of censorship. There’s no direct mention of victims from the USSR being predominantly Jews (Stalin had ordered there should not be), nor of the fact many of the camp guards had been Ukrainians. The modern reader knows the history of course, and Grossman’s account remains eloquently sickening.

For me, it’s the honesty of the author’s accounts that make the book most compelling.

[P.E. · Rating 4 out of 5]

- "Assault groups of the 62nd army dislodge the Germans from house after house, basement after basement, tightening the iron ring around them."
Photographer : Georgy Zelma (1943)
Photo Credit : United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park


This book makes you go through 5 years of WW2 beside writer-journalist Vassili Grossman.

One the one hand, the excerpts from the writer's diary and mail, on the other hand, Anthony Beevor offering you useful chunks of information about the context.

All is not gallant and fair in the "game" of war, but this is an unprecedented source about Operation Barbarossa, gruesome Stalingrad, Kursk, the road to Berlin and over all a useful view on the 'merciless truth of war'.

*****

Ce livre vous fait traverser 5 ans de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale aux côtés de l'écrivain-journaliste Vassili Grossman.

Tandis que les extraits du journal et de la correspondance offrent une matière de première main, Anthony Beevor fournit des éclaircissements très utiles sur la conduite de la guerre aux différentes échelles.

Tout n'est pas beau à voir, tout n'est pas glorieux, noble et droit, mais c'est une source exceptionnelle sur la surprise de l'Opération Barbarossa, sur la bataille de Stalingrad, sur Koursk, sur l'avancée vers Berlin, sur 'la vérité impitoyable de la guerre'.

[zed · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating. If anyone has an interest in the eastern front in WW2 this is a very good read. I am glad that I read Life and Fate prior to reading this book as it allowed me to understand how Grossman was influenced to write his masterpiece.

[Emiliya Bozhilova · Rating 5 out of 5]

Да се оцени книга е лесно. Да се оцени човешки живот, или възлова епоха - почти невъзможно.

Снимката на Василий Гросман от началото на книгата е доста интересна. Леко пухкав, академичен тип със старомодни кръгли очила, типичният книжен плъх. Нищо изпъкващо. Освен ако човек не е наясно, че това е авторът на “Всичко тече” (ежедневието и синтезът на сталинизма), “Живот и съдба” (битката за Сталинград, толкова честно описана, че партийният цензор забранява издаването и за следващите 200 години), както и на и статията за концлагера Треблинка, цитирана на Нюрнбергския процес. Василий Гросман умира в нищета, като политически заличена личност, без да види публикуването на своя магнум опус за Сталинград.

На пръв поглед това развитие на живота му е нелогично. Гросман е напълно асимилиран украински евреин от Бердичев, роден през 1905 г., вярващ в комунизма и в светлите обещания на Октомврийската революция. Вярва в пролетариата и в общочовешките идеали, не в Тората. По самосъзнание е руски патриот. Неговият Рубикон е онова, което и днес - за мен напълно справедливо - се води като Великата Отечествена Война.

Довоенните литературни опити на Гросман не са впечатляващи, до момента в който легендарният Иля Еренбург го назначава за фронтови репортер през 1941 г. в официоза “Красная Звезда”. И този кротък, леко закръглен библиофил с детски идеализъм нахлузва униформата и хуква към фронта, който ще е негов дом до падането на Берлин.

Гросман отслабва. Физическата му издържливост се увеличава. Намира подход както към редници, така и към генерали или случайно срещнати жители на села и градове. Пламенният му патриотизъм е съчетан с дълбока наблюдателност и непосредствена, искрена топлота и разбиране към почти всеки срещнат. Търпението и свръхчовешката му работоспособност при всякакви условия водят до едно от най-обективните наблюдения и отразявания на войната в редиците на Червената армия. Очевидец е на героизма на обикновения войник, както и на цял взвод, поел самоубийствена мисия в Сталинград само за да спечели малко време. Очевидец е и на синдрома на прегарянето, който - в случай на оцеляване - води до доживотен посттравматичен стрес, но в екстремни условия извиква илюзия за пълно спокойствие пред смъртта. Описва отрядите на НКВД, стрелящи в гърбовете на войниците, ако посмеят да отстъпят. Не щади украинския антисемитизъм и колаборационизъм с нацистите, но и човечни постъпки, също на украинци. Ясно посочва ролята на водката в редовете Червената армия. Не мълчи за грабежите и изнасилванията след преминаване на съветската граница. Презира себичната амбиция на доста генерали. И по своему изстрадва Треблинка. Пише репортаж от Ада, с още неизстиналата му пепел. Неописуем. Не всяко сърце би издържало този репортаж, и Гросмановото също пострадва.

Все пак защо Гросман не получава Сталинска премия? Защо Сталин саморъчно го задрасква от списъка, и единствено смъртта на диктатора предотвратява ГУЛАГ? Гросман е идеалист. Но е честен идеалист. Никога не се пречупва по калъпа на примитивната, но ефективна сталинска пропаганда. Твърде обективен е, дори в редактиранитв си и публикувани статии. И най-вече в личните си бележници - литература там не винаги има, по-скоро са като своеобразно военно хайку, но характер има винаги. Неприятно забравя да натърти великата роля на Партията и Вожда във всяко трето изречение. Във войната Гросман проглежда, а това е началото за превръщането му във враг за всеки тоталитарен режим. Индивидуалността, обективността, критичната мисъл винаги са враг на диктатурите. Дори когато произлиза от искрен патриот и доброжелател. Всъщност - най-вече тогава.

П. П. Бийвър ми е далеч по-симпатичен в ролята си на редактор и коментатор на бележниците на Гросман (като писател ми е крайно досаден). Отличен глас зад кадър.

