Vasily Grossman’s account of humanity’s darkest hours

Essential reading, viewing, and listening from the EI editors.

Vasily Grossman, best known for his Tolstoyan novel Life and Fate, served as a correspondent for the Red Army’s daily newspaper, Red Star, after being deemed unfit for military service following the German invasion of the Soviet Union. A host of his reports are collected in From the Front Line: Stalingrad-Treblinka-Berlin, 1941–45. As the title suggests, it is not easy reading.

Perhaps the most famous offering here, ‘The Hell of Treblinka’, is among the earliest, and most vivid, accounts of the Holocaust. Grossman reached the extermination camp of the title, partially destroyed by the fleeing Nazis, having witnessed the liberation of another byword for horror, Majdanek. Almost a million Jews died at Treblinka, most of them gassed, though there were also many victims of wanton, casual cruelty of the most grievous kind. A Jew himself, Grossman’s mother had been killed in a Nazi pogrom in Ukraine, near where he had been born and raised.

Brilliantly translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, From the Front Line is one of the most searing accounts of the depths to which mankind fell in the middle of the last century.

Joy Division’s eternal sound

The 300 or so people who assembled in Birmingham University’s High Hall on 2 May 1980 had no idea they were witnessing the last ever performance by Joy Division. Two weeks later, their singer, Ian Curtis, committed suicide on the eve of the quartet’s first US tour, worn down by epilepsy and a troubled personal life.

The band’s two studio LPs, Unknown Pleasures (1979) and Closer (1980), remain timeless achievements, at the very peak of the pop pantheon. Yet the sound of these remarkable albums did not sit well with some band members, who thought producer Martin Hannett’s metallic sheen too smooth. Eternal, a new compilation of live recordings – 14 CDs’ worth! – shows just how different they were on stage: dirtier, coarser, betraying the influence of the Velvet Underground and the Stooges.

It also reveals how few people actually saw them, for the venues include pubs, youth clubs, the Futurama festival in Leeds (their largest audience?), London’s Lyceum, and a very well-recorded, widely distributed recording from Les Bains Douches in Paris.

The sound quality varies, and the tuning is often awry, especially when it comes to new technology, but the music – and Curtis’ lyrics especially, often rooted in the language of the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible, as well as the futurologist novelist JG Ballard – remain astounding, not least the penultimate song from that final gig, Decades, as Curtis croons ‘Here are the young men, the weight on their shoulders… We knocked on the doors of Hell’s darker chamber, Pushed to the limit, we dragged ourselves in.’ Chilling.

Mitterrand’s last meal

After all that, something lighter. It is rumoured that the last meal of French President François Mitterrand was an ortolan, the delicate songbird, drowned in Armagnac then eaten whole, with the consumer’s head covered with a linen napkin as it is devotionally devoured. The 2012 comedy Haute Cuisine (Les Sauvers du Palais in its original French title) is a very Gallic take on the relationship between Hortense, a celebrated chef employed by the Élysée Palace, and a thinly disguised head of state clearly modelled on Mitterrand. A delightful, diverting meditation on negotiating power and appetite.