Vasily Grossman’s “Sistine Madonna”

One of the Finest Essays Ever Written

In his 1955 piece entitled “The Sistine Madonna”, the great Ukrainian writer Vasily Grossman contemplates the meaning of the work of art by the Italian High Renaissance genius Raffaello Sanzio (1483-1520).  A decade earlier the Soviet Army had seized Raphael’s painting from a museum in Dresden.  It was about to be returned, and now it was being displayed at a museum in Moscow. 

Grossman stands before the painting and is overwhelmed.  The painting strikes him as being immortal and as expressing something eternal.

“There was no other work created by brush, chisel, or pen, no other work that had conquered my heart and mind, that would continue to live for as long as people continued to live.”

Then Grossman takes each of us, his readers, by the hand and coaxes us through the same short journey his imagination has just followed.

            Look at the Madonna, he prompts us.  “She is the model of the maternal soul.”  Look at her humanity in all its suffering.  Look at her unconquerable inner strength.

            Look at the Boy, he encourages us.  So “sad and serious”, so mature, perhaps as mature as his mother.

            Look at them both, he urges us.  Surely we sense it: they are foreseeing their Golgotha.

            Does the painting link to troubling echoes of your memory? Grossman asks.  Let me share with you, he says, how it links to mine:

            There is, for me, Treblinka.  I visualize this mother and child at Treblinka.  First they walk off the cattle car.  Then, barefoot, treading lightly, they walk across the swaying earth.

            Ever since I interviewed the survivors of Treblinka in 1944, he tells us, I have strained many times to imagine the faces of these victims on their way to their deaths.  Now I see their faces clearly.  Four centuries ago, their faces were painted by Raphael.  

“I knew her by the expression on her face, by the look in her eyes.  I saw her son and recognized him by the strange, un-childlike look on his face.  This was how mothers and children looked, this was how they were in their souls when they saw, against the dark green of the pine trees, the white walls of the Treblinka gas chambers.”

            Do you see those two faces?  How calm!  How invincible!  There is a spirit, he reminds us, a spirit of life that cannot be enslaved by violence.

            This painting hung in Dresden, Grossman recalls.  Surely the failed artist Adolph Hitler had stood before the Madonna.  And he had decided her fate.

Do you see the ultimate irony? Grossman asks us.  “Christians” in Germany could not see Mary and Jesus as human beings.  The Madonna was a Jewish woman.  Her son was a Jew.  And Hitler sent them both to the gas chamber.

Vasily Grossman then turns our attention to the Soviet Union.

            Imagine the Madonna and Son are Ukrainian, he says.  They’re walking up a plank, she carrying him, and she’s barefoot, and they enter the cattle car.  Stalin has sent them to a labor camp.

            “Where is your father, little one?”  Where did he go?  Is he felling logs in Siberia?

            Or let’s go back further in time, he invites us.  Into Stalin’s genocide of the Ukrainians by starvation.  Let’s go into the heart of the Holodomor. 

See a woman at a train station in Ukraine in 1933.  Feel her hunger.  Feel her illness.  It is her, the Madonna.  Watch her walk up to you and look at you with those wonderful eyes.  You cannot hear her, for she has no voice, but with her lips she tries to beg you.  ‘Bread.’

            Or see her in 1937.  Amidst the Terror.  The Madonna holds her Son and says goodbye to him for the last time.  A car is waiting for her on the street below.  She’s been arrested and she’s departing for the gulag.

            Imagine, Grossman urges us, Stalin himself looking at the Madonna.

“Did he recognize her?  We ordinary people recognize her.  She is us; their fate is our fate.  They are what is human in humanity.”

How could there have been so many corpses? he asks us.  Millions of corpses.  Corpses of soldiers.  Corpses of civilians.  Corpses of mothers, of boys, of girls.

“All this the Madonna endured with us, because she is us, because her son is us.”

            We know Vasily Grossman’s stories and we know his story.  We know that he has witnessed what almost no other human being has witnessed – and held onto his integrity and his humanity.

            Now he is calling us to remember.  And calling us to work to ensure that such events never happen again.

            Even through the great lethal disaster that was the 20^th Century, even through the most profound disintegrations of human society imaginable, even after traveling through the depths of Hell on Earth, it was and is possible to emerge with our souls intact.

            As we stand one last moment with Vasily Grossman before Raphael’s painting, he shares with us his final thoughts:

“There never was a more terrible time than that in which we lived.  (But) we did not allow what was human in humanity to perish.

“In the cruel and terrible time in which our generation has been condemned to live on this Earth, we must never make peace with evil.  We must never become indifferent to others or undemanding of ourselves.

“As we look at the Sistine Madonna, we can preserve the belief that life and freedom are one, the belief that there is nothing higher than what is human in humanity.  May this belief live forever and triumph.”