***
▶️ Цитати:

💣 “Но защо дойдоха при нас? Какво искаха?”
Войници от Червената Армия при вида на богатствата и благоустройството на немците

💣 “Тук наистина имат точна представа за правата си.” Гросман за берлинчани

💣 “Червената армия се промени към по-лошо веднага щом прекоси съветската граница.”

💣 “Да получиш куршум беше лукс.” Оцелял от Треблинка

💣 “Всички свидетели си спомняха една обща черта на есесовците от Треблинка: любовта към теоретичните разсъждения, философстването.”

💣 “Вече няма за кога да се боим. По-рано трябваше!” Сапьор Жухов в Сталинград

💣 “На земята наблизо лежи книга със заглавие “Унижените и оскърбените”. Капустянски казва на тези хора:
- Вие също сте унижени и оскърбени.
- Оскърбени сме, но не и унижени.”
Из разрухата на Сталинград

💣 “Отивам на бой, както човек отива на работа в някоя фабрика. … Участвах и в атака на щик, но германците не искаха да се бият.” И. Канаев, войник

💣 “Вече не мога да живея без войната. … Откриваме огън и аз се чувствам добре.” М. Стекленков, войник

💣 “Батальонният командир Козлов устоя на атака с танкове. Той беше в чудесна форма и напълно пиян.”

💣 “Обличат подгизнало то от кръв тяло на войната в снежнобели одежди от идеологически, стратегически и художествени условности.”

💣 “Ние, руснаците, не знаем как да живеем като светци, знаем само да умираме като светци.”

💣 “Онзи особен полъх от самолети ниско покрай земята"

[Simone Invernizzi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vasilij Grossman è stato palesemente un dono dell’universo all’umanità.

[Jan Rice · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a living memorial to the WWII Red Army and the soldiers and civilians who were there, and to what they lived through or how they died. When we think of far-off catastrophes and wars, they don't seem real, especially if they are in the past. Our minds perform the required self protection so we can continue to deal with our own day-t0-day realities. What this author does is talk about the particulars and the people and make them real.

Actually the two editors/translators help; they knit together the author's war journals, letters, his published stories, and excerpts from his novels to give us the picture, and as they proceed, they help explain.

Grossman was important to the war effort, writing about the soldiers in ways they could appreciate and enhancing their morale. The higher-ups were aware of his contribution. Oddly, in the beginning, before he became a war reporter, he was so out of shape that he was exempted from serving. Described as "bespectacled, overweight and leaning on a walking stick." In '41, would have been just 36 years old, "yet the girls in the next-door apartment called him 'uncle.'" That's depressing! Once he got himself the job, he surprised everyone by shaping up in short order.

I noticed Grossman's patriotism right from the first. It was "we" this and "us" that. Although he was a Jew he identified as a Russian. While I was reading, a friend compared his writings to those of Isaac Babel. When I looked up Babel, slightly older than Grossman, I found he'd been executed in 1939 as part of Stalin's purge, but Grossman initially seemed oblivious to such goings-on.

Later he confronted the Nazi mass killing of Jews (including his mother) in the parts of the USSR they had penetrated, and not only that but with the cooperation of the locals, for example in Ukraine, where his hometown had been. His eyes also were opened when an exposé of the massacres on which he'd worked was suppressed by the Soviets. The strategy of the authorities was to "erase" the mass killings by refusing to single out Jews or even mention the word "Jew," and insisting on taking all Nazi victims as the same: the "all lives matter" approach of those times. The erasure also covered up the embarrassing local collaboration.

The editors saw Stalingrad as the psychological turning point of the war. After that the Soviets could go on the offensive.

Before my book club meeting on last Tuesday the 17th, the Red Army had turned the tide, had made it back to Ukraine. I was still 80 pages short of the end and it didn't look like I was going to Berlin. But just checked it out tonight. Not sorry to have not stayed long with Treblinka. Or with the savagery of the Red soldiers when they finally did make into Germany.

Another early impression from this book, and one that stayed with me throughout, is about the sheer craziness of dictators. They think they have power over not only facts but events as well. At first Stalin couldn't accept or believe that he'd been tricked by the Nazis. He couldn't believe the USSR was being invaded. Whole armies were encircled and cut off as a result of his denial.

I read this book because the book club was reading it. It wasn't a fun read, but it's not one you have to labor over, either. You learn from books like this.

[Margarita Garova · Rating 4 out of 5]

”...кореспондентите са най-смелите хора във война, защото трябва да заминават от тила за фронта толкова много пъти. А този момент е най-неприятният, това преминаване от славеи към самолети.”

Много се чудех дали въобще трябва да се захващам с тази книга, въпреки любовта ми към военната документалистика. Предвид войната в Украйна и сходствата в безчинствата между Червената и сегашната руска армия, бях сигурна, че ще изпитам неприятно чувство, четейки хвалебствията на Гросман за първата.

Само че има ситуации, в които това, което спасява една книга, поне в моите очи, е личността на автора й. Василий Гросман, военният кореспондент, прекарал най-много време на фронта след 1941 г. и свидетел на битката при Сталинград и падането на Берлин, е от рядката порода човечни съветски писатели и журналисти, безпартиен, наивен и разбира се, парадоксално смел за човек, който е физически непригоден за фронтови условия. В продължение на три години писателят обитава безкрайна земя на страдание – превърнатата от нацистите в пустош руска земя. В расовото прочистване в Бердичев загива и майката на Гросман. Адът на Сталинград, напрежението при Курската дъга, неистовото настъпление към Берлин и описанието на концлагера Треблинка, постоянните борби с цензурата и господстващата в момента идеологическа догма се отразяват на здравето на Гросман, който получава нервен срив след завръщането си от фронта.

