Although best-known for his major novels, Vasily Grossman's powerful social realism was rooted in his active involvement in the Red Army’s struggle against Nazism. His war-time writings are now presen...

Podkolzin is playing a more complete game, driving to the net in offensive situations and increasing his shooting.

Podkolzin is playing a more complete game, driving to the net in offensive situations and increasing his shooting.

Vasily Grossman, From the Front Line. Stalingrad-Treblinka-Berlin, 1941—45, translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, with introduction and notes by Robert Chandler and Julia Volohova, New York Review of Books, 2026. The Soviet writer Vasily Grossman is best-known for his fiction—His novels Life and Fate and its newly translated prequel, Stalingrad, are correctly seen as among the greatest works of world literature. But the powerful social realism of these novels was rooted in Vasily Grossman’s direct involvement in the Red Army’s efforts to fight off the Nazi invasion during World War. For almost the entirety of the war, Grossman stood at the front lines as a war reporter for Red Star (Krasnaia zvezda) and bore witness to every major battle and the liberation of Eastern Europe and Germany from fascism. Along with his colleague Ilya Ehrenburg, he was among the first to report on the Nazi death camps in occupied Poland, most notably Treblinka, where millions of Jews had been murdered. His essay The Hell of Treblinka was used as evidence in the Nuremberg Trials. Now, the most complete edition to date of his wartime writings has been issued in the English language. In contrast to an earlier book with excerpts...