The first and main book by Viktor Platonovich Nekrasov—the novella “In the Trenches of Stalingrad”—may well be the best work about the war: tragic, honest, and piercing. For the rest of the writer’s life, war remained the most significant event in his life, the hardest ordeal he endured with honor. “Soldier, musketeer, wanderer Nekrasov,” wrote Andrei Sinyavsky of him, “a grace of God, a Pushkin breath could be heard in this free-spirited onlooker… He carried freedom with him and within him.”