The Music of Destruction | Mathias Fuelling

From the Front Line: Stalingrad–Treblinka–Berlin, 1941–1945 by Vasily Grossman translated from Russian by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler. NYRB Classics, 512 pages. 2026

During the final days of World War II, Vasily Grossman entered Adolf Hitler’s office study in the New Reich Chancellery in Berlin. Designed by Albert Speer, the building was meant to be the executive center for the new German empire; Grossman noted that among the ruins of the office “the giant globe that had long stood beside [Hitler’s] desk” had been “flattened into a pancake” when the ceiling collapsed. The entrance hall to the New Reich Chancellery, fitting the megalomaniacal Nazi style, was a massive corridor stretching, Grossman estimated, “hundreds of meters long.” Here, Grossman observed “two young Red Army soldiers are trying to ride bicycles along it. They are not having much success, but this does not upset them.” To get to this point, Grossman had advanced more than fifteen hundred miles over the course of four years.

Grossman’s two major novels, Stalingrad and Life and Fate, form a mirrored portrayal of Soviet society and WWII. While they are connected novels, with overlapping characters and storylines and a common emphasis on the nature of shared sacrifice within the Soviet state, they have fundamentally different aesthetic and ideological approaches. Across dozens of characters, Stalingrad emphasizes the struggle of the Soviet people against the Nazis, but this struggle is given meaning and purpose as towards the development and preservation of the socialist project. Life and Fate, using the same characters, also emphasizes the struggle of the Soviet people, yet not just against the Nazis but also against the Soviet state itself, emphasizing how they are trapped in a dual war both outwardly and within as the socialist project breaks down into an ideological justification for power and authority.

Stalingrad was first published in serial form in 1952, with the title For a Just Cause. Grossman began drafting it during the battle; the novel exemplifies the Soviet approved socialist realist approach, combining a rousing patriotic tribute to the war effort with detailed, almost photographically precise prose, and is explicitly modeled on Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

Stalingrad when first published initially received wide praise and was nominated for a Stalin Prize, the highest award for achievement across a range of disciplines in the Soviet Union at the time. In an abrupt shift, following the turn towards state-approved antisemitism with the fabrication of the Doctors’ Plot, Stalingrad was denounced and was almost pulled from circulation. Stalin’s death in March 1953 saved the novel. Life and Fate was written by Grossman across the 1950s and reflects his growing dissatisfaction with the Soviet state. In contrast to Stalingrad, it moves away from socialist realism, explicitly comparing the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany at points, and contains bitter depictions of the Soviet labor camps and the denunciations and moral compromises demanded of the intellectual and scientific class in the state. Soon after Grossman submitted a manuscript of Life and Fate to a Soviet journal in the autumn of 1960, his apartment was raided by the KGB. Agents seized his draft notebooks and the remaining manuscripts in his apartment; Grossman died believing that his masterpiece had been lost, but a manuscript copy that Grossman had given to a friend was eventually smuggled out of the Soviet Union in 1970.

Grossman died early at the age of fifty-eight in 1964, having written novels that chronicled the Soviet experience, alongside a mountain of articles, essays, and short stories. Over the past twenty years NYRB Classics has put out seven books by Grossman, collecting almost all of his output, translated to wide acclaim by the husband-and-wife team of Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, working in collaboration across various volumes with the Russian editors and translators Julia Volohova, Olga Mukovnikova, Anna Aslanyan, and Yury Bit-Yunan. The Chandlers’ latest translation of Grossman—with editorial help from the independent Russian scholar Julia Volohova—is From the Front Line: Stalingrad–Treblinka–Berlin, 1941–1945, a mix of articles that Grossman wrote while a front-line war correspondent embedded with the Red Army and making the notes for what would become Stalingrad.

The Chandlers have crosschecked their translations of the articles from drafts from Grossman’s own notebooks, and typescripts submitted to the newspaper prior to staff editing, producing the fullest versions of these articles in any language, as well as having painstakingly traced, and in some places restored, where sentences were cut or altered by editors from Grossman’s typescripts. Split into six sections, From the Front Line follows Grossman’s reporting from the summer of 1942 through his time at Stalingrad, and then across Ukraine, Poland, and Germany, until his final wartime articles from Berlin and postwar reflections. Read with A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941-1945, translated and edited by Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova, the present collection makes for a more or less comprehensive whole of Grossman’s writing during the war.

Grossman showed the Soviet soldiers their own dignity, and his propaganda value would not be lost on the authorities.

