The Music of Destruction | Mathias Fuelling

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Mathias Fuelling

, June 30, 2026

The Music of Destruction

Vasily Grossman humanized Soviet Russia—to his peril

Still from The Battle of Leningrad (1949). | Mosfilm

Word Factory

From the Front Line: Stalingrad–Treblinka–Berlin, 1941–1945 by Vasily Grossman translated from Russian by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler. NYRB Classics, 512 pages. 2026

During the final days of World War II, Vasily Grossman entered Adolf Hitler’s office study in the New Reich Chancellery in Berlin. Designed by Albert Speer, the building was meant to be the executive center for the new German empire; Grossman noted that among the ruins of the office “the giant globe that had long stood beside [Hitler’s] desk” had been “flattened into a pancake” when the ceiling collapsed. The entrance hall to the New Reich Chancellery, fitting the megalomaniacal Nazi style, was a massive corridor stretching, Grossman estimated, “hundreds of meters long.” Here, Grossman observed “two young Red Army soldiers are trying to ride bicycles along it. They are not having much success, but this does not upset them.” To get to this point, Grossman had advanced more than fifteen hundred miles over the course of four years.

Grossman’s two major novels, Stalingrad and Life and Fate, form a mirrored portrayal of Soviet society and WWII. While they are connected novels, with overlapping characters and storylines and a common emphasis on the nature of shared sacrifice within the Soviet state, they have fundamentally different aesthetic and ideological approaches. Across dozens of characters, Stalingrad emphasizes the struggle of the Soviet people against the Nazis, but this struggle is given meaning and purpose as towards the development and preservation of the socialist project. Life and Fate, using the same characters, also emphasizes the struggle of the Soviet people, yet not just against the Nazis but also against the Soviet state itself, emphasizing how they are trapped in a dual war both outwardly and within as the socialist project breaks down into an ideological justification for power and authority.

Stalingrad was first published in serial form in 1952, with the title For a Just Cause. Grossman began drafting it during the battle; the novel exemplifies the Soviet approved socialist realist approach, combining a rousing patriotic tribute to the war effort with detailed, almost photographically precise prose, and is explicitly modeled on Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Stalingrad when first published initially received wide praise and was nominated for a Stalin Prize, the highest award for achievement across a range of disciplines in the Soviet Union at the time. In an abrupt shift, following the turn towards state-approved antisemitism with the fabrication of the Doctors’ Plot, Stalingrad was denounced and was almost pulled from circulation. Stalin’s death in March 1953 saved the novel. Life and Fate was written by Grossman across the 1950s and reflects his growing dissatisfaction with the Soviet state. In contrast to Stalingrad, it moves away from socialist realism, explicitly comparing the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany at points, and contains bitter depictions of the Soviet labor camps and the denunciations and moral compromises demanded of the intellectual and scientific class in the state. Soon after Grossman submitted a manuscript of Life and Fate to a Soviet journal in the autumn of 1960, his apartment was raided by the KGB. Agents seized his draft notebooks and the remaining manuscripts in his apartment; Grossman died believing that his masterpiece had been lost, but a manuscript copy that Grossman had given to a friend was eventually smuggled out of the Soviet Union in 1970.

Grossman died early at the age of fifty-eight in 1964, having written novels that chronicled the...