“Vasily Grossman is the Tolstoy of the USSR.” —Martin Amis
“Grossman perfected a [journalistic] style that relied less on rhetoric than on the power of witness . . . Grossman’s reporting paints a war epic in miniatures, selecting subjects with an eye toward mystery, uncertainty, and the compromised character of men whom he was encouraged to cast as uncomplicated heroes.”
—Madeleine Wulfhart, The New Yorker
“[In From the Front Line] we already sense a writer with a gimlet eye for detail, instinctive empathy and a grasp of the epic scale on which his two big novels would unfold.” —Jeremy Harding, Granta
“[Grossman] managed to produce first-rate journalism that is also of lasting quality as artful prose . . . [From the Front Line] presents the reader with great matter-of-fact prose in the same lineage as Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov while also offering invaluable coverage of the Eastern Front during World War II.”
—Eric Vanderwall, Los Angeles Review of Books
“For the Second World War, or Great Patriotic War as it is known in Russia, the most renowned writer is Vasily Grossman.” —Tony Barber, Financial Times
“Grossman’s writing features sweeping, almost lyrical descriptions of landscapes ravaged by war . . . and vivid combat scenes that capture human frailty at the mercy of mechanized violence . . . It’s a powerful evocation of a world at war.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Grossman was an extraordinary writer. If you want to know not only what happened during the war in the east, but how it was experienced by those caught up in it, he is peerless—at once clear and vivid, with a masterful sense of when to be prosaic and when poetic, when naturalistic and when rhetorical, all underpinned by a genuine moral rigour intermittently betrayed by the interventions of his editors in Moscow.” —David Bennun, Jewish Chronicle (UK)
