Like Tolstoy, Grossman convincingly portrays the thoughts and feelings of ordinary soldiers in the hours before their deaths. Grossman describes the ensuing German night attack using tanks and waves of men – a bitter hand-to-hand struggle fought with submachine guns and mortars, rifles and spades, across a darkness filled with “screams, groans and wheezes” and “the last bubbles and gurgles of departing life”.Ī Russian during the battle of Stalingrad in the second world war. It advanced 1,400 metres into enemy lines. Another howled, ripping through the air like a large steel claw,” he observes.Īt the moment of German triumph, a battalion of Soviet soldiers fought its way to Stalingrad’s railway station. “One, which must have had curly jagged edges, sounded like someone playing a comb or a kazoo. His descriptions of battle in an industrial age are some of the most vivid ever written – the whoosh of enemy fire, how “each splinter made its own particular sound”. In Stalingrad, Grossman transforms his reportage into a work of lyrical art and fierce power. His dispatches – written with unusual clarity and honesty – made him famous. There, he interviewed soldiers and generals, snipers and women medical orderlies. He narrowly escaped capture as Hitler’s divisions headed remorselessly east, and spent four months on the Stalingrad frontline. Grossman worked for nearly three years as a Soviet war correspondent. There, Soviet and German troops are engaged in a pitiless urban battle that Grossman calls “more grinding, more relentless than Thermopylae or even the Siege of Troy”. The story ends with Krymov crossing the Volga under fire. They include the physicist Viktor Shtrum and political commissar Nikolay Krymov, whose experiences are close to Grossman’s own. In Stalingrad, Grossman transforms his reportage into a work of lyrical art and fierce power
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