Dun-Coloured Dust

Thomas de Waal

  • Russia's War by Richard Overy
    Penguin, 416 pp, £8.99, July 1999, ISBN 0 14 027169 4
  • Stalingrad by Antony Beevor
    Viking, 512 pp, £12.99, May 1999, ISBN 0 14 024985 0

At the heart of Vasily Grossman’s great novel of the Second World War, Life and Fate, is an unforgettable depiction of a house cut off from the frontline in Stalingrad. A group of soldiers and civilians are stranded in no man’s land, linked to their comrades-in-arms only by a narrow underground passageway and forced to fight off an onslaught on three sides. They are so close to enemy lines that they can hear the voices of the German infantrymen swarming around them. Their chances of surviving are virtually nil and, after ingeniously defying death for two months, both house and inhabitants are duly obliterated by a bomb.

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[*] Translated by Alan Myers, Ginzburg’s book is published in the UK by Harvill.