I get it; A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army came over four years ago so writing a review is pointless, kind of like saying ‘There’s this book, A Tale of Two Cities, you gotta read it’ or something like that. Well, Biznesslanch’s riposte to this sentiment is three-fold: a) I just read it so it’s new to me, b) it is not particularly well-known (I think this is true anyways) and c) it is a pretty good book.
A quick word on the author. Vasily Grossman was a Soviet writer and war correspondent, who, according to Keith Gessen writing in the New Yorker, was second only to Ilya Ehrenburg in terms of fame among war writers in the Soviet Union. He eventually became increasingly disillusioned with the system, a feeling that only increased in the post-war anti-Semitic climate of the Soviet Union. In 1960, during the Khrushchev thaw, he attempted to publish one of Biznesslanch’s all-time favorite books, Life and Fate, which was so damningly anti-Soviet that Kremlin ideologist Mikhail Suslov said the book “could never be published in 200 years.” It’s published now, with an excellent translation by Robert Chandler so you have no excuse not to read it. Hell, you can even borrow it from me if live in the Washington DC area; it’s that good.
Anyways, back to the book at hand.
British military historian Anthony Beevor and his translator/collaborator Luba Vinogradova put together a book that was much different from what Biznesslanch expected upon finding it at his local public library, but probably more enjoyable for it. The book consists mostly of the wartime notes of Vasily Grossman – a famous writer and Soviet war correspondent for Krasnaya Zvezda during WW2. Grossman’s stories featured heavily in Beevor’s previous two histories of the Eastern Front, Stalingrad and Berlin: The Downfall 1945 so it’s no surprise that Beevor and Vinogradova created this book.
The basic structure of the book is the notes and fragments of articles by Grossman broken up by commentary from Beevor and Vinogradova, usually giving context to what Grossman is describing. It’s effective because Grossman’s writing, even in note form, more than stands on its own and really only needs explanation in order to understand what unit he was attached to or how one dispatch is from Oryol and the next from Moscow or other similar details.
The most important part of this book is that it humanizes the participants in the fighting in a way that a straight history usually cannot or does not. Passages like “Communist Evseev lost his notepad. Some Red Army soldiers found this notepad. In it he kept a hand-copied prayer” are beautiful for their simplicity and are more moving for lack of context. Grossman, as Beevor and Vinogradova repeatedly point out, was dedicated to portraying the truth of war, a quality that endeared him to ordinary soldiers. The book includes accounts of executions for cowardice or self-inflicted wounds – not published, incidentally, at the time – as well as terrifying and heroic stories like that of crossing the Volga into Stalingrad as bombs and artillery rounds churn up the river around a rickety boat or anti-tank gunners fighting face-to-face with German panzers.
Grossman’s descriptive and story-telling powers come through everywhere, whether it’s from a personal account of a night spent in a previously occupied village; “There isn’t a single cock in the village: women killed them all, because Romanians discovered where chickens had been hidden by the cries of the cockerels,” or just recounting a conversation with a soldier; “‘I felt better once the fighting began. I go to fight like one goes to work, to a factory. It was terrifying at first, but now I am not afraid of bullets. It’s only mortar bombs that upset me.’”
Grossman is at his best when describing the horrors of Treblinka. The book publishes a Grossman article called ‘The Hell Called Treblinka’ which was later quoted at the Nuremberg tribunals. The article paints a moving picture of the naive hopes of the camp inmates as they give way to abject terror and despair, it exposes the utter depravity of the guards and executioners, and, at a basic level, described what happened at the camps in a style more touching than any historian could rightly hope to achieve. It helped that Grossman was a great writer with an eye for the truth – no matter how brutal – but he was also Jewish and you can’t help but think this also influenced him (in an earlier passage, he describes going to his old apartment in Berdichev where his mother had lived until she was executed with the other 30,000 Jews in the city). He explains why he is so graphic in his re-telling of how guards loosed their dogs on the people waiting to be gassed or what happened to bodies of the victims as they were being cremated
“Someone might ask: ‘Why write about this, why remember all that? It is the writer’s duty to tell this terrible truth and it is the civilian duty of the reader to learn it. Everyone who would turn away, who would shut his eyes and walk past would insult the memory of the dead. Everyone who does not know the truth about this would never be able to understand with what sort of enemy, with what sort of monster, our Red Army started on its own mortal combat”
There are flaws in the book, but they are pretty minor. The end of the war, after Stalingrad, seems a bit of an afterthought. Without knowing the source material – Grossman’s notebooks – however, it is impossible to know how much of this is editing and how much is the simple availability of material. In any event, Stalingrad seems to have been the turning point of Grossman’s life – it’s the pivot around which his magisterial novel Life and Fate is based – so it makes sense to focus on this event. Additionally, the most moving passage of the book – about Treblinka, strikingly similar to his portrayal of the concentration camps in Life and Fate – is among the most emotionally raw accounts of the death camps, at least written by an outsider, I’ve ever read.
Grossman captured the voice of the frontoviki – the front-line soldiers – better than any other writer of his generation. If you’re looking for a book to fill in some of the holes left in the burgeoning collection of English-language histories of the eastern front, read this one, even if it isn’t exactly hot off the presses.
A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army by Vasily Grossman. Edited by Anthony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova. Pantheon Books 2005, 364 pages
