A new collection of war reportage by the author of Life and Fate and Stalingrad

"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

"Grossman is the Tolstoy of the USSR" Martin Amis

June 22, 1941: Launch of Operation Barbarossa. Hitler invades the Soviet Union. Vasily Grossman soon begins a new career as a war reporter.

During the next four years, he covers all the major battles of the Eastern Front, from Stalingrad to Berlin, crafting brutally vivid reports that were read by millions of soldiers and civilians alike. And, as the war draws to a close, he was one of the first to expose the horrors of the Treblinka death camp.

Grossman had a remarkable memory and the ability to win the trust of men and women from all walks of life: snipers, generals, fighter pilots, peasants, soldiers in a Soviet penal battalion and German prisoners of war. And his ability to write so vividly, and with such understanding, about world-changing events while they were still unfolding may well be unique.

This collection brings together the best of the forty-nine articles he wrote for the Red Star newspaper, often in newly unearthed versions that have not been distorted by censors. It demonstrates more clearly than ever what an extraordinary amount Grossman witnessed during only a few years.

Translated from the Russian by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler

Introductory material, notes and editorial apparatus by Robert Chandler and Julia Volohova

Details

ISBN13: 9781529414691
Format: Hardback
Number of Pages: 512
Edition:
Publication Date: 29 Sep 2026
Publisher: Quercus Publishing
Publication City, Country: London, United Kingdom
Dimensions (cm): 23.8(H)x15(L)x4.4(W)760
Weight (gm): 760

Author Biography

VASILY SEMIONOVICH GROSSMAN (1905-1964) was born into a Jewish family in Berdichev, in what is now Ukraine. In 1934 he published both "In the Town of Berdichev" - a short story that won him immediate acclaim - and the novel Gluckauf, about Donbas miners. During the Second World War, he worked as a reporter for the army newspaper Red Star; his "The Hell of Treblinka" (1944) was one of the first accounts of a Nazi death camp to be published in any language. His long novel Stalingrad was published in 1952. During the next few years Grossman worked on his second Stalingrad novel: Life and Fate. In February 1961, the KGB confiscated his typescript, but he was able to continue working on Everything Flows, which is yet more critical of the Soviet regime, until his last days. The short stories he wrote during his last three years are among his supreme achievements; English translations are included in The Road. Grossman died on 14 September 1964, on the eve of the twenty-third anniversary of the massacre of the Jews of Berdichev, in which his mother had died.

Reviews

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 *