The Volga Rises in Europe

by Curzio Malaparte

Although Italy was allied with Germany in World War II, the Italian viewpoint on the war often differed sharply from that of the Germans. Malaparte was an eyewitness to the campaigns in Finland, the Ukraine, and Leningrad, and has left behind a moving account of many small incidents in the day-to-day conduct of the war

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Italy, World War II, Journalism, Literature, Russia

282 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1943

About the author

Born Kurt Erich Suckert, he was an Italian journalist, dramatist, short-story writer, novelist and diplomat.

Born in Prato, Tuscany, he was a son of a German father and his Lombard wife, the former Evelina Perelli. He studied in Rome and then, in 1918, he started his career as a journalist. He fought in the First World War, and later, in 1922, he took part in the March on Rome.

He later saw he was wrong in supporting fascism. That is proved by reading Technique du coup d`etat (1931), where Malaparte attacked both Adolf Hitler and Mussolini. This book was the origin of his downfall inside the National Fascist Party. He was sent to internal exile from 1933 to 1938 on the island of Lipari.

He was freed on the personal intervention of Mussolini's son-in-law and heir apparent Galeazzo Ciano. Mussolini's regime arrested Malaparte again in 1938, 1939, 1941, and 1943 and imprisoned him in Rome's infamous jail Regina Coeli. His remarkable knowledge of Europe and its leaders is based upon his own experiences as a correspondent and in the Italian diplomatic service.

In 1941 he was sent to cover the Eastern Front as a correspondent for Corriere della Sera. He wrote articles about the front in Ukrania, but the fascist dictatorship of Mussollini censored it. But later, in 1943, they were collected and brought out under the title Il Volga nasce in Europa (The Volga Rises in Europe). Also, this experience provided the basis for his two most famous books, Kaputt (1944) and The Skin (1949).

Reviews

[Steven Godin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Malaparte was a smoker (this being WWII, who wasn't) and died from lung cancer in 1957. There is little doubt that cigarettes contributed to his death, but I'd throw something else into the equation as well: Dust. The amount of dust sucked into his lungs during not only this war but also WWI, was so bad I'd be amazed if this didn't affect his long-term heath too. The thing is though, after long spells of being battered by the mud and the rain and the cold whilst on the Eastern front, on a dry and pleasant day the inhaling of thick dust that inflamed the lungs was most welcome and seen as a blessing. "It was heaven", he describes. And it's moments like this, from those who were actually there, right at the heart of all that death and carnage, that separates the truly important WWII writers from all the rest. Malaparte's front-line despatches are simply astonishing, his keen eye for detail impeccable, his sentences regarding the various landscapes he would come across breathtaking and poetic, as he sets out to give his impressions on the German advances into the Ukraine in 1941, and then, in the second half of the book, the siege of Leningrad in 1942. In between these two despatches, Malaparte spent four months under house-arrest in Italy; a result of his 'inopportune character' in the eyes of the Germans. He admits as to not having much interest in military actions during the war, and whilst he does touch upon the actual battles taking place right before his eyes, with bullets flying left, right and centre, his greater interest lies with the sociological significance of war, the behaviour of the Soviet peoples under the impact of invasion. Malaparte puts right his own harmful misconceptions about the Soviet Union, by showing it was a highly industrialized and all together efficient society, and he also writes of the Finnish assault on the Soviet Union, and how, when it comes to 'forest warfare', the Finns really were top dogs. This part of the book was really fascinating actually, and it makes me want to read an entire book focusing on the Finns during WWII.

