Life and Fate...

In this morning's mail: Vasily Grossman (2005), A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941-1945 (New York: Pantheon: 0375424075).

Grossman's Life and Fate is certainly one of the best Russian novels of the twentieth century. These wartime notebooks were raw material for the novel, but are, I think, more important as witness to what went on between 1941 and 1945.

We in the west have still done far too little to repay our debt to the soldiers of the Red Army and to the workers of Magnitogorsk for what they did and suffered in those years.