Celia recommends Vassily Grossman’s Stalingrad, in numbered segments:

1. During the Battle of Stalingrad, where he was a war reporter for Krasnaya Zvevda, Vassily Grossman wrote a letter to his daughter, telling her that it was impossible to read anything above the hellish thunder of bombs, except for War and Peace.
2. For a while Grossman was called the Soviet Tolstoy. Grossman rejected this designation by writing his sequel to Stalingrad, called Life and Fate, in which the protagonists of Stalingrad slowly realize that they are trapped in a struggle, not between a good global power and an evil one, but between two brutal totalitarian ideologies, Stalinism and Nazism, equally indifferent to life. A lot of English-language critics have tended to dismiss Stalingrad and praise Life and Fate, lauding the one as a mammoth act of dissent, and remembering the other as a sort of literary pretzel worked over and over again by the censors, until it turned into nothing much.
3. I think the truth is more complicated. What Stalingrad is really about is the promise of the Russian Revolution, the hope of equality and justice and enough for everyone, coming repeatedly into contact with the corruption and indifference of the actual regime. There’s not always much daylight between the Nazi soldiers raiding houses for clothing and furs to send back to their families, and the Soviet generals retreating from them, who scold their staff when their fine china is mislaid and are sure that what’s happening to the country at large—the soldiers, the refugees, the villagers stuck behind German lines—won’t ever happen to them. Where the heroism of the novel happens is with the small people. Grossman’s interest is in the people doing what they can in a system that perceives them only with vast indifference. As I read, I wondered how the Soviet censors nitpicked chapters on the heroic miners supporting the war effort, but somehow missed the force of Grossman’s anger against everyone in charge of the war.
4. “Evil is stronger than good,” says Sofia Osipovna, near the beginning of the novel. I love Sofia Osipovna. She’s a surgeon in her fifties or sixties, middle-aged, butch (Grossman writes: “mannish,” but without the negativity that that description sometimes encodes). When her house is bombed to rubble in the first air strike on Stalingrad, she jumps out of her bath and saves her cigarettes and her best friend’s letters, and then she walks through the fires to her hospital to see what she can do there. Evil is not stronger than good within her. But, in the whole world, perhaps it is.
5. I am writing this in segments because I’m not sure what a singular review of this book would look like. Or rather, because I’m not sure how to review a book that is so deeply concerned with the selfishness and incompetence of power and the small, private strengths of individuals, and not leave some kind of crack in the writing, through which the present day might get in.
6. How do people act, under the fear of death? It’s a central question of Stalingrad, and, for many of the main characters, delayed long into the novel, which begins in a Stalingrad still full of civilians, engineers and nurses and functionaries who know that the war is approaching, but hope against all odds that it won’t actually reach them. They’re decent, mostly, if imperfect, but the question hanging over them is how long can their little decencies last? Some of them will become the ones who hoard their food and water and threaten to throw strangers out of their bomb shelters. And others will rush into burning buildings to save the dying. There’s a strange disconnect between past action and present, and so the central suspense of the novel is not how the battle of Stalingrad will end, or how the war will end, but who each person will become when confronted with the measure of their bravery.
7. To that end, this is a novel almost without structure. It hares off after a Russian officer escaping from encirclement, after a grandmother boarding a refugee boat with her daughter and grandson, after a miner providing coal for the Russian tank factories. The main set of characters largely evacuate Stalingrad two-thirds of the way through the novel and then appear only in letters and by word-of-mouth. One soldier gets a chapter in the novel’s opening and then disappears for eight-hundred pages. Sometimes there’s an interlude of wild comedy, as when one officer, trying to fight his fear of death, can’t resist stopping on a bridge that’s being bombed to dashingly smoke a cigarette. Sometimes the novel feels over-ambitious, and sometimes like the confusion of war, and sometimes like Grossman is going through his own memories, trying to put a life to each face, and asking us to remember, with him.
8. “They go to their death as if to a holiday,” says a young war reporter to General Yeromenko, halfway through the novel, describing the Russian troops. Grossman doesn’t have much affection for generals, and most of their portrayals are deeply unflattering. Yeromenko is the exception. And I wonder how much of Grossman himself might be in the tactless war reporter, who Yeromenko rebukes: “[No], comrade writer, we do not want to die, we do not see death as a holiday, and we will not surrender Stalingrad.”
9. Nevertheless, they do die. Simone Weil, writing about the Iliad, argued that its endless depictions of violence on the human body are born from a bitterness founded on love and sorrow. So it is too with Grossman, who believes in heroism, and yet is constantly pushing against it, asking that we remember not just the glory but the confusion and terror. He gives one of his heroes, the nuclear physicist Victor Shtrum, the name and biography of a Jewish scientist murdered during Stalin’s purges, and so thoroughly wiped from the record that no censor seems to have noticed. He sends Shtrum a letter, written by his mother, who is trapped behind German lines and soon to die in the Holocaust (as Grossman’s own mother was, and did). The text of the letter goes unprinted. Traveling across front lines and borders, it is like a stone thrown into a deep well, a wish that arrives from out of the jaws of death, bearing witness to the dead.
10. Then there is the last battle of the book, which takes place in an abandoned train station, where a Russian battalion, attempting to retake Stalingrad, has advanced too far, and left itself flanked by German troops. They hold the station, for hours, then days, knowing that no help will come for them. How do you remember them? By their names and by their stories, what you know of them. And, in the novel’s last pages, by the last visible traces of battle, seen from a distance: “There on the dark blue tracing papers of the night sky,” Grossman writes, “was a living, breathing sketch of the war; dotted lines of tracer fire, bursts from machine guns and the flames of explosions marked out the strongholds and force fields of a huge battle.” And that they did not go to death as to a holiday.