The Volga Rises in Europe also features some quite surreal scenes that Malaparte just happened to witness - a recently deceased soldier with his head almost in his lap who was right in the middle of feasting on a cheese Sandwich. A group of unescorted prisoners who came across a wooden dressmakers dummy after digging through rubble, staring at it with a mixture of fear and curiosity not knowing what it was or what purpose it served. Three corpses frozen in a block of ice being loaded onto a sledge whilst a group of girls start laughing (everyone else joins in) at the gesticulating gunner pursuing his runaway horse. A soldier who miraculously survived a bullet passing through his skull is sat up drinking and talking and then offered a cigarette, leading to Malaparte half afraid as to whether or not the smoke would exit through the hole in his forehead. And a ghostly scene as Malaparte wanders around the abandoned house of Russian realist painter Ilya Repin. These moments clearly had an influence when writing his later grotesquely brilliant novels Kaputt and The Skin. His descriptions are often lyrical and sometimes so powerfully moving, including when Malaparte and one of his companions hand out a packet of caramels to a group of young children; their little faces suddenly beaming with joy, whilst some of his writing on the icy landscapes towards the end were absolutely stunning. Just like The Skin & Kaputt his writing here pretty much blew me away.

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

The only relatively independent war correspondent on the Eastern Front of WWII, Malaparte's eloquent and poetic prose (he was a novelist after all) shines through even in events which one suspects were somewhat embellished that tend to occur when no one else is around. It hardly matters, he gets the fundamental essence of the greatest man made disaster of all time and pulls no punches despite being at least somewhat in the employ of the Italian government before its fall. War writing effectively at its most bizarre and lyrical.

[Gust P · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5*

[Mateo Toledo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Buen periodismo de guerra, poético.

[WillemC · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75/5.
Wat "Kaputt" en "De Huid" zo goed maakt, zijn de groteske oorlogsbeelden, en "De Wolga...", een verzameling reportages die tijdens de oorlog voor een magazine zijn geschreven, bevat er wat te weinig.

[Fransien Vandeweghe · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5 *

[Milan Trpkovic · Rating 5 out of 5]

Uskoro i u srpskom izdanju.

[Ryan Wulfsohn]

Way, way overrated....could be the translation too I suppose. Some of it is good, but a lot just waffle

[Jasper Donkers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read my full review here.

Born Kurt Erich Suckert, in Prato, Tuscany, to a German father and an Italian mother, and taking Malaparte as his pen name to make a tongue-in-cheek play on Bonaparte, Malaparte is the epitome of the interbellum man of culture with shifting allegiances. In his thoughtful review of the novel The Skin Andrew Stuttaford offers the most elegant and succint description of Malaparte’s political wandering I found so far:

Malaparte was a fascist, and then he was not. He flirted with Communism, and then he did not. A protestant by baptism, an atheist by choice, he converted to Catholicism on his deathbed, but in his will left the house he had built on Capri, the most beautiful in the world some said—his “Casa Come Me”—to the Chinese Communist Party.

Malaparte’s political slipperiness can make him an untrustworthy narrator to some critics. To me, the impossibility of placing Malaparte in a specific tradition - literary or political - is what makes him more trustworthy, not less. We should not make the mistake of equating ideological consistency with strength of character and trustworthiness. Maintaining ideological consistency through the turbulence of modernity, through WWI, the great upheavals of the Italian interbellum and WWII, shows rigidity, not the openness and intelligence one may expect of a politically engaged writer.

There is however something very peculiar about Malaparte’s style of writing. In his preface to The Volga Rises in Europe - his collection of dispatches about the Eastern Front and the Leningrad Siege by the Finnish troops - Malaparte prides himself that he is hailed by notable contemporaries of his as the most ‘objective’ reporter of the war. If his writing is ‘objective’, it is not because its prose is sparse, succinct and factual as we may expect of journalistic writing. It is ‘objective’ rather, because it is ‘hypersubjective’, because it manages to captures the intensity of the war experience by means of the hyperbole, by describing the border-experience that could have only taken place then and there in excruciating detail. It is his great talent for finding the representative and symbolic example and describing it in lyrical detail that makes Malaparte one of the greatest political authors I’ve read. The writing of Malaparte is politically colored, and prone to exaggeration, straddling the line between fact and fiction, but it is so openly and by design. The reader is made part of Malaparte’s political musing and meandering, and is invited to see him test his political assumptions through his writing. It’s gonzo journalism meets political science.

