Novel experiment

Having argued last week that it takes time (maybe a couple of generations) before fiction can be appropriately applied to traumatic historical events along comes a Radio 4 season celebrating the work of the Russian writer and ‘heroic war journalist’ Vasily Grossman, who wasted no time in translating his bitter experiences into a series of novels. Grossman witnessed the struggle for Stalingrad in the winter of 1942–3 as the war correspondent of the Red Star newspaper. He followed the Nazis’ retreat from Russian soil, and was one of the first reporters to enter and then write about the extermination camps at Treblinka and Auschwitz.

But as Stalin’s iron grip on life in Russia tightened, Grossman (who was Jewish and from Ukraine) turned against the Party and to fiction to tell of what he had witnessed — the extermination of the Jews, the devastating famine in Ukraine, the gulags, the purges.