Vasily Grossman - The Road: Short Fiction and Essays

Vasily Grossman is recognized as one of the outstanding literary figures of the twentieth century, best known as the author of the novel Life and Fate. The short fiction and essays collected here are at least as accomplished, and illustrate the remarkable breadth of his work: 'The Road', an account of the war from the point of view of a mule in an Italian artillery regiment, can be read as a 4,000-word distillation of Life and Fate; 'In the Town of Berdichev' (the author's first published success, which won the admiration of Maksim Gorky and Isaak Babel) is the story of a woman commissar who has to choose between her newborn baby and her Red Army comrades; 'Mama' is based on a true story about an orphaned girl who was adopted by Nikolay Yezhov (head of the N.K.V.D. at the height of the Great Terror).

In addition to the eleven stories, this volume includes two letters Grossman wrote to his mother after her death, and three articles, including the complete text of 'The Hell of Treblinka', one of the very first, and still among the most powerful descriptions of a Nazi extermination camp, indeed this essay was read out as evidence during the Nuremberg Trials in 1945-46 where German officials involved in the Holocaust and other war crimes were brought before an international tribunal.

Grossman's stories - works of satire, comedy, tragedy and pure narrative - read like descriptions of real events, drawing as they do on the human detail of Russia's turbulent twentieth century. Illustrated by Robert Chandler's introductions, they demonstrate one by one the bold intelligence, delicate irony and extraordinary vividness for which Grossman has justly become renowned.

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"No matter how mighty the empire, all this is only mist and fog and as such will be blown away. Only one true force remains; only one true force continues to evolve and live;
and this force is liberty.
To a man, to live means to be free "

Vasily Grossman
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