Stalingrad

One needs time and patience to read Stalingrad , but it is worth it. Moving majestically from Berlin to Moscow to the boundless Kazakh steppe… A multitude of lives and fates are played out against a vast panoramic history

One needs time and patience to read Stalingrad , but it is worth it. Moving majestically from Berlin to Moscow to the boundless Kazakh steppe… A multitude of lives and fates are played out against a vast panoramic history

If you have read Grossman before, you will already very likely know that you urgently want to read Stalingrad . If you haven’t, I can only tell you that when you do read this novel, you will not only discover that you love his characters and want to stay with them – that you need them in your life as much as you need your own family and loved ones – but that at the end, despite having finished an 892-page novel, you want to read it again

This is a big event… [ Stalingrad ] gives voice to a dizzying array of experiences… [you] feel as though you are there, wandering through those devastated streets among the starving, dead, and mad

A dazzling prequel… His descriptions of battle in an industrial age are some of the most vivid ever written… Stalingrad is Life and Fate’s equal. It is, arguable, the richer book – shot through with human stories and a sense of life’s beauty and fragility

Few works of literature since Homer can match the piercing, unshakably humane gaze that Grossman turns on the haggard face of war

‘How wonderful to see Grossman’s vision finally come to life. A masterwork told with devastating detail, humour, and profound insights into the essence of truth. I was riveted’

The almost polyphonic breadth and rich nuance of Grossman’s prose is perfectly captured by Chandler’s translation, accomplished with his wife Elizabeth. At close on 1,000 pages, it’s a monumental achievement

[Grossman’s] characters witness, suffer and reflect with a hyper-real intensity. It illuminates nearly every page like the hellish glow that lights up the night sky over Stalingrad

Stalingrad… teems with love, devotion and wonderful flashes of humour. Sometimes all three arrive at once… but the most indelible passages arrive during the battle itself. The blow-by-blow accounts of young men willing to die to gain enough time for reinforcements to arrive from the east bank of the Volga are positively Homeric

An amazing achievement of translation and scholarship. It’s lucid and readable, with moment of wonderfully evocative prose… an astonishing example of the compromises between creativity and censorship

Vasily Grossman (Author)
Vasily Grossman was born in 1905. In 1941, he became a war reporter for the Red Army newspaper Red Star and came to be regarded as a legendary war hero. Life and Fate , his masterpiece, 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.

Robert Chandler (Translator)
Robert Chandler is the celebrated translator of Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. He has edited and translated numerous Russian titles, including the complete works of Platonov. He is the editor of Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida