Vasily Grossman Quotes

27 Sourced Quotes

Thousands of people are being buried and no one attends the funerals,' said one of the soldiers. 'In peacetime it's the other way round: one coffin and a hundred people carrying flowers.

Vasily Grossman
I have written only what I have thought through, felt through and suffered through.

Vasily Grossman
At war a Russian man puts on a white shirt. He may live in sin, but he dies like a saint.

Vasily Grossman
The longer a nation's history, the more wars, invasions, wanderings, and periods of captivity it has seen-the greater the diversity of its faces.

Vasily Grossman
The sea was not freedom; it was a likeness of freedom, a symbol of freedom...How splendid freedom must be if a mere likeness of it, a mere reminder of it, is enough to fill a man with happiness.

Vasily Grossman
The more difficult a man's life had been before the camp, the more furiously he lied. This lie had no practical purpose; it served simply to glorify freedom. How could a man be unhappy outside the camp?

Vasily Grossman
And in this silence of the dumb and these speeches of the blind, in this medly of people bound together by the same grief, terror and hope, in this hatred and lack of understanding between men who spoke the same tongue, you could see much of the tragedy of the twentieth century.

Vasily Grossman
We are restoring the Leninist norms of democracy. But Leninist norms are not the same as the bourgeois norms of democracy. You know yourself: when Gorky—affected by traumatic impressions, deprivation, hunger and housing difficulties in the first years after October—abandoned his revolutionary position, Lenin did not hesitate to close down his newspaper Novaia zhizn'.

Vasily Grossman
It is impossible to publish your book, and it will not be published in the next 200 years.

Vasily Grossman
Everyone who has read your book are unanimous in their judgment. They all think it is politically harmful for us. There is no point in giving it for an evaluation to the writers Fedin, Leonov, Ehrenburg, etc. The reviewers could have made a mistake in their aesthetic judgment but they were unanimous in their political judgment, and I have no doubt that their political judgment is absolutely correct.

Vasily Grossman
Your book contains direct analogies between us and the Hitlerite fascists. You book incorrectly describes our people, communists. Could we have won the war with the kind of people you describe? In your book you say positive things about religion, God, Catholicism. Your book defends Trotsky. You book is full of doubts about the legitimacy of our Soviet system.

Vasily Grossman
Chekhov said: let's put God - and all these grand progressive ideas - to one side. Let's begin with man; let's be kind and attentive to the individual man - whether he's a bishop, a peasant, an industrial magnate, a convict in the Sakhalin Islands, or a waiter in a restaurant. Let's begin with respect, compassion, and love for the individual - or we'll never get anywhere.

Vasily Grossman
You believe that we have violated the principle of freedom in your case. Yes, this is so if one understands freedom in the bourgeois sense of the term. But we have a different conception of freedom. Our understanding of freedom is not identical to the one in the capitalist world—as the right to do anything without taking into account the interests of society. Only the imperialists and millionaires need this kind of freedom.

Vasily Grossman
No, we have not destroyed it. Let it sit. We cannot change its fate.

Vasily Grossman
Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness.

Vasily Grossman
I don't want you to be young and beautiful. I only want one thing. I want you to be kind-hearted - and not just towards cats and dogs.

Vasily Grossman
We would only multiply the number of victims. Our duty is to strengthen the state and defend the people, why, then, should we publish your book.

Vasily Grossman
National Socialism had created a new type of political criminals: criminals who had not committed a crime.

Vasily Grossman
You know what enormous harm we have been dealt by the publication of Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. Everybody who has read your book, everybody who has seen the reviews are convinced that the potential harm from your Life and Fate would be far more dangerous than that of Doctor Zhivago.

Vasily Grossman
Why should we add your book to the atomic weapons arrayed against us by our enemies. Publication of your book would help our enemies.

Vasily Grossman
There is a deep and undeniable sadness in all this: whenever we see the dawn of an eternal good that will never be overcome by evil – an evil that is itself eternal but will never succeed in overcoming good – whenever we see this dawn, the blood of old people and children is always shed.

Vasily Grossman
There are people whose souls have just withered, people who are willing to go along with anything evil - anything so as not to be suspected of disagreeing with whoever is in power.

Vasily Grossman
There's nothing more difficult than saying goodbye to a house where you've suffered.

Vasily Grossman
He was endowed with the extraordinary powers of endurance characteristic of madmen and simpletons.

Vasily Grossman
Our Soviet writer must be guided in his world only by the need of the people, useful for the society.

Vasily Grossman