Malaparte’s hypothesis for The Volga Rises in Europe is laid out in the preface, when he describes the theme that he meant to capture in the work’s originally intended title War and the Strike Weapon, that was censored by the fascist authorities:

I chose it because I felt that the title War and the Strike Weapon brought out in full relief the social character of this war and the fundamental importance of the ‘proletarian ethic’ as a factor in the Soviet military power, to which all those social elements of the social character of this war and the fundamental importance of the ‘proletarian ethic’ as a factor in the Soviet military power, to which all those social elements of the class struggle and of the technique of the proletarian revolution embraced by the word ‘strike’ made, and would continue to make, as significant a contribution as the weapons of war and the various aspects of the military art, such as discipline, technical training, tactical organization, etc.

There is something deductive about Malaparte’s approach here: there is a ‘proletarian ethic’ writ large that has taken form during the modern period on the European continent and it’s spreading, it has a significant impact on the nature of modern warfare, and he means to find it. He is looking for the real and lived examples of what he thinks of as the great cultural achievement of the U.S.S.R., of what he calls ‘the other Parthenon of Europe’:

Behind the Doric columns of the Pyatlyetki, the Five Year Plans, behind the rows of figures of the Gosplan, there stretches not Asia, but another Europe: the other Europe (in the sense in which America too is another Europe). The steel cupola of Marxism + Leninism + Stalinism (the gigantic dynamo of the U.S.S.R according to Lenin’s formula: Soviet + electrification = Bolshevism) is not the mausoleum of Genghis Khan but - in the very sense that bourgeois folk find so distasteful - The other Parthenon of Europe. ‘The Volga,' says Pilnyak, 'flows into the Caspian Sea.' Yes, but it does not rise in Asia: it rises in Europe. It is a European river. The Thames, the Seine, the Potomac are its tributaries.

The Volga is the ‘proletarian ethic’, and its rising. One can imagine a stream of communist ideology flowing like a river over the map of Europe. The title is just subtle enough to dodge the fascists censors.

The first part of the book takes place in the summer of 1941. During this time Malaparte was a front-line correspondent and followed the Germans as they made their way to the Soviet Union through the Ukraine front. There is no real narrative to speak of here, other than fragmentary meetings with German soldiers, an almost description of the German advance, and more theoretical musings about the ‘proletarian’ and ‘industrial ethic’ that prevails in modern warfare.

The scenes of Ukraine are of a ‘countryside in agony, a torpid, impermanent, decaying countryside’. An insecure landscape, that is sitting in waiting for the storm that is the German army. It is this contrast: between the silence of Europe’s granary and the noise, violence and ruthless efficiency of the German Pantzerwagens and motorized divisions thundering over its roads, that makes up the central guiding image/metaphor of this part of the book. Malaparte’s exploration of the impact of modern technology, coupled with a artisinal ‘proletarian ethic’ is here at its most explicit:

I watch them working; I note the way they use their hands, the way they hold things, the way they bend their heads over their implements. They are the same soldiers as I have seen 'working' in the streets of the Banato, outside Belgrade. They have the same impersonal, alert expressions, the same calm, deliberate, precise gestures, the same air of unsmiling equanimity. They reveal the same indifference to everything that is unconnected with their work. It occurs to me that perhaps the peculiarly technical character of this war is leaving its mark on the combatants. Rather than soldiers intent on fighting they look like artisans at work, like mechanics busying themselves about a complex, delicate machine. […] Their very gait, their very manner of speech, their very gestures are those of workmen, not of soldiers. The wounded have that tight-lipped, slightly angry air of workmen injured in an industrial accident. Their discipline has about it the same flexibility and informality as the discipline maintained by a gang of workmen. Their esprit de corps is an esprit d'équipe, a team spirit, and at the same time it as an esprit de métier. They are bound to their unit by the same bonds of loyalty and affection as unite a team of factory-hands to their machine, a team of electricians to their dynamo, a team of artisans to their lathe, to their boiler, to their rolling-mill. In the mechanized armies of today the officers are the technicians, the N.C.O.s are the foremen, the gangers.