Репортажите му са твърде телеграфни, писателят у Гросман е още в зародиш, но затова пък коментарите на Антъни Бийвър и Люба Виноградова уплътняват и изясняват ситуацията от фронта. Гросман умее да регистрира физическите детайли на битката, но също така проявява емпатия и честност във втория план – когато се намесват грубата съветска йерархия, началническите издевателства над обикновените войници, дребните амбиции на командния състав и обичайните пропагандни лъжи.

Въпреки че никога не губи идеализма си по отношение на руския войник, Гросман не може да бъде обвинен в едностранчивост. След преминаването на немска териория по пътя към Берлин, когато червеноармейците се превръщат в насилнически орди, Гросман не спестява и тези факти в очерците си. До края на живота си писателят е в проблематични отношения със съветската власт, а историята на романа му “Живот и съдба” може да съперничи на тази на “Доктор Живаго”. В СССР не прощават нито еврейския му произход (въпреки руския му патриотизъм), нито отказа за слугинаж.

[Dimitri · Rating 3 out of 5]

Grossman is an engaging writer, especially considering his editorial circumstances, but he's let down a bit by his subject: during the Retreat and Stalingrad, he seems to have much more time to collect anecdotes & have more potential interviewees at hand than once the Red Army picks up speed to the Fascist Lair. Also, anecdotes. Some are so minute as to barely fill a short paragraph, others feel generic for those readers versed in Eastern Front books - meaning his stuff's so good it gets recycled again and again. By Beevor himself as well, occasionally, to bring Berlin. The Downfall, 1945 to life.

[Rick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Grossman, the author of the magnificent Life and Fate, took notes tirelessly as he covered the Second World War for Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star) and was, despite Soviet censors, regarded as one of the war’s best journalists. His coverage of the siege of Stalingrad is powerful and gritty and focused on the individual solider, officer, resident. His article on Treblinka was one of the first reports on Hitler’s death camps published in any language. His insistence on reporting on the Holocaust and documenting its inhumanity was at odds with Soviet policy of admitting “any special categories of suffering. All victims of Nazism…had to be defined as citizens of the Soviet Union.” His pursuit of this issue after the war, despite a brief window of tolerance that closed with the slam of Stalinist purges, would have resulted in his arrest and likely execution if Stalin hadn’t suddenly died.

The writings in this anthology come mostly from his journals, with some excerpts from his published reporting. A great believer in the character of the Soviet soldier and the anti-Fascist cause, Grossman’s notes nonetheless recorded what he saw, including the impact of Stalinism, the vanity of generals, and, particularly after the Soviet Army breaks out of its own territory into Poland and Germany, its own atrocities. Most of this he knew could not ever be shared and was dangerous even to notice, let alone record in his notebooks. Yet he did. There is not much you can say about his courage and integrity beyond wishing you would have a fraction of it in similar circumstances.

The prose is equal to his testimony, whether simply describing a firefight: “A lot of rapid white fire. The tap dance of machine guns and rifles is the most disturbing. Green and white German rockets. Their light is mean, dishonest, not like daylight. A ripple of shots. People are neither seen nor heard. It is like a riot of machines.” Or its impact: “wounded men kept arriving; they were all wet with blood and rain.” When he arrives at a Russian village retaken from the Nazis that had largely a Jewish population that is entirely gone, virtually with no trace, Grossman writes one of the most poignant elegies for such a loss to humanity that I’ve ever read. It begins, “There’s no one left in Kazary to complain, no one to tell, no one to cry. Silence and calm hover over the dead bodies buried under the collapsed fireplaces now overgrown by weeds. This quiet is much more frightening than tears and curses.” He then goes on to catalog the anonymous victims by gender, age, occupation in a somber litany leading into the story of one victim, a doctor, whose execution was delayed for two years by the pleas of village peasants. But then he too is shot because the oxymoronic pity of the Nazis was temporary at best. “The old man was forced to dig his own grave,” a peasant woman reported to Grossman, “he had to die alone. There were no other Jews alive in the spring of 1943.” That last sentence knocks the breath out of you and is simply devastating following the preceding paragraphs (too long to quote here in full unfortunately).

His report on Treblinka is of a different order, an unflinching re-construction of the operations of the death camp that is nearly too gut-wrenchingly horrible to read. Grossman, a first class novelist was also a first class journalist. This is a powerful example of the importance of journalism as history’s first testimony. Brilliant. The editors/translators do an excellent job establishing context and supplying useful notes to assist the reader in navigating the past and the nuances of Soviet military organization, culture, and politics.

[Czarny Pies · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bravo to Antony Beevor for producing this compilation of Vasily Grossman's war reporting. Beevor made extensive use of Grossman's published and unpublished writing in his book "Stalingrad" which won three major history prizes. In an act of great professional courtesy, Beevor created this excellent volume so as to draw the public's attention to Vasily Grossman who deservers to be much better known than he is.

Grossman was the senior Russian journalist covering at the front during WWII. He was the first journalist to report on Treblinka and Majdanek. His writing on these two concentration camps alone justify the time taken to read the book.

There are however many excellent moments. I particularly enjoyed reading about Kuznechik, the heroic anti-Nazi camel who accompanied the Red Army loaded with war materials all the way from Kazakhstan to Berlin and whom my mother-in-law was lucky enough to meet as a child in Poland when he passed through with the rest of Soviet Army.

This book is nonetheless a hybrid: that is to say its a selection of one writer's excerpts chosen and edited by another. Vasily Grossman is naturally at his best when he is in charge of the complete process. I suggest his Life and Fate which is probably the greatest novel ever written about the Eastern Front during WWII.

[Walter Mendoza · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book about the German Russian war, point of view journalist Vasily Grossman. Starting with German invasion, the heroic Battle of Moscow, the bloody Battle of Stalingrad, the epic battle of Kursk, the atrocities of Treblinka and the ruins of Berlin.
Great Edition by Antony Beevor, about Grossman's notes; the vastness the events and stories of war. In conclusion an excellent job of the brutal life of people during the war. I recommend this book.

