Free The Road by Vasily Grossman Page A

with his courage, tenacity, and physical endurance; he even proved to be an excellent shot with a pistol.
    David Ortenberg, the chief editor of
Red Star
, was evidently impressed by the articles and stories that Grossman contributed. In May 1942 he allowed Grossman a three-month leave to work on a novel about a Soviet military unit that breaks out of German encirclement. Grossman worked fast, and
The People Immortal
—the first Soviet novel about the war—was serialized in
Red Star
in July and August. Today much of it seems propagandistic, but at the time it was admired for its realism. As always, Grossman not only has a fine eye for a vivid detail but also the ability to make unexpected use of this detail. One memorable passage ends with a political commissar glimpsing the burning ruins of the town of Gomel as reflected in the eye of a dying horse: “The horse’s dark, weeping, torment-filled pupil, like a crystal mirror, absorbed the fire of the burning buildings, the smoke swirling through the air, the luminous, incandescent ruins and this forest of thin, tall chimneys now growing in the place of the buildings which had vanished in flames. And Bogaryov suddenly had the thought that he too had taken into himself all this destruction—this nighttime destruction ofan ancient and peaceful town.”
    In the autumn of 1942, Grossman was posted to Stalingrad. Unlike other Soviet journalists, who stayed in relative safety on the left bank of the Volga, Grossman spent nearly three months on the right bank. Earlier, before crossing the Volga, he had said to a group of colleagues, “To write about the Stalingrad battle one needs to have been on the right bank of the Volga, among those who are fighting in the ruins and on the bank of the river. Until I have been there I do not have the moral right to write about thedefenders of Stalingrad.” Once on the right bank, he shared the soldiers’ lives and won their trust. In the words of his fellow war correspondent Ilya Ehrenburg, “The soldiers at Stalingrad did not consider Grossman a journalist, but ratherone of their comrades in arms.”
    Grossman achieved particular renown for his reports from Stalingrad, but he covered all the main battles of the war, from the defense of Moscow to the vast tank battle of Kursk and the fall of Berlin, and his articles were valued by ordinary soldiers and generals alike. Groups of frontline soldiers would gather to listen while one of them read aloud from a single copy of
Red Star
; the writer Viktor Nekrasov, who fought at Stalingrad as a young man, remembers how “the papers with [Grossman’s] and Ehrenburg’s articles were read and reread by ustill they were in tatters.” And it was not only Soviet citizens who valued Grossman’s articles.
The Years of War
, a collection of Grossman’s reports from Stalingrad and elsewhere, was translated into a number of languages, including English, French, Dutch, and—in 1945—German. According to the historian Jochen Hellbeck, “a German Stalingrad veteran, Wilhelm Raimund Beyer, a young soldier during the war and later a noted philosopher and Hegel scholar, writes with great admiration about Grossman’s war stories [...] as coming very close tohis own experience of the battle.”
    Yekaterina Korotkova has written that “A Stalingrad veteran once told me that he witnessed my father drawing an entire platoon—every last man of them—into a general conversation. And I myself often saw him in conversation with yardmen or listening attentively to a little woman we all despised andwhom we had nicknamed Zhuchka.” Grossman had a remarkable gift for listening and no less a gift for evoking—even in the space of only a few lines—the uniqueness of an individual life. Ortenberg records that Grossman was always interested in someone’s life as a whole, not merely in his or her wartime experiences, and he suggests that this may have been one of the reasons why otherwise inarticulate people were