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The People Immortal by Vasily Grossman review – Soviet wartime propaganda with a human face
An expanded reissue of the author’s 1942 novel about a Red Army unit encircled by German forces is overtly polemical but also vividly written
Some authors have a very active afterlife, though the results when the writer’s literary estate dips its hand in the bran tub marked “other works” can be very mixed.
- John Self
- The Observer
The Soviet writer Vasily Grossman already had many of his books available in English at the time of his death in 1964, but a renewed surge of interest in his masterpiece Life and Fate over the past decade means his other work is being rediscovered.
These books are not of the same calibre as Life and Fate: even on its…