A Writer At War: Vasily Grossman With The Red Army 1941-1945

Product Description

Vasily Grossman's masterpiece Life & Fate is rated by many as the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century. Among its admirers is Antony Beevor, the bestselling author of Stalingrad & Berlin.
A Writer at War is based on the notebooks in which Grossman gathered his raw material. It depicts as never before the crushing conditions on the Eastern Front & the lives & deaths of infantrymen, tank drivers, pilots, snipers & civilians alike.

Deemed unfit for service when the Germans invaded in 1941, Grossman became a special correspondent for Red Star, the Red Army newspaper. A portly novelist in his mid-thirties with no military experience, he was given a uniform & hastily taught to use a pistol. Remarkably, he spent three of the following four years at the front observing with a writer's eye the most pitiless fighting ever known.

Grossman witnessed almost all the major events on the Eastern Front: the appalling defeats & desperate retreats of 1941, the defence of Moscow & fighting in the Ukraine. In August 1942 he was posted to Stalingrad where he remained during four months of brutal street-fighting. He was present at the battle of Kursk, the largest tank engagement in history, &, as the Red Army advanced, he reached Berdichev where his worst fears for his mother & other relations were confirmed. A Jew himself, he undertook the faithful recording of Holocaust atrocities as their extent dawned. His supremely powerful report ' The Hell of Treblinka' was used in evidence at the Nuremberg tribunal.