![]() ![]() In August 1942 he was posted to Stalingrad where he remained during four months of brutal street-fighting. Grossman witnessed almost all the major events on the Eastern Front: the appalling defeats and desperate retreats of 1941 when more than 3 million men were captured, the defence of Moscow and fighting in the Ukraine. He won huge fame for his novel The People Immortal. ![]() ![]() Red Army soldiers came to love this awkward intellectual for his physical courage and for the honesty of his reporting. Remarkably, he spent three of the following four years at the front observing with a writer’s eye the most pitiless fighting ever known. ![]() A portly novelist in his mid-thirties with no military experience, he was given a uniform and hastily taught to shoot a pistol. It depicts as never before the crushing conditions on the Eastern Front and the lives and deaths of infantrymen, tank drivers, pilots, snipers and civilians alike.ĭeemed unfit for service when the Germans invaded in 1941, Grossman became a special correspondent for Red Star, the Red Army newspaper. A Writer at War is based on the notebooks in which he gathered his raw material. Vasily Grossman’s masterpiece Life and Fate is rated by many critics as the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century. ![]()
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