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Chargement... The People Immortal (1942)par Vasily Grossman
Historical Fiction (65) Chargement...
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"Vasily Grossman's three war novels are recognizably the work of the same writer; all display his sharp psychological insights and his gift for descriptive passages that appeal to all our different senses. Nevertheless, the goals he set himself in these novels are very different. Life and Fate is not only a novel but also a work of moral and political philosophy, focusing on the question of whether or not it is possible for someone to behave ethically even when subjected to overwhelming violence. The earlier Stalingrad is primarily a work of memorialization, a tribute to all who died during the war. The still earlier The People Immortal, set during the catastrophic defeats of the war's first months, is both a work of fiction and an important contribution to the Soviet war effort. The plot of The People Immortal is simple: A Red Army regiment wins a minor victory in eastern Belorussia but fails to exploit this success. One battalion is then entrusted with the task of slowing the German advance, even though it is understood that this battalion will inevitably end up being encircled. The novel ends with this battalion breaking out of encirclement and joining up with the rest of the Soviet forces. The NYRB Classics edition includes not only the novel itself (supplemented with passages from Grossman's typescripts that were censored from the published version of the novel), but also a variety of background material, including appreciative letters Grossman received during the first year of the war from Soviet commissars and commanders. Share"-- Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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(Conversely, I borrowed a library copy of Gail Jones' new novel One Another and was about half way through when I realised I had to have my own copy, and I bought it this week at Benn's Bookshop where I met up for the first time with Jennifer from Tasmanian Bibliophile at Large.)
It's difficult to write about novels of war at this time. There is a proxy war of attrition between the US and Russia, and there is asymmetrical warfare in the Middle East, both of these wars causing suffering on all sides, and neither of them are being objectively reported by independent war correspondents. The People Immortal is to some extent a work of propaganda too, although unlike the journalists reporting on the current conflicts, Grossman was 'on the ground' reporting for the Red Star, and he spoke the lingua franca of the soldiers among whom he travelled. And although there were constraints on what he could publish, he wrote about the realities of war, with tenderness and clarity emerging from his first hand experience among ordinary people.
(Soviet war correspondents were not the only ones constrained by wartime censorship. John Steinbeck's brilliant Once There was a War begins with a piece written from a troopship travelling to an unknown destination, which we now know was heading for the D-day landings. But Steinbeck did not have to fear his political leaders in the way that Grossman did, see my review of An Armenian Sketchbook.)
FWIW the bestselling (i.e. populist) British historian Antony Beevor has a very high opinion of Grossman's war reportage. He has even edited a translation by Dr. Lyubov Vinogradov of Grossman's A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941–1945. The blurb at Goodreads describes it as a vivid eyewitness account of the Eastern Front and 'the ruthless truth of war.'
The 'ruthless truth' was that in 1941, a poorly prepared Russia was reeling from Hitler's breach of the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact. You only have to watch a couple of episodes of the documentary Soviet Storm on YouTube with its helpful maps to see how rapidly the German invasion over-ran the Soviets, occupying vast swathes of Soviet territory all the way to the outskirts of Moscow. (The post-Soviet Russian-made Soviet Storm is also a work of propaganda, but it's a useful corrective to the Cold War propaganda that WW2 was won on D-Day. It acknowledges the catastrophic losses and the suffering, and it also identifies Stalin's purges of military leaders and disastrous decisions by the Stavka, and acknowledges Lend Lease and other allied contributions.)
Grossman's novel, published in the early stages of the war, is about a group of soldiers who were part of the thousands trapped in a massive German encirclement, summarised in the blurb like this:
Writing even at this early stage of the war, Grossman saw the scale of the conflict:
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2024/04/01/the-people-immortal-1942-by-vasily-grossman-... ( )