The Road

It will soon be fifty years since Vasily Grossman died - worn out by a lifetime of witnessing horror and brutality, and by the unfriendly attentions of the Soviet state - and  only now is he beginning to be acknowledged as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. Finally, thanks in large part to the efforts of his translator and champion Robert Chandler, almost all of his surviving work is being published in English. This latest volume brings together much of the material that's previously been missing, covering the whole of Grossman's career - from his early, career-making story 'In the Town of Berdichev' to his mournful and foreboding later works. Thanks to Chandler's imposition of a smart (and, ultimately, desperately moving) biographical framework, it's also an index to an eventful and frequently terrifying life.

At the centre of that life lies the Second World War, and at the centre of this book sits one of the supreme documents of witness that war produced: Grossman's report 'The Hell of Treblinka', written in short order after the camp's liberation. More than anything else here, this is not a piece of writing you'll want to read twice: but it's an extraordinary piece of writing for all that, not only in the extremity of the barbarities it relates, but in its haunting restraint and sense of unassuagable mourning. Grossman wants to expose a crime - and, indeed, the piece was use as evidence at the Nuremburg trials -  but he's not interested in merely representing brutality: without either voyeurism or platitude, he lays out for us the sense of a moral void beyond comparison or understanding. He takes the reader through the heart of darkness and leaves them standing, exhausted and uncertain, on the 'earth of Treblinka, bottomless earth, earth as unsteady as the sea'. Any writer who can do that - not just in one article, but again and again - demands to be preserved for posterity, and read, and read again.