A Writer At War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941-1945

"These are the notes Grossman took while a war correspondent for the army newspaper, the Red Star . They are true first drafts of history – quick descriptions of what was going on around him as he sat in some truck or dugout, waiting for something to happen. He has a wonderful, cinematic eye, describing the look of burned-out villages, roads full of refugees, and so on. And he gets the voices of the soldiers and officers absolutely right. He famously never took notes as he interviewed people, but had such a good memory that in the evening he could go off into a corner and write it all down verbatim. I prefer this book even to [his novel] Life and Fate , which was recently dramatised on Radio 4. It’s just so immediate; it takes you right there. The editors, Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova, managed to persuade Grossman’s family to give them access to these notebooks, and it’s the first time they’ve been published. They’re so human and open, and Grossman is such an involved, interesting man. It’s rare to find someone in Soviet literature whose writing hasn’t been poisoned by that ghastly Soviet-realist style. So if Life and Fate looks a bit daunting on your bookshelf, all two and a half inches of it, this is just as good and a lot shorter."