Stalingrad is a dazzling prequel ... In Stalingrad, Grossman transforms his reportage into a work of lyrical art and fierce power. His descriptions of battle in an industrial age are some of the most vivid ever written – the whoosh of enemy fire, how 'each splinter made its own particular sound' ... Stalingrad’s long non-appearance in English is a mystery. It may have suffered from a lack of interest in Soviet culture. The novel was wrongly estimated on the grounds that anything published under Stalin couldn’t have literary merit. In fact Stalingrad is Life and Fate’s equal. It is, arguably, the richer book – shot through with human stories and a sense of life’s beauty and fragility.
Where 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.
...a stunning translation ... It is a less philosophical, more visceral novel than Life and Fate, with Grossman intent on expressing the underlying solidarity of a 'people’s war' where 'great deeds can be accomplished by simple, ordinary people'. The novel’s sweep is immense, by turns microscopic and panoramic ... it would be wrong to think that Stalingrad is a gloomy novel. It teems with love, devotion and wonderful flashes of humour. Sometimes all three arrive at once ... There are dozens of such moments, 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.
Plotlines fray and fail to cohere. Characters make a single appearance before dropping out of the book altogether. Worst of all, where [Grossman's] Life and Fate is vitally personal, Stalingrad borders on propaganda ... it does not smack of freedom ... it is largely the state-sanctioned 'truth' that Grossman defends ... Much of Stalingrad’s dialogue could have been lifted from the script of a blockbuster action movie ... Often, Stalingrad’s paeans to the quiet heroism of the workers are transparent glorifications of uncompensated labor ... It is a testament to the chilling strength of the Soviet regime that the author of Life and Fate signed his name to Stalingrad, too.
By resurrecting the vivid imagery and transgressive language of Grossman’s earliest drafts, the Chandlers’ translation gives the lie to any assertion that Stalingrad lacks the verve of its more celebrated sequel. this exhaustive restoration of a work long neglected for its supposed bowdlerization at the hands of Soviet censorship represents a remarkable achievement ... The resulting text masterfully reconciles archival evidence of Grossman’s authorial intentions with the published record. It is as close as we will likely come to a definitive edition of Stalingrad ... His work endures as a humanist testament to the Soviet cause, and to all the injustices that such a seemingly just cause was made to serve.
First published when Stalin was still alive, Stalingrad is considerably less explicit than Life and Fate about its ethical and political themes. Even so, it was, by Soviet standards, remarkably bold ... No version, published or unpublished, fully accords with Grossman’s conception, and some manuscripts include splendid passages that have never been published. The editors of this English translation therefore chose to include as much fascinating material as possible, carefully indicating in an afterword the versions to which particular passages belong. The result is the most complete, most interesting, and artistically finest version of Stalingrad in any language ... In Stalingrad, Grossman relies on the technique Russians call 'Aesopian language,' which hints at (or allegorizes, like Aesop’s fables) the unsayable. Life and Fate and Grossman’s last novel, Everything Flows, insist explicitly that Communism and Nazism are mirror images of each other, but Stalingrad could not. Instead it criticizes the Nazis for faults that readers would recognize as equally characteristic of the Soviets.
Reading [Stalingrad] is a very eerie experience. It’s like discovering the Bayeux tapestry has a prequel, albeit with marked differences in colours and texture .. Even with the restored passages, it would be impossible to claim this is a subversive or even historically reliable novel. It may not be a 'gelded fictional brontosaurus', as one detractor memorably put it, but much of it is a conventionally Soviet book ... In the end, Stalingrad is a strange and complicated book. It is undoubtedly an amazing achievement of translation and scholarship. It’s lucid and readable, with moments of wonderfully evocative prose. I can’t imagine it will ever feel like an indispensable prelude to Life and Fate, because, as a work of art it’s significantly flawed. These flaws are themselves fascinating. It is an astonishing example of the compromises between creativity and censorship. Observing the negation of Grossman’s art as it tries to burst into flame in spite of the dampening of the censor, you get a deeper appreciation for the empathy, truth and magnanimity of its sequel. Perhaps the most intriguing element of all is the overstory: the way the Grossman of this novel somehow became the dissident author of Life and Fate.
Stalingrad shows a writer who was a less adamant critic of the Soviet project than a reader of Life and Fate might think. It also presents some of the finest examples of Grossman’s prose, an argument to read him not only as a fervent critic of totalitarianism, but as a deeply compassionate writer with an extraordinary gift for portraying psychological complexity and sensory detail ... like Tolstoy, he can paint a vivid picture of almost any sort of person ... Stalingrad is an extreme case of a 'loose baggy monster,' but the lesser sections—for example, chapters on a wartime coal mine, added at the behest of editors—fade from memory quickly, while Grossman’s exquisite sensory details linger ... Stalingrad is, among other things, a testament to the human capacity to rally the bravery, altruism, and resilience needed to bring the world back from the brink of destruction.
