5/31/2023 0 Comments Stalingrad by vasily grossman![]() Praised by some as the “Tolstoy of the USSR,” his works have often been invoked by those who seek to equate the Nazi and Soviet regimes. ![]() The English-language publication this June of an almost 900-page novel by Grossman - the most experienced of Soviet war reporters - thus seems auspicious in its timing. Luciana Castellina wrote in Il Manifesto that the motion’s language “could have come from the neofascist CasaPound ” by promoting a “despicable distortion of history … through its resounding botching of the historical record - it calls into question the prestige of the parliamentary institution that promulgated it.” The reactions from a previous generation of anti-fascists were exasperated, but little-publicized in mainstream media. Ignoring the voluminous academic scholarship on the subject, the Brussels parliament passed a motion which blamed the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939–41 for starting the war and crudely equated communism with fascism. The stakes of this fight over memory were clearly brought into relief by a vote in the European Parliament last month. ![]() With the memory of World War II increasingly serving as a key battleground for Europe’s resurgent far right, the Soviet author’s long-dismissed prequel to Life and Fate has a clearly political charge. The first English-language translation of Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad is no minor event. ![]()
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