“One, which must have had curly jagged edges, sounded like someone playing a comb or a kazoo. His descriptions of battle in an industrial age are some of the most vivid ever written – the whoosh of enemy fire, how “each splinter made its own particular sound”. In Stalingrad, Grossman transforms his reportage into a work of lyrical art and fierce power. His dispatches – written with unusual clarity and honesty – made him famous. There, he interviewed soldiers and generals, snipers and women medical orderlies. He narrowly escaped capture as Hitler’s divisions headed remorselessly east, and spent four months on the Stalingrad frontline. Grossman worked for nearly three years as a Soviet war correspondent. There, Soviet and German troops are engaged in a pitiless urban battle that Grossman calls “more grinding, more relentless than Thermopylae or even the Siege of Troy”. The story ends with Krymov crossing the Volga under fire. They include the physicist Viktor Shtrum and political commissar Nikolay Krymov, whose experiences are close to Grossman’s own. In Stalingrad, Grossman transforms his reportage into a work of lyrical art and fierce power It features characters who appear in both. Grossman originally envisaged Stalingrad and his masterpiece, Life and Fate (1960), as a single organic work.
The unexpected Soviet counter-offensive forms the climax of Vasily Grossman’s 1952 novel Stalingrad, one of the great novels of the 20th century, and now published in English for the first time. After a spectacular advance, German officers believed they had won the war, with the Red Army doomed and in retreat. Soviet troops were clinging on to a narrow strip of land next to the Volga river, and held a couple of giant factories to the north. In September 1942 the German high command announced that the city of Stalingrad had fallen.
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