The Damned and the Dead

The confrontation between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army on the Eastern Front of World War II was defined by incalculable suffering, destruction, casualties, and heroism. While many historians have chronicled the epic nature of that arena of war, it has largely been left to Russian novelists to fully express the intense human dimensions of that conflict. Frank Elliss groundbreaking study provides the first comprehensive survey of that impressive body of literature. Canvassing a wide spectrum of works by Soviet and post-Soviet writers, many of whom were war veterans themselves, Ellis uncovers themes both common to war literature in general and distinctive to the Soviet experience. He recalls the earliest works in this genre by Emmanuil Kazakevich, Grigorii Baklanov, and IUrii Bondarev; presents a long overdue assessment of Vasil Bykovs work, which focuses on the partisan war in Bykovs native Belorussia; and brings into sharp focus the powerful Stalingrad novels of Vasilii Grossman, Konstantin Simonov, Viktor Nekrasov, and Bondarev. He also provides keen insights into the heroic portraits of Stalin in the fiction of Ivan Stadniuk and Vladimir Bogomolov and examines three important war novels published during the 1990s: Viktor Astafevs The Damned and the Dead, Georgii Vladimovs The General and His Army, and Vladimir Buts Heads-Tails. One of the many threads running throughout Elliss study is the dilemma of the Red Army soldier condemned to serve a regime that was utterly paranoid regarding the allegiances of its own armies, so much so that Soviet soldiers often felt as threatened by the Soviet government as they did by the German armies. Many of these novels reinforce the now well-known fact that Stalin devoted considerable resources to ferreting out soldiers whose actions (or inactions) suggested disloyalty to his repressive regime. A few of themsuch as Grossmans Life and Fatebecame battlegrounds in their own right, pitting Soviet writers against Soviet censors in a struggle over the public memory of the war. Russias memories of World War II are forever tied to the suffering of its people. Elliss rich and revealing work shows us why.