Stalingrad

Synopsis

Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad is the monumental first volume of the novel that would eventually lead to his masterpiece Life and Fate. Set during the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the Battle of Stalingrad, the novel moves between the battlefield, bombed cities, factories, homes, hospitals, and political offices, creating an expansive portrait of a society caught in the machinery of total war.

At its centre is the Shaposhnikov family. Alexandra Vladimirovna refuses to leave Stalingrad as the German army approaches, while her children and relatives are scattered across the Soviet Union and the front. Among them is Viktor Shtrum, a Jewish physicist whose scientific work may be vital to the war effort, even as he struggles with fear for his mother trapped behind German lines. Around them Grossman gathers soldiers, nurses, workers, intellectuals, prisoners, political officials, mothers, and children, giving the novel an extraordinary range of human perspectives.

First published in Russian in 1952, Stalingrad was written under the constraints of Soviet censorship, yet Grossman already developed the themes that would define Life and Fate: the conflict between individual conscience and political power, the persistence of ordinary human attachment amid violence, and the devastating consequences of totalitarianism. His attention to domestic life and personal relationships is as important as his descriptions of combat, giving the novel both epic scale and intimate human detail.

Published in English for the first time in this definitive translation, Stalingrad stands as one of the great twentieth-century novels of war, linking the vast historical forces of the Second World War with the lives of the people caught within them.

About the Author

Vasily Grossman (1905–1964) was a Russian novelist, journalist, and war correspondent. During the Second World War he worked for the Soviet army newspaper Red Star and reported from the front, including the Battle of Stalingrad. His eyewitness account of the Treblinka extermination camp, The Hell of Treblinka, was later used as evidence at the Nuremberg trials.

His major works include Stalingrad, Life and Fate, and Everything Flows, along with collections of journalism, stories, and essays. Grossman died in 1964, and Life and Fate was not published until years later, after the manuscript had been seized by Soviet authorities.

Robert Chandler is an acclaimed translator of Russian literature whose translations include Grossman’s Life and Fate, Stalingrad, and works by Andrey Platonov. Elizabeth Chandler collaborated with him on several translations of Grossman and Platonov.

Publisher

New York Review Books Classics

Publication Date

June 11, 2019

Format

Paperback

Pages

1,088

Subjects

Historical Fiction; War Fiction; World War II; Soviet Literature; Russian Literature; Totalitarianism; Battle of Stalingrad; Translated Fiction; Twentieth-Century Literature

ISBN

9781681373270