This post, covering Part 1, Chapter 27, is part of The Slavic Literature Pod’s chapter a day read along of Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate. Learn more about our project here.

The steamer reached Saratov early. Ordered to gather the hospitals’ wounded soldiers first, the steamer chugged on without stopping at Kuibyshev first. A horrible sense of anxiety permeates this chapter as Lyudmila is thrust even more quickly towards the city.

Lyudmila doesn’t even see the city as such. Instead, she sees how “The silhouettes of factories began to appear, together with small huts and houses with corrugated iron roofs,” (p. 139). Her vision of the city probably looks closer to a scene out of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari as opposed to anything concrete, let alone anything resembling optimism.