For the past few weeks, I have been inhabited by a furious desire to re-read Vassili Grossman, this Soviet writer born in Berdichev, then educated in kyiv and Moscow, who is the author of a major work, imbued with humanity, sensitivity and of intelligence, but altogether little known to the general public.
Vassili Grossman, as a war correspondent for Krasnaya Zvezda (The red star), the newspaper of the Red Army, spent more than a thousand days at the front during the Second World War and wrote hundreds of columns that won him the trust of ordinary soldiers as well as those of the highest ranks, who recognized the quality of his listening and his writing. He also kept notebooks of inestimable richness, in which one detects no ideological inflection, but only the acute need to record with absolute honesty and profound humanism the experience of the war.
Vassili Grossman is altogether Jewish, atheist, Ukrainian, Russian and Soviet, but above all, he is deeply human. He does not glorify anything, but notes what he sees with intelligence, compassion, love and certainly a little naivety, considering the risks of reprisals to which his honesty exposes him without his even seeming to be aware of it.
By reading his War diaries and his novels, including the masterpiece life and destiny is the culmination, you never have the impression of having to distance yourself or choose a side, because you are always closer to Man. It appears more and more clearly, as you read, that human beings are caught up in the inextricable flood of History, which makes them blind to the universality of their condition: we live and we die, we love and we suffer. All the rest is futile and superfluous distinction.
Vassili Grossman, with Stig Dagerman, Ryszard Kapuściński, Hanna Krall, Svetlana Alexievitch and so many other “witness writers” who choose to write from what they have seen and experienced without ever brandishing the banner of truth, is one of those authors who appease the ills of Man not by trying to blur them, but by naming them in the fairest way possible so that our conscience is able to match reality.
May there be in Ukraine and Russia, as I write these lines, such authors who, equipped with simple little notebooks, record what they see, live and feel with the same accuracy and the same greatness of soul .