[Federico · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un manoscritto storico di indubbia qualità.

[Jamie Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is amazing that Vasily Grossman survived. He was an honest man at a time when honesty got people killed. What saved him was his talent and fame. His first book, The People Immortal, was published in 1942 to great acclaim, and his columns as a war correspondent for the Soviet army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star) were very popular.

He kept a series of notebooks containing material for his newspaper articles, descriptions of people and scenes he wanted to remember, and details about the army operations he participated in. Some of the things he wrote about were entirely off limits and would have got him arrested, and possibly shot, if the commissars had seen them. These included what the army called “extraordinary events” such as cowardice, desertion, and anti-Soviet activities. He also refused to participate in Stalin’s personality cult, rarely mentioning him at all. This annoyed the dictator, and Stalin was a very dangerous man to annoy.

On the plus side, he was fearless, a front line war correspondent at a time when most of his fellow writers stayed safely in the rear. He had a gift for getting people to talk, and after witnessing the horrors of combat, many of them had a lot to say. Somehow he survived, but it seems it was almost due more to luck than anything else. After the war he was caught up in the USSR’s rising tide of antisemitism, and eventually became an un-person, unable to work or publish, and he lived out his final years in poverty and obscurity.

He is best remembered today for his great work Life and Fate, often called the War and Peace of World War II, but it too only survived by extraordinary luck. Grossman failed to realize that his descriptions of Communism showed that it had a lot in common with Nazism, but if he failed to appreciate that point, it was not lost on the state censors. After he submitted it for review KGB agents were dispatched to his apartment to confiscate all notes and copies of the manuscript, even taking the ribbon from his typewriter. However, he had sent one copy to a friend, who hid it in a satchel in the back of a closet, where it remained for years. When it was finally rediscovered it was microfilmed and smuggled out of the Soviet Union, and published in 1980 to great acclaim, sixteen years after Grossman’s death.

This book is a good introduction for anyone who intends to read Life and Fate, because it provides background on many of the themes that he would put into the novel. Grossman intended it to be a tribute to his mother so that she would not be forgotten. In real life she was swept up in the German capture of the Ukrainian city of Berdichev and murdered by the SS. Also making an appearance in the novel are soldiers he met (some of them under their real names) and incidents he observed. His notes in A Writer at War provide context to the reader and fill out the experience of Life and Fate.

The book consists of extracts from his notebooks, supplemented by background information by Antony Beevor, a respected historian and author of a number of Second World War books. They are in chronological order and trace his feeling from the hopelessness of the early retreats and mass encirclements, through the heroic stand that stopped the Germans at Moscow and threw them back. He chronicled the growing confidence as the Red Army reorganized and improved, and was there as they destroyed the Sixth Army at Stalingrad, turned back five German armies at Kursk, and crushed Army Group Center in Operation Bagration, destroying 28 of the 34 German divisions they faced. He then followed the armies all the way to Berlin, cheering their progress but horrified and disgusted by the wanton rape, pillage, and destruction that was inflicted as they advanced.

His dispatches from Stalingrad made him one of the most famous writers in the USSR during the war, but it is his description of the Treblinka death camp that has the most impact on modern readers. It could not be published in the normal papers or journals. The official reason was the Stalin did not want one group singled out over the others; every death was a Russian death, not a Jewish or Ukrainian, or Uzbek, or any other nationality. The description of Treblinka is unflinching, and searing in its horror. This is where humanity touched absolute rock bottom in its bestial treatment of other human beings. It is difficult to read and impossible to forget, but we must read it and remember it if we are to keep it from ever happening again. If all else that Vasily Grossman wrote is forgotten, this will be his monument.

This book is not a memoir or a history, but something different. It is a series of notes jotted down immediately after they events they described had occurred, and they have a sense of drama and immediacy. For anyone looking to expand their understanding of the Eastern Front, or for someone wanting an introduction to Life and Fate, this is a good choice.

[Rebecka · Rating 2 out of 5]

This wasn't very interesting at all, but that's hardly Grossman's fault. I'm going to read Life and Fate one day, despite having had to force myself through this book. This is a bit like Alexievich's type of history telling, but without the interesting human aspect. I'm not very interested in where which armies (or generals) were when, because I won't remember it anyway, and the anecdotes the editors of this book have put together in between these dry details are sometimes just too random and haphazard. Overall I'm left with very few impressions. Only the Holocaust related chapter at the end caught my attention.

[Ian Beardsell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this collection of Grossman's writings, edited by Antony Beevor, in order to get an idea of his writing style. Vasily Grossman's fictional, "Life and Fate" is touted as a Russian war classic on par with Tolstoy's "War and Peace". I think I see why, and I am as eager as ever to get my hands on it.

Grossman was sent to the various Soviet fronts of WWII, including the infamous Stalingrad, as a journalist with the army newspaper Red Star. Grossman was somewhat unique as an army reporter in that he toned down the Soviet rhetoric of the Great-Patriotic-War-Against-Fascism, but instead he emphasized the every day heroism and resolve of the average Soviet citizen who faced the Nazi death machine that invaded and occupied their country.

Grossman's simple, direct writing style provides vivid imagery like this paragraph from his description of the liberated death camp Treblinka...

The earth is throwing out crushed bones, teeth, clothes, papers. It does not want to keep secrets. And the objects are climbing out from the earth, from its unhealing wounds. Here they are, half ruined by decay, shirts of the murdered people, their trousers, shoes, cigarette cases which have grown green, little wheels from watches, penknives, shaving brushes, candleholders, a child's shoes with red pompoms, towels with Ukrainian embroidery, lace underwear, scissors, thimbles, corsets, bandages....And further on--it is as if someone's hand is pushing them up into the light, from the bottomless bulging earth--emerge the things that the Germans had tried to bury, Soviet passports, notebooks with Bulgarian writing in them, photographs of children from Warsaw and Vienna, letters scribbled by children, a book of poetry, a food ration card from Germany...A terrible smell of putrefaction hangs over everything, the smell that neither fire, nor sun, rains, snow and winds could dispel.

