During the summer of 1941, Curzio Malaparte was the only frontline war correspondent in the whole of Russia. The Italian writer’s dispatches for the Corriere della Sera, which traced the failure of Operation Barbarossa, earned him the ire of Joseph Goebbels, who had him expelled from Nazi-occupied Ukraine. But these unsparingly reported articles, later collected in “The Volga Rises in Europe” (1948), were merely an aperitif. At the same time Malaparte had been working on his magnum opus, “Kaputt”—an autobiographical novel whose German title evoked the broken pile of rubble that much of wartime Europe had become.
