Stalingrado

Vasili Grossman wanted to record everything he had experienced during the Second World War, the death of his mother and his stepson, and his experience as a war correspondent, in an ambitious two-part novel cycle. The first, started in 1943 and published in 1952 under the title For a Just Cause, had to be titled Stalingrad. The second, written from 1949, with the same protagonists, would be Life and destiny. Of the two, Life and Fate is a classic read by thousands of readers around the world. The first, on the other hand, has been considered a novel of lesser rank. What's more, Efim Etkind and Simon Markish, two of the people who did the most to save the Life and Fate manuscript, publishing it for the first time in the West in 1980, in the prologue to said edition, affirmed that For a just cause "it could have won a well-deserved Stalin Prize, because he overflowed with love for the socialist regime...». Could Grossman write two such unequal novels despite conceiving them as a whole and writing them one after the other? This edition answers this question. Apart from returning to the novel the title that Grossman wanted for her, Stalingrad, she reconstructs it for the first time with more than a hundred fragments, some of a couple of sentences, others of paragraphs and entire pages, that the Soviet censors forced to suppress. With this, the novel is enriched and filled with nuances, until it becomes a different work from the one that had been read. Now, as The Economist states, "like Life and Fate, the new Stalingrad is a masterpiece."