One complaint I do have about the format of the book is that it is sometimes hard to discern between Beevor's contextual observations regarding the overall historical events and Grossman's itinerary and the sudden diving into Grossman's notes. In my edition there was only a slight indentation for Grossman's quotes, which I sometimes missed. Also, some of his notes just seemed a bit out of place and unexplained when they appear in a sequential outpouring.

That aside, I found this an excellent introduction to the writing of Vasily Grossman, and in fact, a fairly decent chronological description of the invasion, occupation, and gradual liberation of the Soviet Union from 1941-45.

[Bettie]

Starts 00:30 Sunday 18th November: Elliot Levey reads Vasily Grossman's front line despatches from the battle of Stalingrad

#1. Through Chekhov's Eyes: In the war of the rats, snipers like Anatoly Chekhov reigned.

Powerfully written.
Extraordinary.

One of those that shall remain un-rated.

[Gauss74 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Con l'aggravante di non esserci finito solo col pensiero.
Se sorvoliamo col pensiero i tremila e più anni di storia occidentale, si fa fatica a trovare un mondo più simile a quello infernale del fronte orientale nella Seconda Guerra mondiale: milioni di vittime innocenti (soldati ma anche donne, bambini, anziani, malati) gettate nell' immenso calderone succubi del più assoluto arbitrio del caso.
E probabilmente non esiste modo di percepire quale sia stata la tragedia per intensità e dimensioni se non attraverso gli occhi di un poeta. E chi meglio di Vassili Grossman, Ebreo Ucraino e sensibile uomo di lettere, vittima designata della follia razzista di Adolf Hitler ma anche del razionale incubo staliniano, può raccontare meglio cosa è stata questa guerra? Questo è il valore di "Uno scrittore in guerra", il libro che raccoglie gli appunti, le impressioni, ma anche l'arte frutto della pena di un poeta al fronte, in qualità di inviato del giornale dell'armata rossa.
Va da sè che un documento che ha dovuto resistere a dieci lustri di censura sovietica per arrivare fino a noi non potrà mai essere preso alla lettera, ma dovrà essere studiato atraverso la consapevolezzza del tempo e dei vincoli del mondo sovietico dal quale è nato e del quale nonostante tutto l'autore era fiero di far parte. Da questo punto di vista è preziosissimo il contributo di Anthony Beevor (storico militare di fama mondiale e profondissimo conoscitore della Russia e del fronte orientale) e di Ljuba Vinogradova, che hanno selezionato, ordinato ed assemblato gli appunti di Grossman, intervallandoli con preziose introduzioni esplicative riguardo agli avvenimenti storici.
Ne emerge una immagine dell' Unione sovietica e dell'uomo sovietco diversa e non usuale per il lettore occidentale. Un uomo che sembra esere parzialmente consapevole delle sanguinose storture del regime ma le vive come necessarie per l'avvento del comunismo in nome del quale ogni violenza stalinista cesserà di esistere in quanto non più necessaria; sopportazione resa peraltro meno dolorosa dalla naturale affinità del popolo russo con la morte, dalla attitudine di questo incredibile popolo a costruirsi una vita nello sforzo e nella sofferenza. Secondo Grossman sarà questa la principale chiave di lettura della vittoria dell'URSS nella grande guerra patriottica.
Ma a fianco dell'uomo comunista rimane l'uomo russo. Grossman era ebreo ed ucraino, e quindi avrebbe dovuto sentirsi due volte lontano da quel mondo: è vero il contrario. Nessuno storico e nessun romanziere occidentale (da Emmanuel Carrere a Tiziano Terzani) ha mai voluto concedere all'Unione Sovietica quel ruolo di unificatore nazionale e culturale che invece dalle pagine di Grossman ed Erenburg emerge con violenza (e non stiamo certo parlando di scrittori di regime): le città sovietiche da Kiev a Leningrado, da Minsk a Mosca, sono bel lontane da essere quegli incubi grigi e squadrati che tutti abbiamo immente, ma centri di grande cultura che sfuggono comunque all'indottrinamento staliniano e nelle quali riescono a convivere decine di etnie diverse.
A quale Unione sovietica dobbiamo dunque credere? A quella delle deportazioni di massa dei tatari e dell' Holodomor, od a quella dei soldati della terza armata della guardia che, appartenenti a più di dodici etnie diverse, si dispongono fianco a fianco per fronteggiare e sopravvivere ad un nemico anche più terribile? Non esiste una risposta facile a questa dicotomia, ma davanti al racconto di Grossoman perlomeno occorre dubitare che forse l'idea che la letteratura occidentale ci lascia dell' Unione Sovietica sia troppo semplicistica, e il panslavismo sovietico abbia avuto negli anni anche un elemento unificatore (come testimoniano peraltro le terribili guerre divampate in Jugoslavia e nell'asia centrale alla caduta del blocco dell' Est).
Se "Uno scrittore in guerra" vuole essere prima di tutto un resoconto del fronte orientale nella seconda guerra mondiale vissuto in prima persona, tuttavia le pagine che colpicono di più sono quelle scritte dall'autore davanti all'atroce e spaventoso spettacolo del campo di sterminio di Treblinka. E qui la penna del poeta si affianca a quella dello scrittore, mentre l'ebreo si affianca al sovietico per scrivere un atto d'accusa di incredibile potenza, che a mio parere si dovrebbe far leggere in tutte le scuole.
Per chi già si interessa di quello che è stato e di quello che può insegnare il Fronte Orientale, "Uno scrittore in guerra" offre un punto di vista di alto livello dall'interno e da parte di una delle categorie più a rischio in quel conflitto. Per chi su quell'immenso calderone di sangue intende leggere un solo libro, sarebbe un gran bene che sia questo.

