Letters From the Dead

On 18 September 1942, in the factory district of Stalingrad, a regimental commissar named Dmitri Petrakov was knocked unconscious by a blast. When he came round in a medical tent he wrote to his daughter:

"My little black-eyed Mila, I'm sending you a cornflower... Just imagine - the battle's on, enemy shells bursting all around, craters around us and a flower growing here... And suddenly an explosion ... the cornflower is torn off. I picked it up and put it in my pocket... The flower had grown, reached for the sun but had been torn off by an explosion, and if I hadn't picked it up it would have been trampled upon."

Letters From the Dead is a collection of last letters written by Soviet soldiers, partisans and civilians who did not survive the war - to wives, parents, children, and sometimes to nobody in particular. They were written in dugouts, in transit, in prison cells and in the hours before an action, and they were kept by the families who received them.

They need no advocacy. What they carry is the ordinary voice of people in extremity: instructions about the harvest, apologies for bad handwriting, requests that a child be told something, jokes, and now and then a sentence that stops the reader completely. Nothing in them needs an editor's help.

Compiled by V. A. Kondratyev and Z. N. Politov and translated by James Riordan for Progress Publishers.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.