Voices from Stalingrad

Between the mid-1940s and the early 1960s, Vasily Grossman wrote his masterpiece: the Stalingrad dilogy. "Dilogy" because it consists of two novels: Life and Fate (Zhizn i sudba) and its "prequel," a novel written immediately after the war, published in the USSR under the title For a Just Cause (Za pravoe Delo) in the early fifties after a strenuous tug-of-war with censorship. Life and Fate was less fortunate. The KGBs seizure of the manuscript in 1962 forced the writer to hide his novel, which then had a complex history of emigration and publication abroad. In his homeland, it was published only after the end of the USSR.
In Vasily Grossmans narratives, there is a whole people: farmers, workers, miners, scientists, mothers, women working in factories and in the countryside, girls and boys, young, old, orphans... everyone. Men and women of every social class, whether or not they play a significant role in the story. The novel knows all of them and, at the first opportunity, reveals their stories. To depict such a varied world, a variety of tones is employed. The two Stalingrad novels convey gravitas and solemnity, but also the fun and amusing lightness of comedy, and the melancholy of love stories. No sentimentality, though! Vasily Grossman’s style is never emphatic but dry and rigorous.
This ebook is an investigation into the breadth of expressive registers that the Stalingrad dilogy preserves even in translation, thanks to the work of great translators.