From the Front line

Vasily Grossman is the Tolstoy of the USSR * Martin Amis *
Grossman perfected a [journalistic] style that relied less on rhetoric than on the power of witness … Grossman’s reporting paints a war epic in miniatures, selecting subjects with an eye toward mystery, uncertainty, and the compromised character of men whom he was encouraged to cast as uncomplicated heroes * Madeleine Wulfhart, The New Yorker *
In [From the Front Line] we already sense a writer with a gimlet eye for detail, instinctive empathy and a grasp of the epic scale on which his two big novels would unfold * Granta *
[Grossman] managed to produce first-rate journalism that is also of lasting quality as artful prose … [From the Front Line] presents the reader with great matter-of-fact prose in the same lineage as Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov while also offering invaluable coverage of the Eastern Front during World War II * Los Angeles Review of Books *
For the Second World War, or Great Patriotic War as it is known in Russia, the most renowned writer is Vasily Grossman * Financial Times *
Grossman’s writing features sweeping, almost lyrical descriptions of landscapes ravaged by war … and vivid combat scenes that capture human frailty at the mercy of mechanized violence … It’s a powerful evocation of a world at war * Publishers Weekly *
Grossman was an extraordinary writer. If you want to know not only what happened during the war in the east, but how it was experienced by those caught up in it, he is peerless-at once clear and vivid, with a masterful sense of when to be prosaic and when poetic, when naturalistic and when rhetorical, all underpinned by a genuine moral rigour intermittently betrayed by the interventions of his editors in Moscow * Jewish Chronicle *

Vasily Semionovich Grossman (1905-1964)

Vasily Semionovich Grossman was born into a Jewish family in Berdichev, in what is now Ukraine. In 1934, he achieved immediate acclaim with the publication of his short story “In the Town of Berdichev” and his novel Gluckauf, which depicted the lives of Donbas miners.

During the Second World War, Grossman served as a reporter for the army newspaper Red Star. His report “The Hell of Treblinka,” published in 1944, was one of the earliest published accounts of a Nazi death camp in any language.

His epic novel Stalingrad was released in 1952. In the subsequent years, Grossman dedicated himself to writing a follow-up novel, Life and Fate. Despite the KGB confiscating his manuscript in February 1961, he continued to work on Everything Flows, a novel even more critical of the Soviet regime, until his final days. The short stories he penned during his last three years are considered among his greatest works, with English translations featured in The Road.

Grossman passed away on September 14, 1964, just before the twenty-third anniversary of the massacre of the Jews of Berdichev, an event in which his mother perished.

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