Enemy at the Gates portrays the character Vasily Zaytsev, and is based off which book?
Enemy at the Gates Enemy at the Gates is a 2001 French-American war film written and directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud and based on William Craig's 1973 nonfiction book "", 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.
Vasily Grossman Vasily Semyonovich Grossman (Russian: Васи́лий Семёнович Гро́ссман , Ukrainian: Василь Семенович Гроссман ; 12 December 1905 – 14 September 1964) was a Soviet Russian writer and journalist. Grossman was trained as an engineer and worked in the Donets Basin, but changed his career in the 1930s and published short stories and several novels. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he became a war correspondent for the Red Army newspaper "Krasnaya Zvezda", writing firsthand accounts of the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk and Berlin. Grossman's eyewitness accounts of a Nazi extermination camp, following the discovery of Treblinka, were among the earliest. Grossman also translated Armenian literature into Russian, despite the fact that he could not read Armenian, instead working on the basis of an interlinear translation.