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From the Front Line

From the Front Line

Stalingrad–Treblinka–Berlin, 1941–45

by Vasily Grossman, translated from the Russian by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler, introduction by Robert Chandler and Julia Volohova

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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 covered all the major battles of the Eastern Front, from Stalingrad to Berlin, writing brutally vivid reports that were read by millions of soldiers and civilians alike. And as the war drew 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. Not many reporters are able to write so vividly, and with such understanding, about world-changing events while they are still unfolding.

This collection brings together the best of the forty-nine articles Grossman wrote for the Red Star newspaper, many in newly unearthed versions that have not been distorted by censors. It is still a vital record of a deadly time.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9798896230083
Pages: 512
Publication Date:

Praise

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

[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.
—Eric Vanderwall, 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.
—Tony Barber, 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.
—David Bennun, Jewish Chronicle (UK)

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