His desciptions of the German war machine leave no doubt - what we’re dealing with is the upending and mobilization of the whole of the German industrial complex in service of the war effort:

Below me, on both sides of the hill, down in the valley and again on the opposite slope, I could see, slowly advancing, not an army, but an immense traveling workshop, an enormous mobile foundry that stretched as far as the eye could reach in either direction. It was as if the thousands of chimneys, cranes, iron bridges and steel towers, the millions of cog-wheels, the hundreds and hundreds of blast-furnaces and rolling-mills of the whole of Westphalia, of the entire Ruhr, were advancing in a body over the vast expanse of corn-fields that is Bessarabia. It was as if an enormous Krupps Steelworks, a gigantic Essen, were preparing to launch an attack on the hills of Zaicani, of Shofroncani, of Bratosheni. Yes, that was it: I was looking not at an army but at a colossal steel-works, in which a multitude of workmen were setting about their various tasks with a streamlined efficiency which at first sight concealed the immensity of their effort. And what amazed me most of all was to see this gigantic mobile steelworks leaving behind it no trail of smoking ruins, no heaps of rubble, no blackened fields, but only peaceful villages and unscathed expanses of corn.

By September 1941 Malapare was expelled by the facsist government at the Germans’ request and spent four months under house arrest in Italy. In March 1942 he was allowed to be dispatched again and tagged along with Finnish troops during the siege of Leningrad, where he stayed for almost a year. His experiences in the snow and silence on the Finnish front, with the great industrial city of Leningrad looming on the horizon make up the second part of the book.

Whereas in the first part I found myself skimming over some of the more expository passages, in the second part Malaparte’s writing finds the tone and brilliance I have come to expect from his work and takes on the style I became familiar with in my reading of The Skin, and Kaputt. Some of the more imaginative experiences described by Malaparte here almost seem as if they are finger excercises for his later works. One of the most striking images from Kaputt involves a large group of horses frozen in the Ladoga Lake near Leningrad. In The Volga, it's not horses, but Russian soldiers who are frozen in the ice:

Imprinted in the ice, stamped on the transparent crystal beneath the soles of my shoes, I saw a row of exquisitely beautiful human faces: a row of diaphanous masks, like Byzantine icons. They were looking at me, gazing at me. Their lips were thin and shrivelled, their hair was long, they had sharp noses and large, very brilliant eyes. (They were not human bodies, they were not corpses. If they had been I should have refrained from mentioning the incident.) That which was revealed to me in the sheet of ice was a row of marvellous images, full of a tender, moving pathos: as it were the delicate, living shadows of men who had been swallowed up in the mysterious waters of the lake.

In the passages that follow the image of the Russian soldiers frozen in ice, Malaparte gives what may be his best decription of the esthetic element he has sought to master throughout his work:

War and death sometimes partake of these exquisite mysteries, which are imbued with a sublimely lyrical quality. At certain times Mars is at pains to transform his most realistic images into things of beauty, as if there came a moment when even he was overwhelmed by the compassion which man owes to his like, which nature owes to man.

In his descriptions of the frostbound army on Finnish front the discipline of journalism strike a balance with an intense and lyrical aestheticiation of the excesses of war. The fragmentary descriptions of the silent, brooding Karelinian forests, and the proud and equally brooding and silent Finnish soldiers in their isolated outposts are captivating. In the Finnish forests and hilltops the rules of nature still reign supreme over the machine. The forest is portrayed as a living and breathing predator, in which only the young and most hardened Finnish soldiers, who were born in this organism, can move about with confidence. The scenes of them skiing through the forests, applying tactics of guerilla warfare, unconcerned about the hardships they face, adds to the idea that anything can happen when the Sovjets cross the line into Finnish held territory. One cannot but feel sorry for the groups of the godless, young Sovjet troops, who die all too greedily and almost indifferently, to protect their homeland.

[Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not the same book as Kaput, his other account of the Russian Front. Both works are based on his reporting on the eastern front (and elsewhere on the Axis side) for the Italian newspaper Correire Della Sera.

Whereas Kaput ranges in location from the former Yugoslavia to the eastern front and to Finland, The Volga Rises occurs exclusively on the Eastern Front (from Romania through Moldova and the Ukraine) in its first section, and Finland during the second section. Kaput contains fanciful and possibly fictive incidents; The Volga Rises is more straightforward reporting from the southern wing of Operation Barbarossa between Romania and Kiev, then the winter war in Finland.

He writes about the villages taken by the Axis troops, the bewilderment of the peasantry, the scale of the destruction. He remains largely reserved in his judgement of the Axis troops, yet his reporting moved Goebbels to withdraw him from the Ukraine, after which he was placed under a four-month house arrest and transferred to the Finnish side of the siege of Leningrad.

He is admiring of the Finnish soldiery, and their adherence to what he calls their Lutheran first principles. But what a shape-shifter he was. Here he is pitying the Soviet troops as feeble and underdeveloped products of Stakhanovism, the official Soviet worker ethic, yet he joined the PCI after the war and befriended Togliatti.

Readers of his other books will find the style equally captivating and seductive in its evocations. The second part is marred by the static nature of the reporting. He's more readable when he's in transit, whether with the Axis in the Soviet Union, with the Americans in Naples, or among the high societies of Paris or Moscow. But in Finland he's stuck in the trenches.

[RJ Stewart]

THE VOLGA RISES IN EUROPE by Curzio Malaparte This is an important book for anyone caring to understand in more detail the Soviet psyche during WWII. Curzio Malaparte, a pseudonym for Curt Erich Suckert, was born in Prato, Italy. He was likely the most powerful and brilliant of the Italian writers of the fascist and post-WWII periods. Divided into two books, The Volga Rises in Europe first focuses on the Eastern Front in the Ukraine, while the second chronicles the siege of Leningrad. Malaparte's reporting as an embedded correspondent is unique, but it is his eye for detail, his notable knowledge of art and history, and an outstanding writing skill that make his dispatches especially revealing and lasting. It's not my normal practice to grab a quote for a review, but I find the following passage especially insightful. Speaking of the great Russian artist Ilya Repin, who every day of his adult life slept outdoors, Malaparte, says, "He had a horror of confinement, a hysterical fear of being shut in. This, incidentally, is a typically Russian phobia. The people of Russia are like a bird that has swallowed its cage. Their characteristic craving to escape, their horror of confinement, is merely the inverse of their love for the prison: It is a craving to spew up the prison that is within them, not to escape from it." The reader will find other, similarly poignant passages, making this book unparalleled in the collective WWII oeuvre.

