War reporting from one of Russia's greatest writers, now uncensored and uncut for the first time. An indispensable record of World War II and the Eastern Front.
June 22, 1941: Launch of Operation Barbarossa. Hitler invades the Soviet Union. Vasily Grossman soon begins a new career as a war reporter.
During the next four years, he covers all the major battles of the Eastern Front, from Stalingrad to Berlin, writing brutally vivid reports that were read by millions of soldiers and civilians alike. And, as the war draws to a close, he was one of the first to expose the horrors of the Treblinka death camp.
Grossman had a remarkable memory and the ability to win the trust of men and women from all walks of life: snipers, generals, fighter pilots, peasants, soldiers in a Soviet penal battalion and German prisoners of war. And his ability to write so vividly, and with such understanding, about world-changing events while they were still unfolding may well be unique.
This collection brings together the best of the forty-nine articles he wrote for the Red Star newspaper, often in newly unearthed versions that have not been distorted by censors. It demonstrates more clearly than ever what an extraordinary amount Grossman witnessed during only a few years.
Vasily Semyonovich Grossman (1905—1964) worked as a reporter for the army newspaper Red Star during WWII, covering nearly all of the most important battles from the defense of Moscow to the fall of Berlin. NYRB Classics publishes Grossman's Stalingrad, Life and Fate, The Road, Everything Flows, An Armenian Sketchbook, and The People Immortal.
Robert Chandler's translations from Russian include works by Alexander Pushkin, Teffi, Andrey Platonov, and Hamid Ismailov. He has also written a short biography of Pushkin and edited three anthologies of Russian literature for Penguin Classics. His most recent publication is a selection of poems by Guillaume Apollinaire and his Russian contemporary Velimir Khlebnikov.
Elizabeth Chandler is a co-translator, with her husband, of Pushkin's The Captain's Daughter; of Vasily Grossman's Stalingrad, Everything Flows, An Armenian Sketchbook, and The Road; and of several works by Andrey Platonov.
Julia Volohova is a scholar who has contributed to the publication of several previously unknown texts by Grossman and prepared the updated editions of The People Immortal and Dispatches from the Frontline as well as the first edition of Grossman's correspondence.
