https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonperson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typewriter_ribbon
Because of state persecution, only a few of Grossman's post-war works were published during his lifetime. After he submitted for publication his magnum opus, the novel Life and Fate (Жизнь и судьба, 1959), the KGB raided his flat. The manuscripts, carbon copies, notebooks, as well as the typists' copies and even the typewriter ribbons were seized. The Politburo ideology chief Mikhail Suslov told Grossman that his book could not be published for two or three hundred years:[13]
Life and Fate was first published in Russian in 1980[5] in Switzerland, thanks to fellow dissidents: physicist Andrei Sakharov secretly photographed draft pages preserved by Semyon Lipkin, and the writer Vladimir Voinovich smuggled the photographic films abroad. Two dissident researchers, professors and writers, Efim Etkind and Shimon Markish retyped the text from the microfilm, with some mistakes and misreadings due to the bad quality. The book was finally published in the Soviet Union in 1988 after the policy of glasnost was initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev. The text was published again in 1989 after further original manuscripts emerged after the first publication. Everything Flows was also published in the Soviet Union in 1989. It was first published in English in 1985; a revised English translation by Robert Chandler was published in 2006, and widely praised, being described as "World War II's War and Peace.[5]
The Road,Stories, Journalism, and Essays, New York Review Books, 2010
see also
The Cambridge Introduction to Emmanuel Levinas, Michael L. Morgan, CUP, 2011
Chapter 1 is a discussion of Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, an epic novel about life on the eastern front during the Battle of Stalingrad (1942-1943). Levinas was compulsively drawn to the novel and would invoke its scenes of human suffering and moral sacrifice to attest to his own descriptions of ethics again and again in essays and interviews in the 1980s. The rudiments of Levinas's ethics, including the power of the Other to stimulate gratuitous acts of kindness, the critique of the totality (and, a fortiori, totalitarianism), the crisis of modernity ("the decline of the West"), are clearly set out here at the beginning of Morgan's book, and further clarified, refined, and applied in many of the later chapters. Indeed, the chapter works well not only as a way into Levinas's thought, but also as a rare and insightful commentary on Levinas's reading of Grossman.
https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/the-cambridge-introduction-to-emmanuel-levinas/
see also
Goodness without Hope. Hope without Promise. Vasily Grossman and Emmanuel Levinas In 1980, Life and Fate, the impressive novel on the battle of Stalingrad by the Jewish-Russian writer Vasily Grossman, was published for the first time. Since the original Russian manuscript was “arrested” by the communist regime, the original texts by Grossman have lived an underground life. In his novel - an aemulatio of Tolstoy’s War and Peace - Grossman writes a critical intellectual text on the background of the battle of Stalingrad. The text is poly-interpretable. Levinas was very impressed by reading the novel. In his post-1980 writings, he often refers to Grossman. In a first move, we investigate the way in which Levinas reflects the literary intuitions of Grossman: the critique of ideologies and totalitarianism; the necessary injustice of just institutions; the refusal of collaboration; the violence of great ideas; the little goodness without witnesses; the goodness as radix of social life… I illustrate this with quotes of Grossman and in indicating how Levinas ‘uses’ or reinterprets the literary texts in his philosophy. My thesis is that Levinas not only reads Grossman as a similar inspiration, but that he develops an ‘intellectual gesture’ by which the Grossman intuitions are changed in their radicalness to be integrated in the already elaborated ethical thinking of Levinas after 1980. The ‘little goodness’ – in Grosmann a critique of every ideology – becomes in Levinas’ reading also correction of necessary institutions. In a second move, we delve into the deeper philosophical foundations of both authors. We are convinced there exists an “unconscious congeniality” between them – fostered by the experiences of violence and of responsibility. This congeniality, that existed already before Levinas read Grossman, is evident on two topics: the concept of the mystery of the human soul and the conviction that there is a goodness that precedes society. This congeniality makes it understandable that both authors have common themes and intuitions. This is worked out in the confrontation of the scene of Sofya Osipovna Levinton in the gas-chamber and the Talmud-commentary of Levinas And God created woman. In both texts, a concept of radical responsibility is developed. It is revelating to confront these two congenial texts with each other. Can Levinas clarify the section on Levinton – can Levinton give concrete form to the insight of Levinas? The text of Grossman can be read as a dramatization of philosophy. The core question is: Is evil a perversion of goodness or not? Levinas gives a philosophical answer: l’éthique précède le social. Grossman a dramatical one: there exists a goodness without conditions.
https://limo.libis.be/primo-explore/fulldisplay?docid=LIRIAS1717492&context=L&vid=Lirias&search_scope=Lirias&tab=default_tab&lang=en_US&fromSitemap=1
