All photos are from the author, all quotes come from Vasily Grossman’s novels Life and Fate and Everything Flows.
“Why do people have memories. It would be easier to die – anything to stop remembering.”
“In the blank wall of the world’s indifference there had appeared a tiny snakelike fissure”
“It is the writer’s duty to tell the terrible truth, and it is a reader’s civic duty to learn this truth. To turn away, to close one’s eyes and walk past is to insult the memory of those who have perished.”
“A soul can live in torment for years and years, even decades, as it slowly, stone by stone, builds a mound over a grave; as it moves towards the apprehension of eternal loss and bows down before reality.”
“How can you tear something out of your heart. Your heart isn’t made out of paper and your life isn’t written down in ink. You can’t erase the imprint of years.”
‘If one man is fated to be killed by another, it would be interesting to trace the gradual convergence of their paths. At the start they might be miles away from one another – I might be in Pamir picking alpine roses and clicking my camera, while this other man, my death, might be eight thousand miles away, fishing for ruff in a little stream after school. I might be getting ready to go to a concert and he might be at the railway station buying a ticket to go and visit his mother-in-law – and yet eventually we are bound to meet, we can’t avoid it…”
“Time worked unhurriedly, conscientiously. First the man was expelled from life, to reside instead in people’s memories. Then he lost his right to residence in people’s memories, sinking down into their subconscious minds and jumping out at someone only occasionally, like a jack-in-the-box, frightening them with the unexpectedness of his sudden, momentary appearances.”
Instead of valour or gallantry, you could hear the sadness of a soul parting with everything that it loved, calling on its nearest and dearest to wake up, to lift their head from their pillows and hear for the last time the voice of a father, a husband, a son or a brother…
“…neither fate, nor history, nor the anger of the State, nor the glory or infamy of battle has any power to affect those who call themselves human beings. No, whatever life holds in store — hard-won glory, poverty and despair, or death in a labor camp — they will live as human beings and die as human beings, the same as those who have already perished; and in this alone lies man’s eternal and bitter victory over all the grandiose and inhuman forces that ever have been or will be…”
“There’s nothing more difficult than saying goodbye to a house where you’ve suffered.”
Europe Between East And West 