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This Russian classic eerily foreshadows the war in Ukraine

Vova Yegorov, a 15-year-old Red Army scout, in 1942 - Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images
Vova Yegorov, a 15-year-old Red Army scout, in 1942 - Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images

Vasily Grossman’s first war novel is openly a story of Soviet heroism: in the spring of 1942 a Red Army battalion on the border of Ukraine and Belorussia is ordered to slow the German advance, in the full knowledge that it will be encircled and have to fight its way out. Not quite propaganda, it is nonetheless framed as an archetypal story of moral conflict and a just war, and in the present military circumstances in Ukraine its resonance is deafening.

Grossman, in his thirties and bad health when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, was rejected when he tried to volunteer and instead assigned to the army newspaper, Red Star. In early 1942 Red Star’s editor, David Ortenberg, had the foresight to give him two months’ leave to work on a short novel. The People Immortal, the first Soviet novel of the war, was the result.

Simply plotted, with a narrower focus by comparison with Grossman’s later masterpieces Stalingrad and Life and Fate, The People Immortal might be thought a modest triumph. But Grossman’s future greatness is written in its pages. The humane aptness of his descriptions of soldiers and civilians withstanding pressure (he uses words like “stern” and “simple” repeatedly), his vivid, detailed descriptions of both military and rural life, his sharp sketches of war’s tragedies – of Rumiantsev, the captain who wants to play chess with the young lad Lionya but cannot bear to because his usual partner, the unit’s commissar, has just been killed; and of Lionya’s grandmother Maria Timofeyevna, shot for accusing a German officer of making war on children – fill Robert and Elizabeth Chandler’s tone-perfect new translation, the most complete since the novel’s first Russian publication (aided by the Moscow scholar Julia Volohova).

Grossman viewed The People Immortal as a contribution to the USSR’s resistance. The battalion’s gruelling counter-attack is described with all his precise understanding of war and skill at dramatising military decisions. His narrator writes as if he’s part of the fight: “An enemy advance was threatening to encircle several units of one of our infantry corps.” But his support for the Soviet cause was not unquestioning. His writing was popular on the front line and in staff HQs because he was willing to speak up for soldiers, to hint (he could not do more) that Stalin’s order 270 (forbidding retreat), and incompetent military leadership after Stalin’s 1937 purge of his commanders, were responsible for the USSR’s early defeats.

But there is a ghost at the feast, a discomfiting presence, even a future portent: a great poignancy stalks this publication of The People Immortal. Again and again, Grossman’s portrait of resistance can be transposed to Ukraine’s fight against Russia’s present invasion. Commissar Sergey Bogariov says thoughtfully to his battalion’s commander, “You know, there’s something I keep noticing. Real family men, men who really love their wives and children and mothers, always turn out to be outstanding fighters.” Semion Ignatiev, a rank-and-file soldier, observes closely from a ditch as a German soldier lights his pipe. “It was then that Ignatiev truly understood, in his heart and soul, what was happening in his country: that his nation was fighting for its life, fighting to be able to breathe freely.” Grossman’s Soviets are fighting Germans who have betrayed and invaded them. Eighty years later, brutalised and brainwashed Russian soldiers are back on the same territory, playing the role of invaders and occupiers.

What Grossman, a Soviet Ukrainian Jew, would have made of this irony is impossible to know. But at the heart of his writing lies a tireless humanity and empathy – echoed in the words of Bogariov, lying awake before the attack: “‘Might this war be the last war of all?’ [he] wondered. He passionately wanted to do all he could for the world, so that all its nights and days would be as beautiful as this present night.” So we can have a pretty accurate guess.


The People Immortal is published by MacLehose at £25. To order your copy call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books