Days and Nights

I just finished Konstantine Simonov's Days and Nights. Its a novel about Stalingrad written by someone who was there during the worst of the fighting. On one level its a simple love story with a fair dose of the Party line; the heroine is a Komsomol turned volunteer medic; the baddy is the son of a priest. What interested me about it is the way it deals with the issues of how much the Russians came to hate the Germans and also the fatalism of the Red Army frontniks. Anyone who has read any of Ehrenburg's wartime poetry will know what I am talking about. Both themes run right through Days and Nights though they are rarely dealt with explicitly. The defining moment is when an officer is complaining that his whole life has been taken away by the war. The natural assumption is that he has lost home and family but it turns out he was a historian specialising in Germany, a field to which he can never return.

I don't really think Days and Nights is a great novel but I think it has done more to help me understand both what happened at Stalingrad and the Red Army's behaviour in the last weeks of the war than reading a conventional history. However, if that is what you want then you won't do better than Anthony Beevor's two books; Stalingrad and Berlin - The Downfall 1945.

Whoot!

Its a balmy 7C in Toronto which prompted me to go running in shorts and T shirt for the first time for a few weeks. 10km, 56 minutes. Its not exactly where I was 5 years ago before 2 ankle injuries and when I was still playing competitive rugby. Back then, I clocked 23 minutes for 5km. 15 years ago I was clocking low 40s for 10km but that was 15 years ago! I was pretty pleased to manage it under an hour to be honest.