An Armenian Sketchbook

An NYRB Classics Original Few writers had to confront as many of the last century’s mass tragedies as Vasily Grossman, who wrote with terrifying clarity about the Shoah, the Battle of Stalingrad, and the Terror Famine in the Ukraine. An Armenian Sketchbook , however, shows us a very different Grossman, notable for his tenderness, warmth, and sense of fun.        After the  Soviet government confiscated—or, as Grossman always put it, “arrested”— Life and Fate ,