A Writer At War

A remarkable addition to the literature of 1941-45…a wonderful portrait of the wartime experience of Russia… A worthy memorial to a remarkable man – Max Hastings * Sunday Telegraph *Magnificent… Any war correspondent writing today about the horrors we are still being subjected to by ideologues, mean-spirited leaders and fanatics of various shades and faiths, should take the time to read him. There is a profound humanity in his prose, an abilitity for empathy and a capacity for rage that one rarely meets – Omer Bartov * Times Literary Supplement *Grossman, like Isaac Babel twenty years before him, lifts war correspondence to new heights * Literary Review *As a pithy account of war at its most extreme, this fascinating book will rarely be bettered – James Delingpole * Mail on Sunday *Unforgettable… Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova have recovered nothing less than a lost classic of reportage – Sean McCarthy * The Scotsman *Grossman was above all a clear-eyed and generous witness to the human cost of war, civilians and soldiers of both sides, the lost women and broken men; in the very highest order of journalistic achievement, he was as alert to the victims as much as to the heroes his audience was required to read about – David Flusfeder * Daily Telegraph *Impeccably edited, the commentary as informative as it is unobtrusive. – Robert Chandler * Financial Times *In bringing his notebooks to a wider audience, and in reminding us about this brilliant witness, Beevor and Vinogradova have done their readers - and Grossman’s memory - a great service * Independent *

Vasily Grossman was born in 1905 in the Ukrainian town of Berdichev. In 1941, he became a war reporter for the Red Army newspaper, Red Star, and came to be regarded as a legendary war hero, reporting on the defence of Stalingrad, the fall of Berlin and the consequences of the Holocaust. Life and Fate, the masterpiece he completed in 1960, was considered a threat to the totalitarian regime, and Grossman was told that there was no chance of the novel being published for another 200 years. Grossman died in 1964.

Antony Beevor first came across the notebooks of Vasily Grossman when working on his book Stalingrad, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Wolfson Prize for History and the Hawthornden Prize. He has also written Berlin- The Downfall 1945, which has been translated into twenty-five languages, and most recently, The Mystery of Olga Chekhova. He is currently the chairman of the Society of Authors.

Dr Lyubov Vinogradova is a researcher, translator and freelance journalist, studied biology at university in Moscow, as well as taking degrees in English and German. She received a PhD in microbiology in 2000. She has worked with Antony Beevor for the last ten years on his three most recent books as well as with other British and American historians.

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