A Writer at War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army, 1941-1945 Book

A Writer at War is a selection of Grossman's wartime writings, some journalism for an army newspaper, some scribblings from his notebooks and bits from his letters. I stepped into reading it from Life and Fate which at the time seemed a sensible decision, in hindsight I am not so sure, while there are bits which plainly get recycled into his later fiction - for instance a group of soldiers sawing up a frozen horse for their dinner (or perhaps breakfast - well for a meal for sure) and in general terms the sense of everything being in flux, particularly towards the end of the war with people in motion forwards and backwards, to home or into captivity is true of the atmosphere of his novel too.

Plainly it took a while for Life and Fate to ferment and stew inside Grossman, but one can sense that one thing he did was collapse down his entire experience and changes in outlook during the war years into the time period of the battle of Stalingrad.

One might also be interested in this volume if you have in interest in the second world war, but really I think for me this is a book about journalism - the difference between seeing stuff happen around you and creating, or explaining to an audience, depended on what your attitude is, a narrative. Naturally, as one might guess since Grossman is writing in time of war and more specifically for an army newspaper there is a certain amount of morale boosting propaganda - not quite as far as 'one armed Uzbek kills 14 Germans and captures 20 more, equipped only with a soft boiled egg' but tending in that direction.

The big factor is Grossman's idealism and his Jewishness, both of which were problematic in the politics of the times. Grossman was perhaps using his journalism to teach the Red Army to be the kind of Red Army he wanted to see, the reality of looting and raping, drunkenness and casual killing was less to his taste than acts of kindness or fighting in defence of the Soviet motherland or men from central Asia learning Russian and fighting as equals with everybody else, and as the offensive begins, followed by territorial gains, then the question 'where have all the Jews gone?' seems to be constantly on his mind - the longest piece of journalism in this entire book is a massive article about the Treblinka camp, it is a good sample of all his pieces showing both ability in presenting a compelling and hard hitting information, great diligence in tracking down sources but perhaps the critical sense loosing out to the desire for individual stories and acts of heroism.

In the earlier part of the book there seemed to be more from the notebooks and less journalism, later more journalism and less from the notebooks, we don't get to see how the observations become articles or how the articles get edited and how the readers respond - so the book as it is, is not a compete study of Grossman as journalist.

Really what I am left with is a rough attempt of the biography of the novelist as a younger journalist
- the weight loss, learning to shoot, disillusionment, guilt, growth of a political vision.

A powerful book , but perhaps one that is left to try and find an audience. On completely unrelated notes I enjoyed some cross-overs with other reading such as the mystery of shorts in the Soviet Union (as discussed in Wladimir Kaminov's Meine Mutter, ihre Katze und der Staubsauger: Ein Unruhestand in 33 Geschichten ) here the shorts are misread by local inhabitants as some odd form of underwear and one gets the feeling that the worst thing about the invading Italians apparently was their habit of eating frogs and that for some the worst indignity and horror of being occupied by the Germans was simply that some of them went around with no trousers on (ie they wore shorts). In truth perhaps such things disturb our sense of the morality of the universe more than fascist ideology and violence - such is the nature of the human brain. The other over lap was the shock of the relative prosperity that the Soviets discovered crossing into Germany which in another way emphasises one of the points made in Lizzie Collingham's The Taste Of War: World War Two And The Battle For Food - that relative to Germany the Soviet Union was poor and its resources difficult to exploit due to that relative under development, the decision to invade then was a strategic dead-end from the first.


Someone might ask: ' why write about this, why remember all that?' It is the writer's duty to tell this terrible truth, and it is the civilian duty of the reader to learn it. everyone who would turn away, who would shut his eyes and walk past would insult the memory of the dead. Everyone who does not know the truth about this would never be able to understand with what sort of enemy, with what sort of monster, our Red Army started on its own mortal combat (p 301)
from his Treblinka article - nicely articulating Grossman's conception of the war.