Today’s post is by naturalist and author Jack Nisbet, whose latest book is David Douglas, A Naturalist at Work: An Illustrated Exploration Across Two Centuries in the Pacific Northwest. Nisbet, a Spokane resident and winner of the Washington State Book Award, will be appearing at the Central Library on Tuesday, November 13.
The Volga is the great river of western Russia. Like the Columbia River of western North America, The Volga’s upper reaches drain vast coniferous forests, while further downstream it flows through productive wheat country and arid shrub-steppe.
Over the course of the 20th century, the natural course of both rivers has undergone drastic changes in the name of irrigation, navigation, and hydroelectric power. An aerial map of the Volga reveals a long chain of stagnant lakes similar to those that make up almost 
the entire length of the Columbia, and by any measure these are two rivers under siege.
Yet, like the Columbia, the Volga retains an almost mystical hold on the people who live within its reaches. That relationship is often illuminated through art, and some of Russia’s greatest writers and poets have drawn their strength from the river’s flow. The work of Soviet author Vasily Grossman relies on the Volga to communicate the possibility of survival in the face of overwhelming misfortune.
Grossman was a Russian Jew who grew up within the Volga drainage. He was in Moscow when the Stalinist purges took place and World War II began. As a journalist for the Russian Army newspaper Red Star (roughly the equivalent of our Stars and Stripes), he covered the terrifying Nazi sweep eastward under the arc of the Volga, the Russian abandonment of Moscow, and Hitler’s stubborn decision to destroy he city of Stalingrad on the lower Volga.
In dispatches collected in a superb nonfiction work titled A Writer at War, Grossman brought the whole incredible saga to life. Epic settings like the Tractor Factory and the Chemical Plant sound at one moment like post-apocalyptic science fiction locations, at the next like familiar scenes along the Columbia–the awesome stack of the Trail smelter, the wild piping that surrounds the Goldendale aluminum plant, the vast sawmills that supported towns now drowned beneath still waters.
After the Red Army finally repulsed the Nazis at Stalingrad, Grossman’s Red Star reports followed the German retreat back across western Russia, through the mass graves of the Ukraine and Polish death camps straight to the Nazi heart of Berlin. He quickly discovered the horrific scope of the genocide that had taken place, and made sure he interviewed every surviving Jew he could find along the way. Eventually, 
Grossman helped to assemble the first coherent record of the Holocaust’s full horror in The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry.
After World War Two, Grossman reprocessed this nightmare into a masterpiece of fiction titled Life and Fate. Based on the general scheme of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, the plot follows an extended family of Muscovites through the events that Grossman himself lived, focusing especially on the siege of Stalingrad. In Grossman’s novel, when news of the German surrender there finally reaches a group of physicists working in the Ural Mountains, one of his sagest characters recognizes exactly what has happened.
“The German advance has been halted on the Volga, There’s the power of the Volga for you–living water, living power.”
Join us for a special evening with Jack Nisbet at the Central Library on Tuesday, November 13 at 7 p.m. for a visual presentation on his new book on David Douglas. Jack will also be appearing at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park on November 14. Find more of Jack’s books in our Library collection.
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