Robert Chandler Livres

Dans ce roman-fresque, composé dans les années 1950, à la façon de Guerre et paix, Vassili Grossman (1905-1964) fait revivre l'URSS en guerre à travers le destin d'une famille, dont les membres nous amènent tour à tour dans Stalingrad assiégée, dans les laboratoires de recherche scientifique, dans la vie ordinaire du peuple russe, et jusqu'à Treblinka sur les pas de l'Armée rouge. Au-delà de ces destins souvent tragiques, il s'interroge sur la terrifiante convergence des systèmes nazi et communiste alors même qu'ils s'affrontent sans merci. Radicalement iconoclaste en son temps - le manuscrit fut confisqué par le KGB, tandis qu'une copie parvenait clandestinement en Occident -, ce livre pose sur l'histoire du XXe siècle une question que philosophes et historiens n'ont cessé d'explorer depuis lors. Il le fait sous la forme d'une grande œuvre littéraire, imprégnée de vie et d'humanité, qui transcende le documentaire et la polémique pour atteindre à une vision puissante, métaphysique, de la lutte éternelle du bien contre le mal.

One of Pushkin’s most thrilling prose works, Dubrovsky follows the adventures of an aristocrat-turned-brigand and his audacious scheme for revenge. It is published here with the short story Egyptian Nights. Dubrovsky is the son of a landowner whose property has been confiscated by a corrupt and malicious general. After his father dies, and his faithful servants burn his ancestral home to the ground, Dubrovsky turns to crime. But to achieve his ultimate aim of avenging his father, he must resort to subtler means than banditry. Masquerading as a French tutor, he enters the General’s house and sets about beguiling his daughter. Asking hard questions of our faith in social institutions, in particular the law, Dubrovsky displays the considerable storytelling skill of Russia’s greatest poet. Alexander Pushkin wrote lyric and narrative poems, but his masterwork is the verse novel Eugene Onegin.

Vasily Grossman wrote three novels about the Second World War, each offering a distinct take on what a war novel can be, and each extraordinary. A common set of characters links Stalingrad and Life and Fate, but Stalingrad is not only a moving and exciting story of desperate defense and the turning tide of war, but also a monumental memorial for the countless war dead. Life and Fate, by contrast, is a work of moral and political philosophy as well as a novel, and the deep question it explores is whether or not it is possible to behave ethically in the face of overwhelming violence. The People Immortal is something else entirely. Set during the catastrophic first months of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, this is the tale of an army battalion dispatched to slow the advancing enemy at any cost, with encirclement and annihilation its promised end. A rousing story of resistance, The People Immortal is the novel as weapon in hand.