From the Front Line: Stalingrad, Treblinka, Berlin 1941-45

Telling the truth has always been dangerous in Russia. If Stalin hadn’t died in 1953, Vasily Grossman would almost certainly have been imprisoned and most likely killed. As it was, he lived to complete Life and Fate, generally agreed to be the best war novel written by anyone in the twentieth century, and to have it seized in 1961, three years before he died, by Khrushchev’s KGB. Two friends hid copies and the book was published in the West in 1980, and in Gorbachev’s Russia in 1988. From the Front Line 1941-45, the latest in the invaluable series of Grossman’s writings translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, provides the back ground, in newspaper dispatches, essays and stories, to the masterpiece which is Life and Fate, and also to Stalingrad, the huge novel which preceded it.

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