There are fine descriptions in Stalingrad ... The great writing alternates with passages of bombast and didacticism. Grossman does not capture the brutality inflicted on Soviet soldiers, or the brutality of which they were capable. His censors even struck references to petty thievery, swearing, rotten food, bedbugs – at one stage they removed mention of unwashed hands. Even moments of humour or farce were slashed for undermining the heroic tone. Yet Grossman struggled with ingenuity and tenacity for the partial truth Stalingrad contains. He pushed boundaries at great personal risk, and was sometimes successful. There is much in Stalingrad that is categorically not the official line. Stalingrad is a magnificent but mutilated achievement. Any simple response to it is bound to be wrong. Anything that can be asserted about it needs to be contradicted. As soon as it is examined as a narrative, we are forced to delve into the story of its tortured composition.
Popoff tells Grossman’s story with sensitivity and a keen understanding of his world, drawing on little-known archival collections to produce what must be considered the definitive biography. Throughout she highlights Grossman’s resistance to the twin totalitarian evils of his time—Nazism and Stalinism—and the defense of human freedom that animates all his writing ... Although Grossman’s epic can’t match the artistry of Tolstoy, Stalingrad is a profoundly moving homage to the millions of victims of the last century.
It gives voice to a dizzying array of experiences ... Grossman is invariably compared to Tolstoy but he doesn’t have that writer’s peerless understanding of character and, as you wade your way through Stalingrad (it’s more than 900 pages long), you rarely feel as if you are living it from inside someone else’s skin. Even so, you do feel as though you are there, wandering through those devastated streets among the starving, dead, and mad. It’s enough.
Stalingrad, the first novel in the dilogy, has now finally come down to us, in its first complete English translation, and in a form that Grossman would have been proud of, thanks to the editorial endeavours of his translators Robert and Elizabeth Chandler. Their introduction and detailed notes elaborate the fraught history of the various editions and manuscript and microfilmed sources that have gone to produce this finished book ... It is a prodigious novel ... far more than a fictionalised version of military history ... The Chandlers have done a superb job in rendering Grossman’s Russian prose into a limpid and evocative English ... However, for all their efforts, it is a characteristic of Grossman’s fiction that moments of precise observation such as this often sit with passages of earnest, formulaic exhortations, ramming the message home ... a remarkable and searing act of witness and that testimony was a kind of dry run for the further explorations and the wider ambitions of Life and Fate.
There is an underlying struggle on every page ... a colossal work of research and is an attempt at de-censoring the author. Valuable notes are given to each chapter, indicating which versions were drawn upon ... The easiest way to read Stalingrad as a novel is to disregard these notes and to skip Robert Chandler’s fine introduction and afterword. But that would be to miss the true story and the reward of an intensive tutorial on the experience of writing under a dictatorship ... The present editors have been able to save much fine writing that Grossman was never permitted to publish in his lifetime ... a vast, ambitious book, in terms of characters and action and drama, and there is much fine writing in the descriptions of the city under aerial bombardment and during the fighting. Grossman had enough personal experience of the front to be able to create a gripping narrative. But if we have any interest at all in the novel’s relationship to historical truth, this is not enough; Boris Pasternak commented that only about 60 pages of the whole work struck him as genuine...is in fact two stories, and the more gripping story is that of Grossman’s struggle to tell the truth.
... fascinating ... takes us into the heart of the enigma of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany ... Grossman’s most humane writing about injustice and atrocity paradoxically emerges from his own didactic Socialist Realist style. His desire to connect individual lives with the great flow of history transformed itself into an ability to speak for individuals lost and destroyed in the flow.