During the siege of Leningrad, copies of Soviet newspapers were smuggled into the city through the Axis blockade. These newspapers were then plastered onto the walls of buildings to remind the public that the Red Army was fighting for their liberation. Throughout the war, they were, in the words of the writer Victor Nekrasov, “read and reread by us until they were in tatters.” The Soviet newspaper system was vast during the war; according to the historian Brandon Schechter “over 1,300 newspapers and journals were produced for the army, with a total circulation of over 4.38 million. There were nearly five thousand full-time journalists and writers in the army and hundreds of thousands of soldiers who wrote occasional pieces and letters.” The newspaper was the key form of written material for all members of Soviet society during the war; Grossman was one of the most acclaimed and well-known of the front-line Soviet writers.

Grossman’s life was inextricably bound up with the trajectory of the Soviet state. He was born into a middle class assimilated Jewish family in 1905 in Berdichev, a historically Jewish-majority city southwest of Kiev in Ukraine.

As a teenager Grossman attended Moscow State University to study—following his father’s footsteps—chemical engineering in the 1920s, as part of the Soviet push to create a technical cadre to develop the state. At the beginning of the 1930s, Grossman worked in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine at a coal mine outside of the city of Donetsk, then known as Stalino, as a chemist performing air quality tests in the mine.

Grossman had already begun publishing long form journalism in the late 1920s. While in the Donbas Grossman continued his journalism career and also began writing and publishing short stories. Grossman soon moved to Moscow from the Donbas, taking a job at a pencil factory. Grossman wrote his first novel, Glückauf, between 1931 and 1932 and published it in 1934. Grossman quit his job at the pencil factory before Glückauf went to print, becoming a full-time writer. He published another novel, Stepan Kolchugin, in serialization between 1937 and 1940. By the outbreak of the war, he was one of the most prominent writers in the country.

Whereas Grossman’s contemporaries, like Curzio Malaparte, were prone to editorialization of the realities of occupation and militarization, Grossman’s wartime reporting is strikingly free of ego. Malaparte, the aristocratic fascist aesthete whose nightmarish war novels Kaputt and The Skin are dense with allusions to high culture, couldn’t be more different from the Jewish communist with a background in journalism and Soviet approved socialist realism. Ironically, Malaparte and Grossman faced each other in the opening months of the invasion of the Soviet Union by the Nazis and their Axis allies, Malaparte posted with a Romanian army advancing into southwestern Ukraine as a frontline reporter for an Italian Fascist newspaper, Grossman on the eastern side of the great Ukrainian steppe covering the retreat of the Red Army—two great writers separated by hundreds of miles, the gulf between them the fate of the twentieth century.

Grossman had a renowned talent for solidarity with his subjects; a veteran of Stalingrad who encountered him during the battle remembered how Grossman was able to have a conversation with his whole platoon.

Grossman’s editor at Red Star, David Ortenberg, commented on how Grossman was able to become “like one of the family” after he had spent a week with an anti-tank unit. Ortenberg wrote in his memoirs how Grossman was able to establish a rapport with a famously taciturn general from Siberia while at Stalingrad, to the astonishment of the other Soviet reporters, getting this general “to talk freely to him for six hours, during one of the fiercest days of the battle.” Grossman’s colleague, the great Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg, also noted that, “The soldiers at Stalingrad did not look on Grossman as a journalist, but rather as one of their comrades in arms.” Grossman never makes himself the central subject in his reporting; he never presumes that the reader is interested purely in what he himself thinks and feels. The rare moments where he discusses himself are always a launching point to a further investigation of the world and the people around him. For example, in a brief excerpt from an article titled “The Stalingrad Army,” Grossman recalls the New Year’s Day, 1943 spent listening to a recording of one of Beethoven’s “Twenty-Five Irish Songs” on a gramophone in a cellar HQ with a group of Soviet soldiers, with its refrain asking a female personification of Death to “wait behind the door” while a blizzard rages outside. Grossman writes that this “was probably one of my most intense experiences of the entire war.” And yet he goes on to recount the battle for Stalingrad, listing the names of individual soldiers, their faces, features, and heroism. Grossman’s interest is in the common man. Grossman is merely a conduit.

The totality of Grossman’s world emerges in his profiles of a young sniper, “going on twenty,” who trained himself to be able to tell distances at a glance relative to his own steps; the members of a Red Army unit trapped in a coal mine for three weeks in the steppe outside Donetsk; a tankman defending a command post in Stalingrad who, after running out of ammunition, threw stones at the Germans; and the soldiers in Berlin at the end of the war marveling at the wealth concentrated there and wondering why the Germans attacked the poor-by-comparison Soviet Union.