Voices from Stalingrad
an illustrated eBook
by Ferdinanda Cremascoli
on Amazon – Read for Free
Esiste una versione italiana in sei volumetti, uno per episodio che potete
Voices from Stalingrad is an illustrated ebook by Ferdinanda Cremascoli. Six episodes from Vasily Grossman’s masterpiece. Each episode is an investigation into the range of tones in Vasily Grossman’s dilogy, also preserved in translation, thanks to the work of great translators.
Many worlds, Many Tones
Voices. In the Stalingrad dilogy, Vasily Grossman recounts the lives of an entire people: farmers, workers, miners, scientists, mothers, women working in factories and in the countryside, girls and boys, orphans… everyone. To capture such a varied world, a variety of tones is employed. The two Stalingrad novels encompass gravitas and solemnity, as well as the entertaining lightness of comedy and the melancholy of love stories. No sentimentality, though! Vasily Grossman’s style is never emphatic, but dry and rigorous.
Why “Dilogy”? Because the story develops over two novels: Life and Fate and its “prequel,” a novel written immediately after the war and published in the USSR under the title For a Just Cause in the early fifties, after a strenuous tug of war with censorship. Life and Fate was less fortunate. The KGB’s seizure of the manuscript in 1962 forced the writer to hide his novel, which had a complex history of emigration and publication abroad. In Russia, it was published only after the end of the USSR.
Trials of Translation
Voices. There is, however, a paradox. In the West, the second novel, Life and Fate, was highly appreciated in the 1980s and 1990s, while the first novel was either not taken into consideration or was judged to be a “Soviet” novel. Only in recent years has the first novel, For a Just Cause, been read with attention, and its greatness has been discovered. The English translation is from 2019, and the Italian one is from 2022. The first to recognize the importance of the first novel were the French: a translation into that language dates back to 2000.
Yet the Stalingrad Dilogy is a true masterpiece. Perhaps it was read at the wrong time, but its greatness is such that time will eventually give it the recognition it deserves