[Robert Brouwer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eindelijk had ik weer eens een boek dat ik overal mee naar toe wilde nemen, zodat ik heb kunnen lezen bij bushaltes, in stadsbussen, op bankjes in het park en bankjes op andere plaatsen in de stad. Maar nu is het uit en moet ik mijn eigen leven weer vorm gaan geven. Liever zoek ik naar een boek dat mij opnieuw zo kan begeesteren als onderhavig boek.
Ik had van Malaparte al "Kaputt", "De huid", "Techniek van de staatsgreep" en "Bloed" gelezen. De onlangs in 2022 verschenen vertaling (de eerste in het Nederlands) van dit oorspronkelijk in 1951 uitgebrachte boek kwam voor mij als een welkome verrassing.
Malaparte schreef de verhalen als oorlogsverslaggever tussen 1941 en 1943 voor de Italiaanse krant Corriere della Sera, waarschijnlijk meteen al met de bedoeling ze later te bundelen (zo las ik in het nawoord van vertaler Jan van der Haar).
Het boek bestaat uit twee delen: "Waarom Rusland", over de strijd in de Oekraïne en "Het arbeidersfort" over het beleg van Leningrad.
Het boek vertoont overeenkomsten met "Kaputt", logisch, want het verhaalt over dezelfde periode.
Ik was van begin tot eind geboeid door dit boek. Het is een ooggetuigeverslag van de oorlog met prachtige metaforen en interessante observaties en overdenkingen. Nu moet ik daar natuurlijk voorbeelden van gaan geven, maar daar ben ik te lui voor.
Ik hoop dat ik nog mag meemaken dat er een Nederlandse biografie komt van Kurt Erich Suckert, zoals Curzio Malaparte eigenlijk heette.

[JW · Rating 3 out of 5]

In his introduction, Malaparte describes the Russo-German War as a clash of bourgeois and proletarian ideals. However, in the book’s first part, where the author follows German and Romanian forces advancing through Ukraine, he describes the Russian and German soldiers as products of the same industrial culture. The technique and technology of warfare has been shaped by modern mass production, which in turn shaped the fighting men.
The book’s second half concerns the siege of Leningrad. Malaparte was embedded within a Finnish unit. Although he writes of Leningrad as the industrial and ideological heart of Bolshevism, his real subject is how the natural environment determined the bounds of this winter war. The forests of the Karelian Isthmus seem more threatening than the opposing armies. The ice of Lake Ladoga seems to have a life of its own. The sounds of firearms and cannons intrude upon, but cannot shatter, the winter’s repose. Finnish ski troops glide silently across the snow while the Russians are seen from a distance. Except for the occasional corpse, found frozen in ice or dangling from icy branches. And all, it seems, to no purpose.

[Deniz Kabaağaç · Rating 3 out of 5]

Malaparte'nin kitaplarında, bu okuduğum üçüncüsü, hep aynı fotoğrafın farklı parçalarını görüyorum, Avrupa'nın farklı yüzlerini. Okuduğum diğer iki kitabı gibi bu da ikinci dünya savaşında cephede yazılan yazılardan oluşmuş. Bu sefer Rus cephesinde Alman ve Fin ordularının yanından Sovyet tarafına bakıyor. Kaputt için yazdığım yorumda Avrupa'yı anlamak için okunması gereken bir kitap olduğunu yazmıştım. Bu sefer benim söylememe gerek yok Malaparte zaten Volga Avrupa'dan doğar diyerek Sovyetler Birliği'nin, bu gün Rusya'nın diyebilir miyiz bilmiyorum, Avrupa'nın bir parçası olduğunu söylüyor. Bundan dolayı da Kaputt için yaptığım yorumu tekrarlamakta zorun görmüyorum. Avrupa'yı anlamak için okunması gereken bir kitap. Ayrıca Malaparte'nin gerçeğin farklı yanlarını, acımasız ya da mutluluk kaynağı, yansıtmaktaki becerisi, savaşın korkunçluğu içinde savaşanların insanlar olduğunu ve insanın olduğu her yerde insanca bir şeyler olduğunu göstermekteki becerisi kitabı ilginç yapıyor.

[Rein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rauw ooggetuigeverslag van de strijd van de nazi’s tegen de Sovjet-Unie en de belegering van Leningrad. In het eerste boek gaat Malaparte mee met een gemotoriseerde colonne en later met de infanterie die vanuit het Roemeense Galati via het huidige Moldavië optrekt naar Kiev, vier maanden later is hij te vinden in de ijskoude loopgraven die de Finnen rond Leningrad hebben aangelegd. In beide delen spreekt een persoonlijke visie op de oorlog. Malaparte stelt in het eerste boek vast dat de Russen zich hebben ontwikkeld tot arbeiders met de daarbij horende arbeidersmoraal en dat hun leger het als een eindeloze mobiele metaalfabriek opneemt tegen de burgermoraal van de nazi’s. De Finnen die in het tweede boek Leningrad belegeren, hebben sociaal gezien weer een groter moreel bewustzijn dan de Russen, die zich gemakkelijk als kanonnenvlees laten gebruiken. Malaparte laat vooral zien dat oorlog alleen maar ellende met zich meebrengt, al is het alleen al voor de journalist die door de kou niet kan schrijven.