[Dorin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I must admit, I don’t spend much time researching the books I am buying/picking up. Most of the time, a trusted recommendation, the name of the author, a well-written review or a feeling about what the book is about is enough. In this case, I was under the impression that I would get Vasily Grossman’s texts published in Krasnaya Zvezda throughout the Second World War, which would have been good enough. Instead, I got his unpublished and uncensored notes from the war, with very detailed context by the editor, something even better. However, now I need his texts, in the form they were published, for comparison.

Grossman was not fit to fight, but he spent almost three years (out of four) on different fronts with the Red Army. He lived amongst the soldiers, and he gained their trust. His reporting became very popular both on the frontline and back home. Krasnaya Zvezda, the Red Army’s official newspaper, became more popular and read than other, more widespread newspapers. This was all thanks to Grossman and his style of reporting. He was not interested in official propaganda, in big battles and big victories; he was focused on the individual. He picks characters and follows them: soldiers, commanders, infantry, tanks corps, aviation, snipers, people under occupation and people freshly liberated, collaborators, women – auxiliary staff, nurses, campaign wives, rape victims, children. He had some time off in 1942 and he wrote a very well-received war novel. He was appreciated and published even though he was not following any directives. With time, however, his articles were modified and censored. He became very frustrated with this.

He was with the Red Army when it retreated from Ukraine – a very sad time for him. He knew that his mother didn’t get out and he would probably never see her again. He was at Stalingrad for most of the battle. He was with the counter-offensive: at Kursk, liberating Ukraine, in Poland – in Warsaw and Lodz, but also at Majdanek and Treblinka, and all the way to Berlin. Sometime during 1943 he was becoming aware of Soviet antisemitism, at the time when he was discovering the scale of the Nazi atrocities. He was also a Jew. The official Soviet propaganda did not recognize the Nazi antisemitism and Holocaust as a distinct crime, and every time Grossman reported on this, he was censored. He worked, together with other writers, on The Black Book (of Soviet Jewry). It was not allowed to be published in the Soviet Union.

One reason I became interested in Grossman is because I knew he was with the Red Army when it got to Treblinka. When he got there, there was nothing left of Treblinka but fields and roads covered in ashes, a few personal effects sticking out from them and a handful of survivors hidden in the forest. However, Grossman was able to write a beautiful, albeit sad, tragic and heart-piercing essay. (It was not published in Krasnaya Zvezda, but in Znamya, a few months later). Thankfully, this essay is quoted in full. It is an impressive long piece of reconstructive journalism, where Grossman pieces together everything he learns there, all the small details, all the survivors’ and witnesses’ testimonies, to tell the story of Treblinka and its factory of death, from the moment people arrived there to the last days of the camp. He gets almost everything right (apart from the number of victims, which was estimated better later, on different methodology).

‘It was a luxury to get a bullet’, said Kozensky, a doctor who escaped from the camp. People said to me that it was many times more terrible to live in Treblinka than to die there.

It is a miracle that Grossman’s notes survived. Some of them would have been reason enough for a death sentence in the era of Stalinism. On the counter-offensive, Grossman notices more and more than the Red Army is not what he had idealized. After crossing into Poland and then into Germany, he saw how Soviet soldiers became beasts, interested only in raping and looting. It was very sad for him, even though he remained loyal to the Army. He could not forget the sacrifice and the resilience at Stalingrad.

He used his notes in his later novels: For a Just Cause and Life and Fate. The first one was censored, published and then, a few years later, removed from the libraries. The second one, his masterpiece, where his family is the inspiration, where there is a tribute to his mother, where he puts on the same plate Nazism and Stalinism, was never published during his lifetime (it is a miracle a copy survived and found later).

[Paula Fialho Silva · Rating 5 out of 5]

"It is infinitely hard even to read this. The reader must believe me, it is as hard to write it. Someone might ask: 'Why write about this, why remember all that?' It is the writer's duty to tell this terrible truth, and it is the civilian duty of the reader to learn it. Everyone who would turn away, who would shut his eyes and walk past would insult the memory of the dead. Everyone who does not know the truth about this would never be able to understand with what sort of enemy, with what sort of monster, our Red Army started on its own mortal combat."

[Dario Andrade · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anthony Beevor, o historiador que escreveu a respeito da Stalingrado, editou essa compilação dos cadernos de anotações que o Grossman redigiu ao longo da Segunda Guerra. Como ele foi um dos correspondentes de guerra mais longevos no front oriental, têm-se desde os instantes iniciais da invasão nazista da União Soviética até a conquista de Berlim, quase 4 anos depois. Há, ainda, os tenebrosos momentos em que os soviéticos chegaram aos campos de concentração ou extermínio nazistas.
A parte principal é Stalingrado, cujo cerco se tornou símbolo da resistência soviética.
A seleção é bastante boa e os comentários feitos pelo Beevor praticamente transformam o livro em uma biografia do Grossman.
Difícil não respeitar o Grossman como jornalista. Um observador atento e, sobretudo, honesto, lutando o tempo todo contra a censura soviética. Como o próprio Beevor ressalta, ele só escapou do gulag depois da guerra porque Stalin morreu. Mesmo assim, terminou com seus livros proibidos, humilhado e expurgado do mercado editorial. Não viu a publicação de Vida e destino, a obra da sua vida.
Enfim, nas palavras do próprio Grossman, a “cruel verdade da guerra” em primeira mão.

[Mickey Mantle · Rating 5 out of 5]

A magnificent book.
Spellbinding.....a humanistic account of a brutal war...from Moscow through Stalingrad, Kursk, Treblinka, Warsaw and on to Berlin.
Interviews with the regular soldier on to Generals and all conducted at the front.
Absolutely fabulous.

