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Bearing witness: Vasily Grossman in Stalingrad
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Stalingrad
by Vasily Grossman
(Harvill Secker, £25)
THESE days, superlatives can be overused, resulting in truly great achievements being devalued.
Yet no-one can doubt that Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate deserves the highest accolade. So too with its prequel Stalingrad, now published for the first time in English.
There is evidence to suggest that this great Soviet writer intended the two works to be one monumental statement of humanity’s suffering and surviving the cataclysm of the second world war.
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