The Road

Gathering together short stories, essays, and correspondence—almost all of it never before translated into English—New York Review Books has published Vasily Grossman's The Road, a major work by a major literary figure of the 20th and now the 21st century. Beginning with early stories written in the '30s that already display the sensitivity and compassion that would infuse Grossman's entire oeuvre, The Road proceeds chronologically through the author's tumultuous life. A profound concern with both the cause of the individual as well as larger socio-political ideals that were sometimes fatally opposed to that individual runs through all of Grossman's stories, whether he's writing about doomed aristocracy, indefatigable peasants, the loneliness of orphans or, in one later work, the struggles of a mule conscripted into military service. The essays are the most powerful pieces here, the strongest being a devastating look at the concentration camp in Treblinka, written one month after it was shut down and while its grounds were still soaked with the blood of its victims. The later work includes anguished, moving letters Grossman wrote to his mother despite knowing she was already dead and an essay on cemeteries and the politics of dying. Yet despite the gravity of his subject matter, Grossman never allows himself to be defeated. His writing and his worldview are passionate and irony-free—and the cumulative effect of this crucial book is all the more bracing for it.