An epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of documents. The usual form is letters, although diary entries, newspaper clippings and other documents are sometimes used. Recently, electronic "documents" such as recordings and radio, blogs, and e-mails have also come into use. The word epistolary is derived from Latin from the Greek word ἐπιστολή epistolē, meaning a letter.
Roger David Casement, known as Sir Roger Casement CMG between 1911 and 1916, was a diplomat and Irish nationalist. He worked for the British Foreign Office as a diplomat and later became a humanitarian activist, poet and Easter Rising leader. Described as the "father of twentieth-century human rights investigations", he was honoured in 1905 for the Casement Report on the Congo and knighted in 1911 for his important investigations of human rights abuses in Peru.
Vasily Grigoryevich Zaytsev was a Soviet sniper and a Hero of the Soviet Union during World War II. Prior to 10 November 1942, he killed 32 Axis soldiers with a standard-issue rifle. Between 10 November 1942 and 17 December 1942, during the Battle of Stalingrad, he killed 225 enemy soldiers, including 11 snipers.
Enemy at the Gates is a 2001 war film written and directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud and based on William Craig's 1973 nonfiction book Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad, which describes the events surrounding the Battle of Stalingrad in the winter of 1942 and 1943. The film's main character is a fictionalized version of sniper Vasily Zaytsev, a Hero of the Soviet Union during World War II. It includes a snipers' duel between Zaytsev and a Wehrmacht sniper school director, Major Erwin König.
Sir Antony James Beevor, is an English military historian. He has published several popular histories on the Second World War and the 20th century in general.
Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov was a Soviet military officer. He was the commander of the 62nd Army during the Battle of Stalingrad. Following World War II, Chuikov was Chief of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany (1949–53), commander of the Kiev Military District (1953–60), Chief of the Soviet Armed Forces and Deputy Minister of Defense (1960–64), and head of the Soviet Civil Defense Forces (1961–72).
Vasily Semyonovich Grossman was a Russian writer and journalist. Born to a Jewish family in the Ukraine, then a part of the Imperial Russian Empire, Grossman trained as a chemical engineer at Moscow State University, earning the nickname Vasya-khimik because of his diligence as a student. Upon graduation he took a job in Stalino in the Donets Basin. In the 1930s he changed careers. He began writing full-time and published a number of short stories and several novels. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he was engaged as a war correspondent by the Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda; he wrote firsthand accounts of the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk and Berlin. Grossman's eyewitness reports of a Nazi extermination camp, following the discovery of Treblinka, were among the earliest accounts of a Nazi death camp by a reporter. After World War II, Grossman's faith in the Soviet state was shaken by Joseph Stalin's turn towards antisemitism in the final years before his death in 1953. While Grossman was never arrested by the Soviet authorities, his two major literary works were censored during the ensuing Nikita Khrushchev period as unacceptably anti-Soviet, and Grossman himself became in effect a nonperson. The KGB raided Grossman's flat after he had completed Life and Fate, seizing manuscripts, notes and even the ribbon from the typewriter on which the text had been written. Grossman was told by the Communist Party's chief ideologist Mikhail Suslov that the book could not be published for two or three hundred years. At the time of Grossman's death from stomach cancer in 1964, these books remained unreleased. Hidden copies were eventually smuggled out of the Soviet Union by a network of dissidents, including Andrei Sakharov and Vladimir Voinovich, and first published in the West, before appearing in the Soviet Union in 1988.
Günther von Kluge was a German field marshal during World War II who held commands on both the Eastern and Western Fronts. He commanded the 4th Army of the Wehrmacht during the invasion of Poland in 1939 and the Battle of France in 1940, earning a promotion to Generalfeldmarschall. Kluge went on to command the 4th Army in Operation Barbarossa and the Battle for Moscow in 1941.
Generally, a battle is a combat in warfare between two or more parties.
Erwin König is a name of an apocryphal Wehrmacht sniper allegedly killed by the Soviet sniper Vasily Zaytsev during the Battle of Stalingrad.
Army Group B was the title of three German Army Groups that saw action during World War II.
Winrich Behr was a German officer during World War II. He was on the intelligence staff of the Sixth Army during the Stalingrad encirclement. Behr had served Friedrich Paulus, Erwin Rommel, Gunther von Kluge, Walter Model. He was the witness of Model's last hours in Ruhr Pocket.
The Battle of Stalingrad (1942–43), a battle on the Eastern Front of World War II, often regarded as the single largest and bloodiest battle in the history of warfare, and one of the most decisive battles of World War II, has inspired a number of media works.
Alexander Werth was a Russian-born, naturalized British writer, journalist, and war correspondent.
Willi Bredel was a German writer and president of the DDR Academy of Arts, Berlin. Born in Hamburg, he was a pioneer of socialist realist literature.
Stalingrad is a 1990 two-part war film written and directed by Yuri Ozerov, and produced by Quincy Jones and Clarence Avant. Revolving around the eponymous Battle of Stalingrad, the film was a co-production between the Soviet Union, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and the United States. It stars an ensemble cast featuring Powers Boothe, Mikhail Ulyanov, Bruno Freindlich, Fernando Allende, Sergei Garmash, Nikolai Kryuchkov, and Ronald Lacey.
Ella German is a Belarusian woman known for having a brief relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald after his defection to the Soviet Union in 1959. She has lived most of her life in Minsk, the capital of Belarus ; in 2013 she was living in the Israeli town of Acre.
Heinrich Gerlach was a German soldier of the 14th Panzer Division in the Second World War and later a Latin and German teacher. His semi-autobiographical novel of the Battle of Stalingrad, The Forsaken Army, re-written with the help of hypnosis after it was seized by the Soviets, was published in Germany in 1957. In 2012, Carsten Gansel discovered the original manuscript in the State Russian Military Archive. It was published in Germany in 2016 and in an English translation in 2017 as Breakout at Stalingrad.
