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. 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 first English publication, Grossman’s early novel Stalingrad was called a “socialist realist dog” and a “gelded fictional brontosaurus”.
Now we are reintroduced to Grossman’s 1942 novel The People Immortal in a new expanded translation by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler. From 1941 Grossman was a reporter on the army newspaper Red Star, and this novel draws on his experiences and contacts there. The story is based on an account given to Grossman by a Soviet officer of how he led a Red Army unit out of German encirclement after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.
