Memory of Russia: Exhibition “Days and Nights of Stalingrad” in Moscow

To the 70th anniversary of victory at the State Literary Museum (Moscow) on February 8, 2013 opens the exhibition, dedicated to the three outstanding “chroniclers” and witnesses of the Battle of Stalingrad – writers Konstantin Simonov, Victor Nekrasov and Vasily Grossman.

The focus of the exposition is unique materials telling of the life of writers in the period of the defense of Stalingrad and the unusual fates of their “Stalingrad” books. The story “Days and Nights” (1944) by K. Simonov, which grew out from his war reports, in fact opened the theme of the Battle of Stalingrad in literature and it was a scenario to the same film before the end of the war. The book of V. Nekrasov “In the trenches of Stalingrad” (1946), written by a direct participant of Stalingrad events, brought him a great success. The Grossman’s novel “Life and Fate” suffered quite a different fate. In 1961, the manuscript was confiscated, the author never saw it published, and soon it completely stopped printing. It is interesting that these three works were significant for the disclosure of “Stalingrad” theme in the military prose: if stories by Simonov and Nekrasov open it, the novel by Grossman, comparable in scale to the epic “War and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy, in fact crowns it.

The exhibition features about 150 exhibits including the first editions of stories by K. Simonov and V. Nekrasov and miraculously survived manuscript of the novel by V. Grossman “Life and Fate”, as well as newspaper reports and letters from the front, posters, paintings, drawings, documents and photographs as well as personal things of participants of the events.

A separate attention is given to new museum materials from the V. Nekrasov archive, acquired in 2012.