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Volga Rises in Europe

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The Volga Rises in Europe is a collection of dispatches describing the German invasion of Russia in World War II, written for publication in Italy. Malaparte accompanied the German Army in the Ukraine between June and September 1941 and was a guest of the Finnish Army in the Karelian Isthmus between March and November of 1942. Notwithstanding its subject and the picture on the cover, the book is more of a travelogue than a war memoir. Although Malaparte gets to the front lines on occasion, more often his accounts describe scenes of past battles after the front has moved on. Much of the book is a description of the terrain, such as the Finnish forests, and the people he meets, both soldier and civilian. In addition, Malaparte engages in a fair amount of social commentary and speculation, particularly about the Soviet system. His style is often poetic although there is a tendency to imbue certain incidents with more importance than they perhaps merit. Malaparte is at his best when he describes the people he meets such as the Ukrainian peasants trying to reopen their church, which the Soviets have turned into a seed warehouse, or his visit with an elderly woman and her friends and relations at Soroki. For those interested in military history there are descriptions of small skirmishes, the crossing of the Dneistr and attacks on the Stalin Line. In Part 2, Malaparte describes the trenches outside the besieged Leningrad, the siege of the naval station at Kronstadt, as well as the convoys to Leningrad over frozen Lake Ladoga. Malaparte makes it clear that from the beginning of the war, the Russians were fighting to the last man. I was also surprised at the frequency with which Russian aircraft appear early in the war since other accounts relate that they were largely destroyed in the opening days. Overall, this book was not what I expected, but is very readable and provides some frank descriptions of lesser known aspects of the war.

This book is a poetic look at what the author sees. He obviously never heard Sherman's line, "War is hell." The descriptive narrative is beautiful yet still holds weight.
If war were what he describes the human race would never be in a different state.

having been an avid wwii reader for many years, i found this book to be a welcome change of pace from the usaual run of the mill, bog standard wwii book.
i do of course realize that there are very many excellent studies of this period of time available,and i own many, but i loved this book for the excellent way it was written, and mainly for the mental images it put into my head.
the eastern front has always been of special interest to me and to read something completely different about it, and learn new aspects of it was truley welcome.(i know i cant spell).

As I read this book, I was made to think of descriptive essays written in college. The focus is on what is seen, not what is happening. From the perspective of an Italian journalist, readers a treated to a description of the background to the battles between the Soviets and Germans during World War II. Though it is stated to be objective, the author at the very least leans toward Germany's style of government heavily.

The accounts of this book do include detailed descriptions of this scenes of Russia that included in few publications. Additionally, the interactions with the people in the author's journey give a unique perspective into life during this period. A generation divide exists between those that remember life before communism, and the younger generation that know only the life perscribed by the Soviets. The use of a church for grain storage is a vivid example of the divide.

I can say with little doubt that there a re few books available that can tell the war from this particular perspective. On the other hand, the focus on the background life tends obscure the war itself from memory. As a consequence, the book is rather one-dimensional. While the book is a learning experience, the value remains in question.

Curzio Malaparte was an Italian correspondent traveling with the German troops on the Russian front. In an extremely indignant preface, he enumerates the indignities he and his work suffered before, during and after the publication of the individual articles and, later, the book. Don't read the preface. You won't want to read the book if you do. And that would be a shame, because the book, for all its flaws, is an interesting read. Malaparte is interested in describing ordinary life on the front, for soldiers and civilians both, and his depictions of human interactions can be by turns touching, funny, and more than a little creepy. However, one is always intensely aware that he is a Writer; the language is lyrical, often overly so, and it often seemed that each narrative was following a set pattern: peaceful peaceful touching peaceful peaceful ARGH twist ending (often involving dead people). Other times he just sticks with peaceful peaceful peaceful. What I am saying is, it can get a little montonous. Nonetheless, it is an interesting book, in part because it is fascinating to watch Malaparte wander across the Russian front, not oblivious to the death and destruction around him but seeming in a way to be impervious to it. One never really gets the sense that he thought any of this touched him, or that he really felt any responsibility for it, and he is more interested in exploring his own feelings than trying to get inside the heads of the people he talks to. This is sometimes frustrating, but watching him go is an interesting exercise, and the writing is occasionally as beautiful as he thinks it is. On the positive side, his perspective-- with the German troops but not actually German (and therefore no apologist; he both sees and comments on negative aspects of German behavior, most of which references were apparently censored out of the original articles)-- is unusual, as is his attention to the ways in which the war has affected the local civilians.

This is not your typical book about the war on the Eastern Front. In fact, I kept thinking that Robert Duvall would make his entrance in the book and say "I love the smell of napalm in the morning".

Only an Italian could write in the manner that this book is written. He views the battlefield from a different perspective than any German would look at it like. His apologies to dead bodies, his perspective on dust, sun, and mud, his viewpoint of the bullet flight path, are all so much lyrical poetry. However the war he was covering was extremely deadly, and the fronts he was on witnessed millions in dead soldiers. This is serious business, but Malaparte looks on it as deadly poetry.

This is quite a different book than any written Germans or Russians. His viewpoint on Communism is also less than stellar. This is a strange book, but it gives a different viewpoint of the Eastern Front in World War Two.