[Gary · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am usually pretty generous with my star ratings, so it is difficult when I find a book like this and I want to give it ten stars but only have five to play with. This book is truthful, well written, happy, sad … desperately sad, and one chapter describes events so horrific that I wanted to cry – and resent Germans (I have German friends) for a short time until I realised it is ridiculous to resent modern Germans who have done a lot to acknowledge and regret what happened, and I must put it in perspective; it is an indication, however, of how it made me feel.

For those who follow my reviews, you will know that the last book I read was Panzer Battles, written by a German Major-General, which includes an extensive section about the Russian Front. As I said in its review, it is basically a description of strategy, tactics, and the big picture of that struggle from the point of view of one of the men directing it. This book, A Writer at War, is the complete opposite; a work of infinite humanity, kindness and an honest recording of what ordinary people like you and I (and soldiers) suffer in war at the local level.

A Writer at War is a book produced from the war diaries of Vasily Grossman, a Ukrainian Jew who worked for Kraznaya Zvezda, the Red Army’s newspaper, based in Moscow. As a war correspondent, Grossman followed the Red Army during the humiliating defeats of 1941 as Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, smashed its way through the USSR to the very outskirts of Moscow, retreating all the way and witnessing Blitzkrieg at its most effective and destructive. Grossman had been an overweight, unfit office-based journalist until his war work quickly transformed him into a lean, fit and brave frontoviki, as frontline soldiers were known. The whole time he was writing articles for Kraznaya Zvezda from his notes, although they were not always published for political reasons.

Grossman’s strength lay in his innate ability to concentrate on the individuals caught up in the war, so while his fellow journalists were writing pieces simply praising and lauding the abilities and bravery of the Red Army, Grossman wrote about, for example, waking up in a village with chickens running around, birds singing in the crop-laden fields and a beautiful blue sky above, only to have it all smashed and razed by squadrons of JU87 Stukas (with cardboard sirens attached to make them more scary) raining down bombs, so that after two hours the village was a burning, smoke-filled series of craters and ruined buildings, with dead people and animals lying around.

Grossman wrote about the peasant women in rags who gave almost all their remaining food to the soldiers trying to defend them, about the jokes made in the officers’ bunkers and amid the ranks of the soldiery, and about the suffering of individuals. The people adored his articles and him because of his humanity and his unerring devotion to documenting the suffering of ordinary folk, and the sacrifices of the Red Army trying to repel the invaders.

What he did not do so well was read the political nuances and toe the Party line. Journalists were supposed to attribute much of the credit for any victories achieved to the Communist Party as the saviour and leader of the USSR but Grossman was more interested in the ordinary soldiers and officers of the Red Army than in his political masters, and this did not endear him to their hearts. We must not forget that Stalin’s Soviet Union was no better than Hitler’s Germany; it was just different. A similarity was that nothing would be tolerated that criticised the (Communist) Party or even hinted at independent thought. It is difficult for people under the age of about 45 to comprehend how the USSR worked, unless they read a lot about it, because it seems unbelievable unless you know. (If you want to know more, read John Le Carré novels.) No sacrifice, no cruelty, no injustice, was too great not to be used by the regime not only to stay in power but to maintain total control over everyone’s minds as well as deeds. (Read Animal Farm and 1984.) Sometimes, Grossman’s articles were considered inappropriate by the authorities – everything was vetted by the Communist Party before being approved, or not, for publication. His editor in Moscow and some of his colleagues were also Jewish, and did try to steer him in the ‘right’ direction but he almost got into trouble a few times. Only his huge popularity with the people and his stirring articles kept him from being ‘purged’.

Grossman had to take some leave to recover and recuperate after Moscow was saved by the stubbornness of the Soviet soldiers and the winter weather, and he used this time to write a novel as well as further longer articles.

Grossman was then present during much of the Battle of Stalingrad, spending a great deal of time almost on the front line in the bunkers of the generals and colonels running the battle on the Soviet side. He became friendly with them and they would tell him everything. He also became enamoured with snipers, who he saw as the heroes of the Battle. Later, he switched his hero-worship to ‘tankists’, the tank crews who he saw as valiant and heroic, and who often made the difference in battle against the highly-skilled Wehrmacht panzer divisions, who came to fear the T-34 tank employed more and more as the war progressed. [This was simple, quick and cheap to produce and had a powerful 76.2 mm gun that could knock out most German tanks. It was later upgraded to carry an 85 mm gun that was even better. The German tanks were far superior at the outbreak of war but, until the Tiger (Panzer VI – 88 mm gun), Panther (Panzer V – 76 mm gun) and Tiger II (aka King Tiger – high-velocity 88 mm gun) came on the scene, the T-34 scared them no end.]

The victory at Stalingrad (and the capture/destruction of the entire German Sixth Army – 147,200 killed and 91,000 captured) by the Red Army is said to have been the main turning point of the War but the Nazis were far from beaten. Grossman followed one Soviet army or another as they battled their way across Crimea, Ukraine and Belarus, and on into Poland. He describes battles, strategy and tactics, but also the petty arguments between squabbling generals, jealous of others’ successes; the gathering of food and new boots; men using official papers to make cigarettes because they could not get cigarette papers; and the traffic jams of troops and civilians moving over roads of mud or dust.

One of the main subjects of contention with the Soviet authorities was Grossman’s natural desire, both as a Jew and as an honest journalist, to document the Nazi atrocities against Jewish people. The Stalinist line was that everyone who died was a Soviet citizen – journalists were not allowed to point out that most of them singled out for execution were Jewish; this betrays the regime’s own anti-Semitic views. Interestingly, the authors state that the Stalinist anti-Semitism was different from that of the Nazis: the Nazis had a racial prejudice, whereas the Soviets were afraid of challenges from ‘international Jewry’ – they felt that the fact that Jewish people stick together across boundaries was anti-Soviet and anti-Communist. The tragic result, of course, was the same – persecution and death, albeit in different ways and on a different scale.

