![]() ![]() There could be no further retreat.” If you were going off to war, you expected to be killed. The fate of a great country and a great people-the fate of the world-was being decided. There was, therefore, no greater crime in the world than retreat. There’s no clever way to get killed.” The line is delivered after so many of Grossman’s characters (civilians and military) are dead, in large part because Stalin has earlier decreed, “any further retreat would mean the end of everything. As a battalion commander observes late in the novel, “All deaths are stupid…. ![]() What we do know for certain is that Grossman was a war correspondent and that much of what he observed ended up in the various editions of the work, which Chandler calls “an act of homage…to honour the dead.” It may have helped that in the midst of the appearance of the various editions of Stalingrad (1952-1956), Stalin died (1953). They don’t tell us how many years were involved in examining multiple versions and printed editions of Grossman’s thousand-page novel, but in both the introduction and an afterword Robert tells us that “Grossman battled editors and censors throughout his career,” and that he had to tote the line for what Stalin himself regarded as appropriate Russian realism. It’s a small miracle that we have an English translation of Vasily Grossman’s novel, Stalingrad, given the huge amount of restorative work Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler had to undertake to piece the novel together. ![]()
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