Please join Robert Chandler for an evening dedicated to his latest translation of Vasily Grossman’s writing: From the Front Line: Stalingrad, Treblinka, Berlin – 1941–45. 

From August 1941 until 1945, Vasily Grossman was a correspondent for Red Star, one of the three most important Russian newspapers of the time, read by soldiers and civilians alike. His articles provide a vivid picture of many of the most important moments of the Second World War, as he followed the battle from Stalingrad to Berlin, and was one of the first to expose the Treblinka death camp. Grossman’s articles have been republished many times – but only in censored versions; this new volume, in contrast, draws on all the extant manuscripts and typescripts. 

Few great writers have ever responded immediately to world-shaking events; usually they have needed time. Tolstoy, for example, wrote War and Peace more than 50 years after Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. Grossman is an exception. He began work on his novel Stalingrad only months after the end of the battle – and many chapters of of the book are based on his wartime journalism.

The best articles in From the Front Line provide sensitive and unexpected portraits of individuals, from private soldiers to important generals. Grossman is not – as was once thought – a dull and conventional Soviet writer who suddenly metamorphosed during the 1950s into a brilliant and courageous dissident. Even when he was embedded in the heart of the Soviet military establishment, Grossman’s war correspondence was both thoughtful and courageous, full of humanity, a witness to history.

Robert Chandler is an acclaimed translator of Russian literature, whose translations and co-translations from Russian include works by Alexander Pushkin, Hamid Ismailov, Teffi, Andrey Platonov and Vasily Grossman. In 2020 his co-translation of Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad was awarded the Lois Roth Award from the Modern Languages Association and shortlisted for four other translation prizes. Chandler is the (co)-editor and main translator of three anthologies of Russian literature for Penguin Classics: of Russian short stories, of Russian magic tales, and (together with Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski) of Russian poetry. His translations have won prizes in both the UK and the USA and his own poems have appeared in the TLS and elsewhere.

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