Hundreds of thousands of Jews were shot, starved to death or gassed from early in the invasion and long before the extermination camps were scaled up to accommodate thousands of people a day. Once the army he was with reached Poland, Grossman visited Treblinka, the main extermination camp in the east of the country, just northeast of Warsaw. An entire chapter in the book reproduces Grossman’s writing about this, including many interviews with survivors, locals and soldiers who liberated the camp. This chapter is extremely harrowing and haunting, describing the absolute cruelty and horror of what happened there to ordinary men and women who had committed no crime. From general histories one gets a feel for what it was like but it is quite difficult to imagine being there. Grossman projects his sensitivity and humanity to imagine and describe how the people must have felt when first confused by what was happening (the Nazi guards were very clever at tricking them into thinking they were at a labour camp until they were unloaded from the train and then corralled, surrounded by barbed wire fences, high walls, vicious armed guards and German Shepherd dogs), and then terrified as the realisation hit them that they were about to die a horrible death. Treblinka was not like Auschwitz. The latter was a huge set of camps with barracks for the inmates and various compounds. Treblinka had no barracks except those for the guards. When people arrived at Treblinka, they were murdered almost immediately and then buried. When Himmler visited the camp in June 1944 (just after D-Day), he knew that the writing was on the wall for the Nazi regime so he ordered all the thousands of buried corpses and all the new victims to be burned so as to hide the evidence. The guards and their accomplices had to exhume the bodies and take specialist advice from a man sent from Germany because the bodies would not burn. With typical efficiency, they solved ‘the problem’.

It is quite unbelievable the depths to which human cruelty can sink, and people who deny the Holocaust should be made to read this chapter (if they can read), among other works. Grossman’s words were so powerful and, having been written during a visit to Treblinka, they were used as testimony at the Nuremburg Trials of Nazi war criminals after the war.

Being an honest man, Grossman was appalled that his beloved Red Army changed once it left Soviet soil. Its soldiers (including many officers) behaved as the German soldiers had behaved on their soil. They pillaged, looted and committed multiple rapes of women and girls, both in Poland and Germany. He wrote about this but he mostly blamed it on the supply troops following in the footsteps of his beloved frontoviki, but the reality was that the frontline troops were just as guilty. Not only Polish and German women were raped – Ukrainian and Russian girls forcibly taken to Germany as slave labour also fell victim to the lust of the Red Army, whose ‘blood was up’.

From Poland, Grossman continued to travel with the Red Army until they reached the Oder, the last major river before Berlin, at which point the armies were over-extended, exhausted and in need of rest, recuperation and maintenance & supplies. Grossman returned to Moscow for a rest himself, returning in April ready for the final attack on Berlin and the end of the Nazi regime. He describes the battle for Berlin and what it was like in the aftermath.

This book is a clever combination of the authors’ descriptions of the progress of the war in the USSR and explanations of what Grossman was doing, interspersed with passages written by Grossman directly from his lived experiences. As such, it is a fascinating and enjoyable historical record, even though extremely harrowing and sickening at times, and one that is very important in the body of works about the Second World War.

The authors/translators, veteran military historian Antony Beevor and Lyuba Vinogradova, have created a highly readable narrative from Grossman’s scribbled notebooks and finished articles, and turned them into a comprehensive history of the Red Army, at the level that the individual experienced it, and of the Great Patriotic War, as the Russians call their (considerable) contribution to World War Two. I cannot praise it highly enough.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of dairy entries and notes from Russian author Vasily Grossman while he was a war-correspondant for the Red Army during WWII, most notably the battle of Stalingrad. He is best known for his novels Life and Fate and Forever Flowing, but this is a great primary source to see how his own experiences during the war influenced his novels, short stories, and his philosophy regarding the Soviet Union and the Holocaust. A fascniating writer and historical figure, as he is commonly considered the precursor to the Soviet dissident movement that began in the 1950's.

[Calzean · Rating 4 out of 5]

Grossman's notes and his short articles are well combined with Antony Beevor's narrative of Russia in WWII and Grossman's experiences. Grossman's attention to the details and the human voices of the soldiers he meets reminded me of Svetlana Alexievich as both authors look for the Russian spirit in times of drama. It's a rare USSR (and Jewish) author who was able to criticise Stalin, honour the average man and report accurately. Well worth reading for an understanding of what Russia went through in WWII.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Powerful book

A powerful book about WWII mainly on the Eastern Front and the battle of Stalingrad. It does go on with Grossman 's travel with the Soviet forces to Berlin. The details are not as numerous as the information before, during and after Stalingrad. Grossman does write some very powerful prose about Triblinka that is heart-wrenching. For those interested in the Eastern theatre of WWII, I highly recommend.

[Sarah Beaudoin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is hands-down one of the best nonfiction books I've read. Grossman was a journalist assigned in Stalin's army during World War II, and he spent almost the entire war at the front. This includes being present for nearly the entire battle for Stalingrad, being one of the first people at Treblinka after its liberation, and arriving in Berlin shortly before the German authorities surrendered. Grossman chronicles his observations, with a particular focus on the individual experiences. The result is not just a shocking glimpse inside some of the most horrific battles of the war, but countless vignettes of the impact of war on the lives of those experiencing it.

[Morgiana · Rating 5 out of 5]

it was a really enjoyable read about how a sensible, non-political journalist got by about Stalingrad, the great tank battle of Kursk, and the Siege of Berlin.
I really liked he made interviews with the simple soldiers as with the hig ranked officials and while the nightmares of war has raged with full force, he could remain human -
which is the hardest thing to do.
If you want to read a detailled but human writing about war, soldiers this book is highly recommended.