He is Hemingway without the modernism (and exalted masculinity).”
He has none of the bravura of Bulgakov, Olesha or Platonov, not much of the refinement of Pasternak or Solzhenitsyn. His prose is plain, rugged, nearly old-fashioned. Why do we so admire him? If you haven’t read him, you may be surprised that he does not feel ‘new’. “The appearance of Stalingrad, Grossman’s prequel to Life and Fate written a decade earlier, is then a cause for excitement. Its vividness and power were so extraordinary that I felt my understanding both of that century, and of human love and fragility, shift on their foundations. “I read Life and Fate on a trip to Moscow during the post-Soviet badland years, at the very end of the last century. And then, within months of the Soviet victory at Stalingrad, he was writing some of the first articles and stories published in any language about the Shoah.” He spent longer than any other Soviet journalist in the thick of the fighting on the right bank of the Volga, in the ruins being fought over building by building and even room by room.
According to Robert Chandler, “Vasily Grossman was a man of unusual courage, both physically and morally. Evans tells that story, too, in London’s The Telegraph.Ĭhandler and his wife and co-translator for Stalingrad, Elizabeth Chandler, are already getting the reviews most writers dream of. But there was another big difference: the Soviet Union didn’t want Grossman’s stories told, and did its best to suppress and destroy the manuscript. Both books have been considered a twentieth century update of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. But there’s a significant difference: while Count Tolstoy tended to focus on the stories of aristocrats, Grossman, a Ukrainian Jewish journalist and soldier who had written about the opening of Treblinka (he was there), “accords a proper humanity to his subsidiary cast of steelworkers, factory chemists and Red Army soldiers, who battle against the odds from their ice-bound dugouts and foxholes,” according to Ian Thomson, writing in the London’s Weekly Standard. It’s the first-ever translation of the “prequel” to Life and Fate (we’ve written about that book here and here and here). In Germany, 1945.Ī few days ago, Vasily Grossman‘s 1952 Stalingrad arrived at my Stanford mailbox – a surprise for me, and an absolute miracle for Russian literature.
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