(This is the fourth in our seven-part series. Next Felix Purat will review Life and Fate and then Everything Flows.)
Was Vasily Grossman a philosopher? Not quite. But during a lifetime observing the most terrible events of the 20th Century, after observing world war (twice), Nazism, and Stalinism – up close from the ground level – he reached some conclusions that are usually found in the realm of philosophy. Conclusions about human nature, about truth and meaning, about the relationship between power and freedom, and about goodness and happiness and strategies for achieving both.
Vasily Grossman was better than a philosopher. He was a man of profound empathy who excelled at entering other people’s life experiences. He entered the inner life of the Soviet soldier. And he empathized with Germans.
A non-practicing Jew who seems to have been agnostic about both Deity and the afterlife, Grossman nonetheless recorded a profound experience of consciousness in his Armenian Sketchbook. Some call it a near-death experience. I’d call it an out-of-body experience.
Leaving his body, he experiences himself as the “real” Vasily Grossman. What makes up the real him? His love for his mother. The books he has read. His hatred of totalitarianism. And his ecstasy at seeing the sea for the first time as a boy of 7 or 8.
He understands that he is living in a world of contradictions, foolishness, and wickedness, but also a world of beauty and goodness.
Grossman reunites with his body, and senses himself now as a whole being. And now he celebrates the work of writers and other artists who lovingly unite eternal truths with the truth of their own individual “I” – including the contradictory, the foolish, and the wicked as well as the beautiful and the good.
Not surprisingly, Grossman developed an uncompromising commitment to human freedom.
In 1946, he declared the ultimate importance of “basic and sacred human rights, the right of each individual to live, to think, and to be free.”
Near the end of his life in the early 1960s – in Everything Flows – he declared that “there is no end in the world for the sake of which it is permissible to sacrifice human freedom.”
Given the voracious appetite human beings have to dominate others, we must value individual freedom and never take it for granted. Each generation must know that freedoms won can be lost – that freedoms that seem inalienable and inviolable can be reversed. Freedom is never secure. We must be willing to fight for it and to sacrifice for it.
As, arguably, the leading witness of totalitarianism in human history, Grossman wrestled with the consequences of it. He concluded that the evil of Fascist totalitarianism and the evil of Communist totalitarianism were equal. Fascism is based on worship of one’s race or nation. Communism is based on classism. They end up being equally evil.
Hitlerism and Leninist-Stalinism both divided people into categories to be valued or destroyed. Both worldviews rejected the very notion of humanity. Both rendered individual life meaningless. Both engaged in ghastly cruelty. Both brought about dreadful suffering. And both slaughtered millions of people.
When Grossman speaks of and defends liberty, he is thinking of something profound – an innate force in the human spirit.
He is thinking of his character Lionya, an 11-year-old boy who is determined to hang onto his toy black revolver as he trudges for several days behind German lines. All the while, he is confident that he will be able to find his commissar father.
He is thinking of a Soviet man’s defense of a humiliated German soldier. He is thinking of a woman who gives a loaf of bread to a hated German prisoner. He is thinking of an old Soviet peasant woman who takes care of a Nazi whose patrol has arrested and will execute her husband.
This is Grossman’s consistent chord – his enduring theme: In whatever circumstances we find ourselves in – even amidst overwhelming violence – we still have a choice. We can choose to behave as ethically as possible – to live by our conscience. We can remain the master of our soul.
Grossman’s best characters yearn for freedom and suffer from its loss. It makes sense that Grossman regarded the rights and freedoms of individuals to be literature’s “eternal mission”.
On the matter of human freedom, who could disagree with Grossman? We must be free to think and communicate – without seeing the State as the sole repository of truth. However ineffable it may be, freedom matters.
And it’s here that we find Grossman going even deeper. Maybe to the deepest place many of us can go. Into the very heart of the individual.
He is firm about it. Unyielding. “The only true and lasting meaning of the struggle for life lies in the individual . . . Let’s begin with respect, compassion, and love for the individual – or we’ll never get anywhere.”
For valid reasons, Grossman takes it all the way. To Grossman, each group exists primarily to assert everyone’s right to think, feel, and live in his or her own way. We join together primarily to win or defend this right.
But why? Why is the individual so important? And here Grossman does tread into the territory of our best philosophers and spiritual thinkers.
First, each individual has an essence, a “spirit of life”. Each of us must remain free so that we have the ability to be our true self.
Second, each individual participates in “the hidden harmony” that flows through everything. Each of us must remain free so we can find positive meaning in life within that flow – and affirm it.
Third, each individual has the capacity for goodness. Each of us must remain free so that we can act in accord with that indominable force inside of us that aspires to what is good.
Even in the worst and most tragic of situations, we are still capable of altruism. Moved by another person’s condition, we are still capable of acting with courageous kindness. And each of these acts is a form of victory in the flow of life.
For Grossman, it’s existential. Life is good because it exists. And in each unique individual life “someone exists as a whole world that has never been repeated in all eternity”.
So of course it’s about democracy; of course it’s about experience, not ideology. It’s about your spirit’s longing and my spirit’s longing for what is good.
Even if we face terror or dictatorship, we must be fearless. Even when we suffer violence from the State, we must adhere to our ideal of humanness. We must stand up to power. Stronger than our need for personal safety is the mysterious force of freedom.
It’s about our will. “Every step that a person takes under the threat of . . . labor camps and death is . . . an expression of his own will.”
It’s about our positive, meaningful, vital sense of life. “The reflection of the universe in someone’s consciousness is the foundation of his or her power.”
And in the end, it is obvious yet incredibly profound: We affirm the singular existence of each and every individual we encounter, Vasily Grossman teaches us, because we find ourselves in utter amazement at his or her unique presence. Standing before us in this moment, as everything flows, is this one individual with this one life and fate.