The Soviet Union. The German invasion is in full swing and it’s all gone horribly wrong for Stalin and co. In this maelstrom, a Soviet Red Army battalion is trapped behind enemy lines. It must fight its way out or be destroyed.

Tolstoy would envy the number of characters Vasily Grossman manages to fit into as short a book as The People Immortal. He would also envy their vividness. There’s the driver who’s been stuck on the same page of David Copperfield since the war began. There’s the general who only eats unripe apples. And then, at a time when Grossman had to be constantly mindful of Soviet censorship, there’s the peasant who longs for the arrival of the German invaders.

All these characters make the price of entry to this novel steep. Yet somewhere along the way you find yourself immersed. As the Red Army fought in the face of a fearsome adversary, Grossman – a war correspondent during the Second World War – was present with his notebook. The scenes and interviews he conducted then appear time and again in The People Immortal. Few novels are as closely researched.

It’s a book that’s as much a time capsule as a story. Completed when the German advance had been stopped dead at the gates of Moscow, The People Immortal was published in 1942, when the war still hung in the balance. No one knew how it would end. For many, the worst, at Stalingrad, was yet to come.

Comparison with current events in Ukraine is inevitable. The novel takes place in the same region that Russian tanks advanced through toward Kyiv in February. Grossman, like President Zelensky, was born a Russian-speaking Ukrainian Jew. Many statements made by ordinary Ukrainians today might have been lifted from the novel.

Grossman’s successors are now at work doing what he did 81 years ago. Their stories may not appear for a long time. For now, half a world away, I’d argue that there are few better ways of understanding the psychology of what is happening than through Vasily Grossman’s The People Immortal.