> Skip to content
  • Published: 1 November 2006
  • ISBN: 9781845950156
  • Imprint: Pimlico
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 400
  • RRP: $39.99
Categories:

A Writer At War

Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941-1945




A Writer at War offers the one outstanding eye-witness account of the war on the Eastern Front and perhaps the best descriptions ever of what Grossman called 'the ruthless truth of war'.


In the summer of 1941, as the Germans invade Russia, newspaper reporter Vasily Grossman is swept to the frontlines, witnessing some of the most savage atrocities in Russian history.

As Grossman follows the Red Army from the defence of Moscow, to the carnage at Stalingrad, to the Nazi genocide in Treblinka, his writings paint a vividly raw and devastating account of Operation Barbarossa during World War Two.
Grossman’s notebooks, war diaries, personal correspondence and newspaper articles are meticulously woven into a gripping narrative and provide a piercing look into the life of the author behind recent Sunday Times bestseller Stalingrad.

A Writer at War stands as an unforgettable eyewitness account of the Eastern Front and places Grossman as the leading Soviet voice of ‘the ruthless truth of war’.

‘A remarkable addition to the literature of 1941 – 1945...a wonderful portrait of the wartime experience of Russia... A worthy memorial to a remarkable man’ Sunday Telegraph

  • Published: 1 November 2006
  • ISBN: 9781845950156
  • Imprint: Pimlico
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 400
  • RRP: $39.99
Categories:

About the author

Vasily Grossman

Vasily Grossman was born in 1905. In 1941, he became a war reporter for the Red Army newspaper Red Star and came to be regarded as a legendary war hero. Life and Fate, his masterpiece, was considered a threat to the totalitarian regime, and Grossman was told that there was no chance of the novel being published for another 200 years. Grossman died in 1964.

Also by Vasily Grossman

See all

Praise for A Writer At War

As a pithy account of war at its most extreme, this fascinating book will rarely be bettered

James Delingpole, Mail on Sunday

Unforgettable... Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova have recovered nothing less than a lost classic of reportage

Sean McCarthy, The Scotsman

In bringing his notebooks to a wider audience, and in reminding us about this brilliant witness, Beevor and Vinogradova have done their readers - and Grossman's memory - a great service

Independent

A remarkable addition to the literature of 1941-45...a wonderful portrait of the wartime experience of Russia... A worthy memorial to a remarkable man

Max Hastings, Sunday Telegraph

Impeccably edited, the commentary as informative as it is unobtrusive.

Robert Chandler, Financial Times

Grossman was above all a clear-eyed and generous witness to the human cost of war, civilians and soldiers of both sides, the lost women and broken men; in the very highest order of journalistic achievement, he was as alert to the victims as much as to the heroes his audience was required to read about

David Flusfeder, Daily Telegraph

Grossman, like Isaac Babel twenty years before him, lifts war correspondence to new heights

Literary Review

Magnificent... Any war correspondent writing today about the horrors we are still being subjected to by ideologues, mean-spirited leaders and fanatics of various shades and faiths, should take the time to read him. There is a profound humanity in his prose, an abilitity for empathy and a capacity for rage that one rarely meets

Omer Bartov, Times Literary Supplement