Promotional Information

A WRITER AT WAR offers the one outstanding eye-witness account of the war on the Eastern Front and perhaps the best descriptions ever of what Grossman called 'the ruthless truth of war'.

About the Author

Vasily Grossman was born in 1905 in the Ukrainian town of Berdichev. In 1941, he became a war reporter for the Red Army newspaper, Red Star, and came to be regarded as a legendary war hero, reporting on the defence of Stalingrad, the fall of Berlin and the consequences of the Holocaust. Life and Fate, the masterpiece he completed in 1960, was considered a threat to the totalitarian regime, and Grossman was told that there was no chance of the novel being published for another 200 years. Grossman died in 1964.

Antony Beevor first came across the notebooks of Vasily Grossman when working on his boook Stalingrad, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Wolfson Prize for History and the Hawthornden Prize. He has also written Berlin- The Downfall 1945, which has been translated into twenty-five languages, and most recently, The Mystery of Olga Chekhova. He is currently the chairman of the Society of Authors.

Dr Lyubov Vinogradova is a researcher, translator and freelance journalist, studied biology at university in Moscow, as well as taking degrees in English and German. She received a PhD in microbiology in 2000. She has worked with Antony Beevor for the last ten years on his three most recent books as well as with other British and American historians.

Reviews

A remarkable addition to the literature of 1941-45...a wonderful portrait of the wartime experience of Russia... A worthy memorial to a remarkable man
*Sunday Telegraph*

Magnificent... Any war correspondent writing today about the horrors we are still being subjected to by ideologues, mean-spirited leaders and fanatics of various shades and faiths, should take the time to read him. There is a profound humanity in his prose, an abilitity for empathy and a capacity for rage that one rarely meets
*Times Literary Supplement*

Grossman, like Isaac Babel twenty years before him, lifts war correspondence to new heights
*Literary Review*

As a pithy account of war at its most extreme, this fascinating book will rarely be bettered
*Mail on Sunday*

Unforgettable... Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova have recovered nothing less than a lost classic of reportage
*The Scotsman*

Soviet author Grossman volunteered for the army when the Germans invaded in 1941 and spent more than three years as a special correspondent at the front for the army newspaper Red Star. His wartime writing established him as a major "voice" of war-a status resembling in many ways that of Ernie Pyle in America. This volume, a perfect complement to the panoramic vision of Ivan's War, collects excerpts from Grossman's notebooks and published dispatches, few of them longer than a couple of paragraphs. And while the dispatches usually describe scenes fitting with Soviet orthodoxy, Grossman's notebooks also record the bloody-mindedness, the despair and the disaffection that permeated Soviet ranks as the Red Army paid its dues of learning how to fight a modern war. That material, of course, was not published at the time. Grossman was a perceptive observer with an eye for essential detail. His vignettes of the fighting at Kursk and the battles that brought the Red Army into Berlin are models of combat reporting, and the elegiac realism of his description of Treblinka merits wide anthologizing in Holocaust literature. This volume stands among the finest eyewitness accounts of Soviet Russia's war on the Eastern Front. (Jan. 10) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

A remarkable addition to the literature of 1941-45...a wonderful portrait of the wartime experience of Russia... A worthy memorial to a remarkable man -- Max Hastings * Sunday Telegraph *
Magnificent... Any war correspondent writing today about the horrors we are still being subjected to by ideologues, mean-spirited leaders and fanatics of various shades and faiths, should take the time to read him. There is a profound humanity in his prose, an abilitity for empathy and a capacity for rage that one rarely meets -- Omer Bartov * Times Literary Supplement *
Grossman, like Isaac Babel twenty years before him, lifts war correspondence to new heights * Literary Review *
As a pithy account of war at its most extreme, this fascinating book will rarely be bettered -- James Delingpole * Mail on Sunday *
Unforgettable... Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova have recovered nothing less than a lost classic of reportage -- Sean McCarthy * The Scotsman *