The people immortal

Emma — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

One of Grossman’s three great war novels – alongside Life and Fate and Stalingrad.

“A significant, valuable addition to Grossman’s small but powerful body of work” WILLIAM BOYD

“A remarkable novel that illuminates the terrible realities of Barbarossa and the banal horror of warfare with incomparable understanding and insight” JONATHAN DIMBLEBY

“There are always good reasons for reading Grossman, but few times are as resonant as our own” Financial Times

“At the heart of his writing lies a tireless humanity and empathy” Telegraph

“Grossman combines a journalist’s eye with a novelist’s empathy” Spectator

Set during the catastrophic defeats of the war’s first months, it tracks a Red Army regiment that wins a minor victory in eastern Belorussia but fails to exploit this success. A battalion is then entrusted with the task of slowing the German advance, and eventually encircled, before ultimately breaking out and joining with the rest of the Soviet forces.

Grossman’s descriptions of the natural world – and his characters’ relationship to it – are both vivid and unexpected, as are his memorable character sketches: eleven-year-old Lionya is determined to hang on to his toy revolver as he walks a long distance behind German lines; his defiant grandmother slaps a German officer in the face and is shot; Kotenko, a fiercely anti-Soviet peasant who initially welcomes the Germans, hangs himself in despair when they treat him with contempt; and Semion Ignatiev, a womanizer and gifted story-teller, turns out to be the boldest and most resourceful of the rank-and file soldiers.

Grossman spent most of the war years close to the front line. But The People Immortal is far from being mere morale-boosting propaganda. On the contrary, as letters included in this volume make clear, it was read as a textbook, and as a work of military education. This edition includes not only the unredacted novel itself, translated here for the first time since 1946, but also a wealth of background material.

A heavily redacted English translation of The People Immortal was published in 1946. This current edition is the first that reflects Grossman’s original text.

Translated from the Russian by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler

Life and Fate

Emma — Thu, 14 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Based around the pivotal WWII battle of Stalingrad (1942-3), where the German advance into Russia was eventually halted by the Red Army, and around an extended family, the Shaposhnikovs, and their many friends and acquaintances, Life and Fate recounts the experience of characters caught up in an immense struggle between opposing armies and ideologies. Nazism and Communism are appallingly similar, ‘two poles of one magnet’, as a German camp commander tells a shocked old Bolshevik prisoner. At the height of the battle Russian soldiers and citizens alike are at last able to speak out as they choose, and without reprisal – an unexpected and short-lived moment of freedom. Grossman himself was on the front line as a war correspondent at Stalingrad – hence his gripping battle scenes, though these are more than matched by the drama of the individual conscience struggling against massive pressure to submit to the State. He knew all about this from experience too. His central character, Viktor Shtrum, eventually succumbs, but each delay and act of resistance is a moral victory. Though he writes unsparingly of war, terror and totalitarianism, Grossman also tells of the acts of ‘senseless kindness’ that redeem humanity, and his message remains one of hope. He dedicates his book, the labour of ten years, and which he did not live to see published, to his mother, who, like Viktor Shtrum’s, was killed in the holocaust at Berdichev in Ukraine in September 1941.

Grossman, Vasilii – The Bell Bookshop

The people immortal

Life and Fate