The Writer at War

A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941-1945 (2005)

Edited and translated by Antony Beever and Luba Vinogradova

This is a mostly incoherent, and therefore mostly incomprehensible, book about WWII.

Maybe the fault lies in the translation, but I suspect that the problems run much deeper than that.

There is no question that Vasily Grossman was severely traumatized by the war (his own family was massacred by the Nazis).

Grossman got into trouble with the Stalinists because he wanted to tell the truth about the war. Soviet officials tried to destroy every copy of the manuscript for this book, but one was smuggled out and eventually published.

I would rate this book as not worth reading with one possible exception. If there is someone who has never learned a thing about the Hitler-Stalin conflict in WWII, this book will convey just how horrible it was for everyone involved.