The People Immortal

The People Immortal
Vasily Grossman
RRP:
NZ$ 65.00
Our Price:
NZ$ 52.00
Hardback
h238 x 158mm - 352pg
18 Aug 2022 UK
International import eta 7-19 days
9781529414738
Out Of Stock
Currently no stock in-store, stock is sourced to your order
One of Grossman' s three great war novels - alongside Life and Fate and Stalingrad. "The People Immortal is a remarkable novel that illuminates the terrible realities of Barbarossa and the banal horror of warfare with incomparable understanding and insight" JONATHAN DIMBLEBY"There are always good reasons for reading Grossman, but few times are as resonant as our own. As a proud son of Ukraine, steeped in Russian culture, Grossman was both a chronicler of the Soviet Union' s greatest victories and a clear-eyed investigator of some of its darkest crimes. " JOHN THORNHILL, Financial TimesSet during the catastrophic defeats of the war' s first months, it tracks a Red Army regiment that wins a minor victory in eastern Belorussia but fails to exploit this success. A battalion is then entrusted with the task of slowing the German advance, and eventually encircled, before ultimately breaking out and joining with the rest of the Soviet forces. Grossman' s descriptions of the natural world - and his characters' relationship to it - are both vivid and unexpected, as are his memorable character sketches: eleven-year-old Lionya is determined to hang on to his toy revolver as he walks a long distance behind German lines; his defiant grandmother slaps a German officer in the face and is shot; Kotenko, a fiercely anti-Soviet peasant who initially welcomes the Germans, hangs himself in despair when they treat him with contempt; and Semion Ignatiev, a womanizer and gifted story-teller, turns out to be the boldest and most resourceful of the rank-and file soldiers. Grossman spent most of the war years close to the front line. But The People Immortal is far from being mere morale-boosting propaganda. On the contrary, as letters included in this volume make clear, it was read as a textbook, and as a work of military education. This edition includes not only the unredacted novel itself, translated here for the first time since 1946, but also a wealth of background material. Translated from the Russian by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler
You will not only discover that you love his characters and want to stay with them - that you need them in your life as much as you need your own family and loved ones - but that at the end . . . you will want to read it again * Daily Telegraph on STALINGRAD * Few works of literature since Homer can match the piercing, unshakably humane gaze that Grossman turns on the haggard face of war * Economist on STALINGRAD * There are always good reasons for reading Grossman, but few times are as resonant as our own. As a proud son of Ukraine, steeped in Russian culture, Grossman was both a chronicler of the Soviet Union' s greatest victories and a clear-eyed investigator of some of its darkest crimes. -- John Thornhill * Financial Times * The People Immortal is a remarkable novel that illuminates the terrible realities of Barbarossa and the banal horror of warfare with incomparable understanding and insight. As you would expect from Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, the translation is superb. -- Jonathan Dimbleby
VASILY SEMIONOVICH GROSSMAN (1905-1964) was born into a Jewish family in Berdichev, in what is now Ukraine. In 1934 he published both "In the Town of Berdichev" - a short story that won him immediate acclaim - and the novel Gluckauf, about Donbas miners. During the Second World War, he worked as a reporter for the army newspaper Red Star; his "The Hell of Treblinka" (1944) was one of the first accounts of a Nazi death camp to be published in any language. His long novel Stalingrad was published in 1952. During the next few years Grossman worked on his second Stalingrad novel: Life and Fate. In February 1961, the KGB confiscated his typescript, but he was able to continue working on Everything Flows, which is yet more critical of the Soviet regime, until his last days. The short stories he wrote during his last three years are among his supreme achievements; English translations are included in The Road. Grossman died on 14 September 1964, on the eve of the twenty-third anniversary of the massacre of the Jews of Berdichev, in which his mother had died.
Status: Indent title, imported to order
ISBN-13: 9781529414738
Published: 18 Aug 2022
Published In: United Kingdom
Imprint: MacLehose Press
Publisher: Quercus Publishing
Format: Hardback
Height: 238mm
Width: 158mm
Spine: 36mm
Weight: 660g
Pages: 352

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