A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941-1945 by Vasily Grossman, edited by Antony Beevor, translated by Luba Vinogradova (Harvill, 20).
Vasily Grossman's novel, Life and Fate, has been ranked as one of the greatest Russian novels of the 20th century. Grossman gathered the raw material for the novel while working as a journalist with the Red Army throughout the Second World War.
Grossman's observations of both the mundane and broader sweep of events have a vivid sense of immediacy. Among the vignettes which stand out are the "queue of blind men from invalid home in a long file tied together with towels" during the Russian retreat. When the German advance is halted by the bitter winter "that made nostrils freeze together" he tells of how "practical jokers put dead frozen Germans on their feet and on their hands and knees making intricate fanciful sculpture groups".
His account of Stalingrad is particularly poignant. Grossman tells how the dogs that lived among the ruins could discern between the sound of a German plane and a Soviet one. They started to bark long before the ground forces heard approaching German planes, but they were silent when Soviet planes flew over. The defence of the city was stiffened by terrible discipline, with more than 13,000 soldiers executed.
Grossman recalls one extraordinary event: "Sentence. Execution. They undressed him and buried him. At night he came back to his unit in his bloodstained underwear. They shot him again."
In one amusing account of red tape he tells of a pilot who, instead of bailing out of his burning plane, saves it and brings it back to base. When he tries to get his scorched trousers replaced he is refused by the quartermaster because the "minimum period hasn't elapsed before a replacement can be provided".
Following the army's march on Berlin, Grossman returns to his birthplace in the Ukraine to discover the Germans have murdered his Jewish mother, along with most of the other 30,000 Jewish inhabitants of the town. But his report is censored by the state, lest the Jews appear as the sole victims. One of the most moving chapters in the book covers his report "The Hell called Treblinka", gleaned from first-hand accounts of the few survivors. It was later used as evidence in the Nuremberg trials.
Antony Beevor has sensitively placed Grossman's material its historical context, providing a fitting tribute to a remarkable journalist.
Published: 14/03/2006
