The Road by Vasily Grossman
At the outset of World War II, the fiction writer Vasily Grossman became a correspondent for Krasnaya Zvezda, a Red Army newspaper, and his firsthand accounts of major battles made him famous. His elaborate reports of Nazi death camps were among the earliest. Of course, his success as a journalist didn’t prevent him from experiencing the brunt of Stalin’s disfavor.
For centuries, writers have sat on benches and made up stories about passersby. Vasily Grossman, Andrei Platonov, and Semyon Lipkin would do this while sitting opposite Platonov’s apartment building in Moscow in the 1930s. Lipkin, the least known of the trio, recounts that the stories Grossman invented were matter-of-fact, journalistic, whereas Platonov’s, rarely grounded in the practical, were more concerned with a character’s interiority, which was “both unusual and simple, like the life of a plant.” This distinction also applies to their prose: Platonov created worlds, and Grossman, the more