For this translation, as forceful, sensitive and richly coloured as that of Life and Fate, Robert and Elizabeth Chandler have woven the strongest unpublished material into the 1956 version. The result is another huge, seething fresco of front-line combat, domestic routine under siege, and restless debate. Again, Grossman transforms into art 'all the savage grief and homeless happiness of those terrible years' ... The battle scenes...have all the mesmeric thrill and dread that admirers will recall from Life and Fate. The lyricism, tenderness and pathos of the moments of respite touch the same heights ... There are, though, differences between the two masterworks. Unlike Life and Fate, written after Stalin’s death in the hope of greater freedom, Grossman drafted parts of the earlier book under duress. Some chapters of heroic labour in the fields or mines echo Socialist Realist doctrine. A very few pages parrot the sloganeering uplift of party orthodoxy ... few works of literature since Homer can match the piercing, unshakably humane gaze that Grossman turns on the haggard face of war
Grossman’s characters also embody this strange wartime synthesis: some are terrified while others sit calmly in their fired-upon barges and boats, making plans to read the day’s paper ... also includes, as the Chandlers often emphasize, 'several hundred of the vivid, comic, and surprising passages' that were published in only some of the Russian editions, and passages that were never published ... even Grossman’s worst-tempered characters are afforded moments of insight and clarity—and, Elizabeth says, 'unlike nearly all his Soviet contemporaries, he treats even his German characters with respect.'
Grossman allows himself these flourishes, and not all of it is convincing. Some of it even rings false in light of Grossman's early career as a functionary of the Soviet state ... But these are not regular beats in Grossman's writing, and their occasional appearances might not, for the modern reader, lower Stalingrad or detract from the prevailing humanity of his characterizations. His lengthy digressions into the desperate experiences of a group of Ural-based coal miners illustrate the tension.Miners are, of course, the enduring symbol of the indefatigable proletariat, cherished by Marxists in this period for their salt-of-the-earth quality and their historically well-developed sense of class consciousness. But Grossman's technical descriptions of their routine activities are interesting in their own right, and the sensitivity with which he characterizes their inner lives is evocative ... His character sketch of Vavilov, the honorable and hardscrabble peasant-soldier whose experiences begin and end the book, shows that this where his heart is – with ordinary people and the emotional and psychological content of their lives ... An overwhelming melancholy settles gradually on the reader with full force in the course of the book's over-1,000 pages. But these grim facts are partly why his work in general, and Stalingrad in particular, is powerful: he is providing witness to posterity for such lost lives.
Tolstoy’s influence is certainly apparent in the interweaving of domestic drama with detailed accounts of the fierce military battle to defeat the invading German army. The lens through which we view the battle, the defining turning point in the Second World War against Nazi ideology, zooms in and out from the particular to the general ... Stalingrad, like its sequel, honours the ordinary people who make history, it is a hymn to the sacrifice of war ... [Grossman] is profoundly moved by small details that reveal the heroism of individuals caught in the crosshairs of war ... Grossman, the humanist, remains squarely and unflinchingly focused on the individual and collective determination to defeat Nazism.
One needs time and patience to read Stalingrad, but it is worth it. Moving majestically from Berlin to Moscow to the boundless Kazakh steppe, the novel attempts to replicate for the USSR what War and Peace had done for 19th-century Russian society and Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in 1812. A multitude of lives and fates are played out against a vast panoramic history ... Grossman accords a proper humanity to his subsidiary cast of steelworkers, factory chemists and Red Army soldiers, who battle against the odds from their ice-bound dugouts and foxholes ... Stalingrad has now been restored to the version that Grossman himself might have wanted.
Movingly illustrating the tragedies of wartime Soviet society, Grossman’s epic novel is a nonetheless powerful rebuke to those who equate Nazism and those who fought against it ... a rich narrative portraying the fate of a whole society through the perspective of a single family ... From the early catastrophic defeats of 1941, Grossman builds a total picture of Soviet society around the Shaposhnikov family ... The substantial sections of the book concerning the 'Home Front' may grate with those who care little for industrial fiction with which Grossman first cut his literary teeth; meanwhile a chapter praising Stalin’s role as commander-in-chief will be exotic for those unused to the style of high socialist realism demanded by Grossman’s censors ... Grossman’s understated yet redolent literary style is most obvious in Stalingrad when it comes to characterizing the confused, vulnerable, and isolated rather than the certain and the fanatical. Grossman’s empathetic and humanistic approach to his subjects appears...powerfully ... the translators’ excellent description of what was excised from the official editions—and why—offer a fascinating insight into the minds of Soviet censors (the unprofessionalism inherent in talk of dirty hands, thievery, and tardy commanders could be as problematic as divisive political ideas).
... a masterpiece of intertwined plots that cascade together in a long sequence of militaristic horror ... A spectacular afterword details the extent of censorship the text suffered under Stalin. As a stand-alone novel, this is both gripping and enlightening, a tour de force. When considered as a whole with Life and Fate, this diptych is one of the landmark accomplishments of 20th-century literature.
... extraordinary ... A classic of wartime literature finally available in a comprehensive English translation that will introduce new readers to a remarkable writer.
