But reading Grossman, I was continually imagining the way other great struggles, other great crises, other moments in history might appear if captured like this, if we were as attuned, as Grossman is, to the ways in which they shape our understanding of history. Stalingrad was to determine future social systems and philosophies of history.” 860 (page references are to the NYRB Classics edition) I have never read a text that was more complex and fascinating in its rendering of historical actuality and change.Īs Grossman remarks: “The outcome of this battle was to determine the map of the post-war world ….

They are made up of a massive collages of vignettes involving a hundred or so characters, stretching from the frontline, to family and work life in the rear areas, the ghettos behind the German lines, the deportation trucks, the gulag, concentration camps and gas chambers.īut it is not the subject matter as such that I want to address here, so much as Grossman’s treatment of time and history at a moment of extreme crisis. They are also novels of ideas, spiked with passages of philosophical reflection and argument. They offer a meditation on the revolution. They portray a cross section of Soviet society. These aren’t books that it is easy to be “finished” with. Reading the books back to back was engrossing. In the last couple of months I’ve immersed myself in Vasily Grossman’s two-volume epic about Stalingrad – For a Just Cause (1952) published in English in 2019 as Stalingrad and the sequel Life and Fate (1960), which has long been famous in the West as an account of the war that the Soviet censors tried to suppress. It was the end of the last major German offensive on the Eastern Front, a turning point in the war and, thus, in world history. It cost the Red Army, the Wehrmacht and its allies, the Italian, Romanian and Hungarian forces, a combined total of c 2.5 million casualties, over 1 million of them KIA.

The battle of Stalingrad raged between 23 August 1942 and 2 February 1943 when the last of the German 6th Army surrendered. This newsletter is strong stuff, more Wages of Destruction than regular Chartbook fare.

Grossman life and fate review