The Road brings together short stories, journalism, essays, and letters by Vasily Grossman, the author of Life and Fate, providing new insight into the life and work of this extraordinary writer. The stories range from Grossman’s first success, “In the Town of Berdichev,” a piercing reckoning with the cost of war, to such haunting later works as “Mama,” based on the life of a girl who was adopted at the height of the Great Terror by the head of the NKVD and packed off to an orphanage after her father’s downfall. The girl grows up struggling with the discovery that the parents she cherishes in memory are part of a collective nightmare that everyone else wishes to forget. The Road also includes the complete text of Grossman’s harrowing report from Treblinka, one of the first anatomies of the workings of a death camp; “The Sistine Madonna,” a reflection on art and atrocity; as well as two heartbreaking letters that Grossman wrote to his mother after her death at the hands of the Nazis and carried with him for the rest of his life.
Meticulously edited and presented by Robert Chandler, The Road allows us to see one of the great figures of twentieth-century literature discovering his calling both as a writer and as a man.
"There are always many 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. He would have understood better than most the split identities, divided loyalties and historical animosities that underlie the current conflict. Indeed, he embodied many of them. . . . As a victim, as much as a witness, of history, Grossman’s writings also tell us much about the tragic fate of Ukraine and its Jewish community, in particular. . . . It is as an insistent, truth-telling humanist that Grossman may have left his most lasting legacy. . . . even today, as we watch another brutal war ravaging the long-suffering people of Ukraine, it is striking how his spirit endures."
—John Thornhill, Financial Times
"Another superb translated work to appear [in 2010] was The Road, comprising Vasily Grossman's short stories and journalism. Although occasionally tainted by propaganda, his stories—particularly the later ones—are extraordinary, punctuated with small details that stop the eyes and drag them back to read certain phrases again."
—The Guardian
"Grossman's unsparing, literary account of the horrific ways Nazi Germany implemented its ethnic-cleansing program at Treblinka was one of the first reports of a death camp anywhere in Europe and eventually provided prosecutors at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal with crucial background information. The surprise is that up until now an English-language translation of Grossman's lengthy article has never been published in its entirety. That will soon change with the publication of The Road, a collection of some of Grossman's best short stories and war-time articles, including 'The Hell of Treblinka.'"
—Tobias Grey, The Wall Street Journal
"Grossman's greatness is manifested in a constant ability to surprise his readers: where we lazily expect darkness and gloom, Grossman provides lightness and humour; what might seem at first glance to be narrow polemic turns out, when paid more attention, to have the grandeur of tragedy."
—David Lea, The Literateur
"Vasily Grossman is the Tolstoy of the USSR."
—Martin Amis
"Soviet author Grossman volunteered for the army when the Germans invaded in 1941 and spent more than three years as a special correspondent at the front for the army newspaper Red Star. His wartime writing established him as a major "voice" of war—a status resembling in many ways that of Ernie Pyle in America...Grossman was a perceptive observer with an eye for essential detail. His vignettes of the fighting at Kursk and the battles that brought the Red Army into Berlin are models of combat reporting, and the elegiac realism of his description of Treblinka merits wide anthologizing in Holocaust literature."
—Publishers Weekly
