A Writer at War

by: Vasily Grossman

Published by: Vintage

Reviewed by Kathy Perschmann

Subtitled: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army, 1941-1945

(Edited and translated by Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova)

Grossman was born in 1905, and though he was exempt from fighting in World War II when Hitler invaded Russia (he tried to enlist), he did get a job covering the war for the Red Army newspaper, Red Star, Krasnaya Zvezda.

Beevor (author of Stalingrad and The Fall of Berlin, 1945) and Vinogradova have taken Grossman’s extensive notes from his war reporting years and some of his published dispatches and combined them into a fascinating and horror-filled account of heroism, shocking brutality from both Germans and Russians, criticism of some officers, and praise for others. Grossman’s experiences were coalesced into the novel Life and Fate, which Grossman tied to get published in the Soviet Union. It was suppressed in the 1960s and finally published in the 1980s to great acclaim.

Writer at War is full of beautiful brief anecdotes of ordinary people, both army and civilians, and their defense of the Soviet Union. There are short descriptions of bodies, ruins, the frenzied flight of whole towns in front of the invading German forces, the mud, the cold, the food, and the orphaned and abandoned children. These are images we may not want to confront; but we should. Brutal wars and genocide are still going on–and we need to recall what it was like and what it is still like.

I have not experienced anything so powerful since I saw Elim Klimov’s film about the invasion, Come and See.

NOTE: Grossman’s report on Treblinka was used in the Nuremberg Military Tribunal, and published in Znamya. Grossman was disillusioned by Stalin’s refusal to acknowledge the slaughter of Jews in the Ukraine (among those killed was Grossman’s mother). Grossman’s articles on this subject were often censored or not used at all.

Armchair Interviews says: Powerful stories.