A Writer at War

December 5, 2005
Soviet author Grossman volunteered for the army when the Germans invaded in 1941 and spent more than three years as a special correspondent at the front for the army newspaper Red Star
. His wartime writing established him as a major "voice" of war—a status resembling in many ways that of Ernie Pyle in America. This volume, a perfect complement to the panoramic vision of Ivan's War
, collects excerpts from Grossman's notebooks and published dispatches, few of them longer than a couple of paragraphs. And while the dispatches usually describe scenes fitting with Soviet orthodoxy, Grossman's notebooks also record the bloody-mindedness, the despair and the disaffection that permeated Soviet ranks as the Red Army paid its dues of learning how to fight a modern war. That material, of course, was not published at the time. Grossman was a perceptive observer with an eye for essential detail. His vignettes of the fighting at Kursk and the battles that brought the Red Army into Berlin are models of combat reporting, and the elegiac realism of his description of Treblinka merits wide anthologizing in Holocaust literature. This volume stands among the finest eyewitness accounts of Soviet Russia's war on the Eastern Front.

January 1, 2006
Soviet-era Russian novelist Vasily Grossman (1905-64), whose major work, " Life and Fate" (1985), was suppressed in his lifetime, kept notebooks when he worked as a journalist during World War II. That was a forbidden and perilous practice in the Stalinist system, and Grossman's jottings about warfare he witnessed constitute a rare record of the attitudes and conditions experienced by the Red Army soldier. Beevor, whom readers will recognize from his battle histories, " Stalingrad" (1998) and " The Fall of Berlin, 1945 " (2002), connects Grossman's terse sketches with commentary about the war's course and Grossman's movements at the battlefront. Grossman wrote for the Red Army's official newspaper, and his frank character observations of officers and men will affect those interested in the soul of the WWII Soviet army, and in the genocide its advance revealed. In its wake, Grossman discovered what happened to his mother, and his 1944 article about Treblinka was one of the first to describe a German murder factory. This compilation captures Grossman's great sensibility to his merciless times. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)