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

Vasily Grossman’s masterpiece Life and Fate is rated by many critics as the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century. A Writer at War is based on the notebooks in which he gathered his raw material. It depicts as never before the crushing conditions on the Eastern Front and the lives and deaths of infantrymen, tank drivers, pilots, snipers and civilians alike (both male and female). 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 and hastily taught to shoot 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.

Red Army soldiers came to love this awkward intellectual for his physical courage and for the honesty of his reporting. He won huge fame for his novel  The People Immortal. Grossman witnessed almost all the major events on the Eastern Front: the appalling defeats and desperate retreats of 1941 when more than 3 million men were captured, the defence of Moscow and the fighting in his homeland of 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, and, as the Red Army advanced, he reached Berdichev where his worst fears about his mother and other relations were confirmed. A Jew himself, he undertook the faithful recording of Holocaust atrocities in The Ukraine, at Odessa and Majdanek as their extent dawned. His supremely powerful report ‘The Hell of Treblinka’ was later quoted at the Nuremberg tribunal.

A Writer at War offers the one outstanding eye-witness account of the war on the Eastern Front and perhaps the best descriptions ever of what Grossman called ‘the ruthless truth of war’.