This article focuses on Vasily Grossman’s ethics, encapsulated as ‘small acts of senseless kindness’, exploring their origins and influence. It suggests that the significance of Grossman’s work in this sphere has yet to be fully recognized, and that it will in due course be seen as comparable to that of his fellow chemist, Primo Levi, or for that matter his revered predecessor, Anton Chekhov.
LevinasE (2001) Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
17.
LevinasE (2006) Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. SmithMBHarshavB. London: Continuum.
18.
MalcolmJ (2003) Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey. London: Granta.
19.
MandelstamO (2004 [1931]) For the sake of the future’s trumpeting heroics. In: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam, trans. BrownCMerwinWS. New York: New York Review of Books, p. 60.
20.
MargalitA (2002) The Ethics of Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
21.
MorsonG S (1993) Uncle Vanya as prosaic metadrama. In: JacksonRL (ed.) Reading Chekhov’s Text. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 214–27.
22.
TacitusC (2008) The Annals: The Reigns of Tiberius, Claudius, and Nero, trans. YardleyJC. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
23.
TaylorC (1992) Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
24.
TodorovT (1996) Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, trans. DennerAPollackA. New York: Holt.
25.
WrightTHughesPAinleyA (1988) The paradox of morality: an interview with Emmanual Levinas, trans. BenjaminAWrightT. In: BernasconiRWoodD (eds) The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other. London: Routledge, pp. 168–80.