[Ferre Wyckmans · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Kille zonnemessen doorsnijden die dikke nevel, weerkaatsen op het staal van de tanks, op de ruggen van de witschuimende paarden. Ijzige windvlagen vormen scherpe aardklompen in het stof. Zand kruipt in de mond, de ogen branden, de oogleden bloeden. Het is juli en de kou is om te snijden." (p.40).
Meer moet er niet gezegd over de litteraire kwaliteiten van de oorlogsverslaggeving (1941-1942) van Malaparte. De politieke en sociale verschillen tussen de Duitsers en de Russen, waarbij die laatsten zelfs wat het niet achterlaten van de doden een paradoxale netheid betonen.
De switch tussen journalistieke verslaggeving en zelfs poëtische esthetiek gaat 277 bladzijden door. Kortom een ronduit prachtig boek, over oorlog a.u.b..

[Ruben Fuchs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Curzio Malaparte traveled as a war correspondent for Corriere delle Sera in 1941-1942, accompanying the Germans on the Eastern Front, first in the warm Ukraine, later in icy Finland. His style and descriptions range from raw-realistic to almost poetic. Malaparte endeavors to fathom the Russian soul and mentality, offering wise lessons for our time. RF

‘These Soviet soldiers, who die so easily, who accept death with an unconsciously eager, almost greedy indifference, lack any religious grammar, any supernatural syntax. […] They know that they will die like a stone, a piece of wood. A machine.’

[William Dove · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘The Volga Rises in Europe’ is the most remarkable rambling war time diary I have ever read.

Curzio Malaparte’s value system is very different to my own. He is racist and a fascist and likely many other unpleasant ‘ists’. These would be reasons for me to stay well clear of his books.

However, the way he writes is incredible and unique. He is funny, engaging, unusual, and wonderfully opinionated. His style is addictive. I have read ‘The Skin’ and I plan to read ‘Kapput’.

[Jacques Thielen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Malaparte is een ontdekking in deze bijzondere tijd. De schrijver overleed in 1957, maar de manier waarop hij verslag doet over de tweede wereldoorlog als 'embedded' journalist, is nog steeds actueel.
Naast een verhalende vertellijn van gruwelijkheden weet Malaparte op een literair mooie manier verslag te leggen van zijn ervaringen. De technieken zijn veranderd, de kern van oorlog niet.

[Peter Altena · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wat een schrijver, wat een nabijheid bij de oorlog. Malaparte verslaat de oorlog van Roemeens/Duits/Finse kant, maar zijn bewondering voor de daadkracht en de levensbeginselen van de Sovjet-Unie lijkt veel groter. Zijn verslagen zijn poëtisch, analytisch - en wars van gemakkelijke schema's.

[Samuel Massey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Muddy fields, missing bodies, and too much tomato paste for lunch

[redbird_fan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not a book about strategies, battle plans, etc. - This is a book about the people involved in the Eastern theater of WWII.

Beautifully written, it gives a completely different perspective than your normal history book.

I found it extremely fascinating and enjoyable. Not the same as Kaputt, and not as highly regarded by most, but I like it just as much if not more.

[Braekeveldt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Malaparte was an Italian reporter following the German progress in Russia from the frontlines from 1941 till 1943. A quite authentic witness from a cruel war.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Schilderen met woorden” en tijdloos zoals de vertaler schreef in het nawoord.

