PositiveHarper\'s... make[s] clear the extent to which Grossman was a product of the Soviet literary system—the troubles he experienced publishing his books and articles and the compromises and censorship he accepted in order for them to see the light of day .
Vasily Grossman, Trans. by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler
PositiveHarpersWhere Life and Fate presents a disillusioned moral hellscape, Stalingrad is a work of hope and true belief in the long march of the Soviet project. Above all, it is a paean to the strength of the Soviet people as they mobilized to confront fascism. Long dismissed as phoned-in socialist realism, this major work, Chandler suggests, has been unjustly ignored because of stubborn Cold War thinking—an enduring prejudice that if a book actually managed to get published at the apogee of Stalin’s rule, it couldn’t be good ... Though it is far from perfect, Stalingrad is an accomplished historical war novel, focusing, like Life and Fate , on the Shaposhnikov family, and is similarly remarkable for its scope ... dredges up the ideological strata of antebellum communism, the pre-1917 world of European salons and cravats, and is laced with unsparing discourses on the depredations of fascism ... a nineteenth-century novel updated for the twentieth century, and at times feels like a diorama. Like a post-rock record, the book has meandering, slow chapters, where Grossman noodles off in a corner, exploring, to no discernible end, some aspect of human nature during wartime. But it is also a time capsule of lives, documenting the ideological nuances and socioeconomic complexity of this lost world.
