The Volga Rises in Europe

The Italian journalist and novelist Curzio Malaparte had the extraordinary distinction of being the only war correspondent on the Eastern front who was actually permitted to travel to the front. His record of the war is therefore an account that is unique and utterly personal. Expelled from the southern part of the war zone on the orders of Goebbels, he was sent back by Mussolini in January 1942 to cover events in Finland, where the Germans had little control. From there he observed the siege of Leningrad. This is the writing of a man who knew and travelled in Russia extensively; a man with an astonishing eye for detail and a man of humanity and compassion. His account of the war does not trace the grand strategies, the great breakthroughs and clashes, but concentrates on individuals and little incidents: Ukrainian peasants eagerly rebuilding their church as the Red Army flees; Soviet soldiers listening, even as they fight, to the speeches of Stalin played endlessly on an old gramophone; aristocrats serving tea amidst the chaos of war; Finnish skiers silently flitting amongst the huge Soviet battleships frozen in the ice of Kronstadt. The result is a unique and moving testimony of the most terrible struggle of the twentieth century.