[Erik B.K.K. · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really don't like staccato writing. I couldn't concentrate at all, the words seemed to fly on the pages. I think I now know what it's like to have dyslexia.

[Jack · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really compelling articles, and it’s clear Malaparte thought/hoped the Axis would win.

[Ion Marandici · Rating 3 out of 5]

Malaparte describes the beginning of the German campaign on the Ukrainian front, including the crossing of the Prut and Nistru rivers by the German and Romanian troops. On Nistru, they face the Stalin fortification line. In the book, one finds several essays on the siege of Leningrad. A good read, even though, at times, it becomes repetitive. Plenty of details about the landscape.

Malaparte notes that the Russians collect all the dead bodies and the equipment from the battlefield. "It is, in short, clear that the war has come as no surprise to the Russians, at any rate from the military standpoint," says he. (29)

Romanians are described as peasants, while the Germans as mechanics (32).

A thought-provoking description of the reaction of the villagers from Zaicani (Bessarabia), when the German-Romanian soldiers march through the village: "Troops of boys rush forward to admire the German vehicles, the women lean over the palings and laugh, the old men sit in the doorways of the houses, their faces half-hidden by large woolen caps." (50)

"Captain Zeller confirms that on this front (Ukrainian, Bessarabia), the Soviet divisions are composed mainly of Asiatic elements. Only the specialist units are Russian." (51)

"I walk over to the bodies of the dead Soviet soldiers, I examine them one by one. They are Mongolians, nearly all of them." (near Bratosheni, Bessarabia, p. 59)

Somewhere close to Cornoleuca: "A cry passes down the column: "The Mongols! The Mongols!" by this time the German soldiers can distinguish the Mongolian units from the other Soviet units by the way they fight, even by their tactical dispositions. As a general rule tanks manned by Asiatic crews fight not in formation but singly, or in groups of two or three at the most" (77)

There is also one episode in the book, where Malaparte talks about the fears of the local peasants regarding the harvest and the price the Germans would pay for it.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly remarkable piece of history and of writing. Malaparte was an OBSERVER type of war correspondent rather than an interviewer/reporter. I identify with that because in my journalism days I was also more of an observer than a reporter. This book, which precedes the semi-fictional "Kaputt," has lots of similarities and could be read in conjunction with that novel. In any event, his analysis of the Soviet "soul," if one can use that term, is quite incisive.

The first half of the book, the campaign of summer 1941, takes him from Romania into the Ukraine. VERY interesting observations of Jews he encounters, especially as he had no idea what was going to happen to them in the months ahead. This portion of the book treats the war as a clash of machines . . . German industrial might vs. Soviet industrial might.

The second half, in early 1942 from the Finnish perspective of the siege of Leningrad, is more about men than machines. Both sections of the book are tremendously descriptive and colorful. Often sad, however . . . which is appropriate when dealing with war, no?

This book is hard to find. Thanks, Johnson County KS interlibrary loan and the University of Kansas library.

[Erik · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was very excited to read this book, as the Italian contributions to Operation Barbarossa / invasion of Russia are poorly documented. This book fills some of the gaps, but does so in mediocre fashion. The writing is tolerable initially, but becomes quite repetitive by book's end. The subtle political nature of the book (the author was exiled to Russia by Mussolini) is quite visible to me, so it does tend to paint the events depicted in a darker, grimmer tone.

While their role was small, the Italians in Russia did suffer heavily with most personnel becoming casualties. Their obsolete equipment and lack of supplies needed for the harsh environment left them vulnerable, and the Russians made them pay. The author focuses attention on this, and clearly was not whitewashing the tragedy as it unfolded.

This is not a terrific book, and really was not that enjoyable to read. This said, it does cast some light on a very poorly discussed topic while maintaining some semblance of integrity and honesty. I give this 2.5 stars, but round up as it is a unique reference book.

[Eldon.shirkley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent